Mobility versus job stability: Assessing tenure and productivity outcomes

Based on the data from survey responses and publications of 1583 academic scientists in Spain, this paper examines the relationship between scientific performance and reward, considering tenure and permanent positions as key academic rewards in early phases of academic career and focusing especially on the mediating effect of mobile versus stable career paths. Although widely practiced, inbreeding has often been considered to be at odds with universalism and merit in science. Our findings indicate that inbred faculty does not get tenure with less scientific merits than PhDs from other institutions; we also find that non-mobile careers are a strong predictor of the timing of rewards in the form of early permanent positions. Our results question the assumption mainly based on US evidence that mobility enhances career. These findings must be interpreted in the context of organizational and institutional features of the Spanish academic system that promote the development of internal academic research job markets.

[1]  Barry Bozeman,et al.  Academic careers, patents, and productivity: industry experience as scientific and technical human capital , 2005 .

[2]  P. Allison,et al.  Entrance into the Academic Career , 1979 .

[3]  Yu Xie,et al.  Sex differences in research productivity : New evidence about an old puzzle , 1998 .

[4]  M. F. Fox.  Publication Productivity among Scientists: A Critical Review , 1983 .

[5]  Richard Whitley,et al.  Competition and pluralism in the public sciences: the impact of institutional frameworks on the organisation of academic science ☆ , 2003 .

[6]  Barbara F. Reskin,et al.  Sex Differences in Status Attainment in Science: The Case of the Post Doctoral Fellowship. , 1976 .

[7]  J. S. Long,et al.  Rank Advancement in Academic Careers: Sex Differences and the Effects of Productivity. , 1993 .

[8]  C H Handschin.  INBREEDING IN THE INSTRUCTIONAL CORPS OF AMERICAN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES. , 1910, Science.

[9]  Diana Crane,et al.  The Academic Marketplace Revisited: A Study of Faculty Mobility Using the Cartter Ratings , 1970, American Journal of Sociology.

[10]  Ronald G. Ehrenberg,et al.  Do Economics Departments with lower Tenure Probabilities pay Higher Faculty Salaries? , 1998, Review of Economics and Statistics.

[11]  A. B. Hollingshead.  Ingroup Membership and Academic Selection , 1938 .

[12]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Theories of Citation , 1998 .

[13]  J. S. Long,et al.  Scientific Careers: Universalism and Particularism , 1995 .

[14]  Yimin Ding,et al.  An End to Business as Usual? , 2003, Science.

[15]  Bernard Berelson,et al.  From Graduate Education in the United States , 1961 .

[16]  M. Maehr.  Advances in Motivation and Achievement , 1991 .

[17]  Chan-ung Park.  Gender in Academic Career Tracks: The Case of Korean Biochemists , 2007 .

[18]  Jonathan R. Cole,et al.  Fair Science: Women in the Scientific Community. , 1982 .

[19]  Lowell L. Hargens,et al.  Patterns of Mobility of New Ph.D.'s among American Academic Institutions. , 1969 .

[20]  Paula E. Stephan,et al.  Careers of Young Scientists: , 2001 .

[21]  Mary Frank Fox,et al.  Social-Organizational Characteristics of Work and Publication Productivity among Academic Scientists in Doctoral-Granting Departments , 2007 .

[22]  John H. McNeely.  Faculty inbreeding in land-grant colleges and universities , 1932 .

[23]  Manuel Soler,et al.  How inbreeding affects productivity in Europe , 2001, Nature.

[24]  Stanley Lieberson,et al.  Texas Institutional Inbreeding Re-Examined , 1961, American Journal of Sociology.

[25]  S. Cozzens.  Comparing the Sciences: Citation Context Analysis of Papers from Neuropharmacology and the Sociology of Science , 1985 .

[26]  Paula E. Stephan,et al.  Striking the Mother Lode in Science: The Importance of Age, Place, and Time. , 1993 .

[27]  V. Burris.  The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks , 2004 .

[28]  Lowell L. Hargens,et al.  An Examination of Recent Hypotheses About Institutional Inbreeding , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[29]  J. Mora.  The academic profession in Spain: Between the civil service and the market , 2001 .

[30]  P. Blau.  The Organization of Academic Work , 2021 .

[31]  Clifton F. Conrad,et al.  Institutional Inbreeding Reexamined , 1984 .

[32]  H. Zuckerman,et al.  The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community , 1991 .

[33]  J. S. Long,et al.  Productivity and Academic Position in the Scientific Career , 1978 .

[34]  L Aran,et al.  Socialization and career patterns as determinants of productivity of medical researchers. , 1968, Journal of health and social behavior.

[35]  Martin T. Wells,et al.  Inbreeding in Law School Hiring: Assessing the Performance of Faculty Hired from within , 2000, The Journal of Legal Studies.

[36]  Stephen Cole,et al.  Social Stratification in Science , 1974 .

