Working Paper #2017-046
Emergent structures in faculty hiring networks, and the effects of mobility on academic performance
This paper is about the South African job market for PhDs. PhD to first
job mobility involves the preferences of both the hiring institution and
the candidate. Both want to make the best choice and here institutional
prestige plays a crucial role. A university’s prestige is an emergent
property of the hiring interactions, so we use a network perspective to
measure it. Using this emergent ordering, we compare the subsequent
scientific performance of scholars with different changes in the
prestige hierarchy. We ask how movements between universities of
different prestige from PhD to first job correlates with academic
performance. We use data of South African scholars from 1970 to 2004 and
we find that those who make large movements in terms of prestige have
lower research ratings than those wo do not. Further, those with higher
prestige PhD or first job have high research ratings throughout their
careers.
- Keywords
-
- Academia
- South Africa
- faculty hiring network
- institutional prestige
- institutional stratification
- scholars research performance
- university system
- matched pair analysis
- JEL codes
-
- D7
- I2
- J15
- O3
- Z13
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Cowan, R., & Rossello, G. (2017). Emergent structures in faculty hiring networks, and the effects of mobility on academic performance (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2017-046). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=7363