[37]  Paula Mählck,et al.  Mapping Gender Differences in Scientific Careers in Social and Bibliometric Space , 2001 .

[38]  J. Ben-David,et al.  The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study , 1973 .

[39]  R. Brickman,et al.  The promotion of mobility of scientists: A problem of French science policy , 1977 .

[40]  Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith.  Boston / New York , 1999 .

[41]  E. Marshall.  Panel Proposes Tighter Rules for Tissue Studies , 1998, Science.

[42]  John Stone,et al.  Handbook of Science and Technology Studies , 2007 .

[43]  Hugo Horta,et al.  Navel Gazing: Academic Inbreeding and Scientific Productivity , 2010, Manag. Sci..

[44]  Xavier Bosch.  Spain Reconsiders Its University Reform Law , 2006, Science.

[45]  P. Allison,et al.  7. Fixed-Effects Negative Binomial Regression Models , 2002 .

[46]  Reece McGee.  The Function of Institutional Inbreeding , 1960, American Journal of Sociology.

[47]  Louise Ackers,et al.  Internationalisation, Mobility and Metrics: A New Form of Indirect Discrimination? , 2008 .

[48]  D. Crane.  Scientists at major and minor universities: a study of productivity and recognition. , 1965, American sociological review.

[49]  Jeffrey Pfeffer,et al.  Uncertainty, Secrecy, and the Choice of Similar Others , 1978 .

[50]  Barry Bozeman,et al.  Using the Curriculum Vita to Study the Career Paths of Scientists and Engineers: An Exploratory Assessment , 2004, Scientometrics.

[51]  Mary Frank Fox,et al.  10 Women and Scientific Careers , 1995 .

[52]  Deborah Jones Merritt,et al.  Sex, Race, and Credentials: The Truth about Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring , 1997 .

[53]  J. S. Long,et al.  DEPARTMENTAL EFFECTS ON SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY , 1990 .

[54]  Frank Clemente,et al.  Early Career Determinants of Research Productivity , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[55]  Leonardo Sánchez-Ferrer.  From bureaucratic centralism to self‐regulation: The reform of higher education in Spain , 1997 .

[56]  Jonathan R. Cole,et al.  Fair Science: Women in the Scientific Community , 1987 .

[57]  W. Hagstrom.  Inputs, Outputs, and the Prestige of University Science Departments , 1971 .

[58]  J. S. Long,et al.  Organizational Context and Scientific Productivity , 1981 .

[59]  Alan L. Porter,et al.  Career Patterns of Scientists: A Case for Complementary Data , 1981 .

[60]  Arcadio Navarro,et al.  High rate of inbreeding in Spanish universities , 2001, Nature.

[61]  K. Land,et al.  A Comparison of Poisson, Negative Binomial, and Semiparametric Mixed Poisson Regression Models , 1996 .

[62]  Peter B. Doeringer,et al.  Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis , 2020 .

[63]  Monica Gaughan,et al.  National science training policy and early scientific careers in France and the United States , 2004 .

[64]  Theodore Caplow,et al.  The Academic Marketplace , 1959 .

[65]  Lowell L. Hargens,et al.  Sponsored and Contest Mobility of American Academic Scientists , 1967 .

[66]  Laura Cruz-Castro,et al.  RESEARCH EVALUATION IN TRANSITION: INDIVIDUAL VERSUS ORGANISATIONAL ASSESSMENT IN SPAIN , 2008 .

[67]  B. Reskin.  Scientific Productivity and the Reward Structure of Science , 1977 .

[68]  Mary Frank Fox,et al.  Participation, Performance, and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering: What is at Issue and Why , 2006 .

[69]  L. Sanz-Menéndez.  Research actors and the state: research evaluation and evaluation of science and technology policies in Spain , 1995 .

[70]  A. B. Hollingshead.  Climbing the Academic Ladder , 1940 .

[71]  Christine Musselin,et al.  European academic labor markets in transition , 2005 .

[72]  Clara Eugenia Garcia,et al.  Competition for funding as an indicator of research competitiveness , 2005, Scientometrics.

[73]  G. Melin.  The dark side of mobility: negative experiences of doing a postdoc period abroad , 2005 .

[74]  B. Reskin,et al.  Scientific Productivity, Sex, and Location in the Institution of Science , 1978, American Journal of Sociology.

[75]  Christine Musselin,et al.  Towards a European Academic Labour Market? Some Lessons Drawn from Empirical Studies on Academic Mobility , 2004 .

[76]  Jochen Gläser,et al.  The Changing Governance of the Sciences , 2007 .

[77]  P. Allison,et al.  Productivity Differences Among Scientists: Evidence for Accumulative Advantage , 1974 .

[78]  Rolf A. Zwaan,et al.  Assessing the usefulness of bibliometric indicators for the humanities and the social and beha vioural sciences: A comparative study , 1989, Scientometrics.

[79]  Walter Crosby Eells,et al.  The Effects of Inbreeding , 1935 .