The employment situations and career prospects of postdoctoral researchers
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-12-2016-0241 |
| Pages | 396-411 |
| Published date | 12 February 2018 |
| Date | 12 February 2018 |
| Author | Christine Teelken,Inge Van der Weijden |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
The employment situations
and career prospects of
postdoctoral researchers
Christine Teelken
Department of Organisation Studies, The University of Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and
Inge Van der Weijden
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden,
The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to draw on the employment situation of postdoctoral researchers
(postdocs) in the Netherlands, concerning their career prospects and embeddedness within their organisation,
in order to discuss theoretical perspectives on academic careers.
Design/methodology/approach –This multi-method study consists of three parts: a survey, in-depth
interviews, and three focus group meetings with postdocs as well as representatives of the human resource
staff and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This paper reports on the findings from the focus group
meetings, which concentrated on how postdoctoral researchers consider their employment situation and
career prospects.
Findings –The three focus group discussions revealed that postdocs are caught within a dual controversy,
the first involves their lack of clarity concerning their career prospects and developments despite their highly
valued work, the second regards the fact that they are specialized staff, contributing to the primary process of
their employing organisation but faintly connected. Although the postdocs’formal position seems weak, their
situation in terms of academic socialising is much stronger and active than appears at first sight, particularly
due to their personal agency.
Practical implications –The postdocs require and appreciate guidance and support, particularly when
they must leave academia.
Originality/value –The paper provides new and additional insights into the position of postdocs and their
career prospects. Their personal agency in pursuing further career steps is more active than expected in
previous studies.
Keywords Academic careers, Career prospects, Personal agency, Postdoctoral researchers
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Academic organisations have changed quite substantially in recent decades in terms of their
tasks, structure, and culture due to increased internationalisation, lowered government
influence and funding, and a larger impact from external stakeholders (Enders et al., 2011).
Like other public organisations, universities are increasingly financed in an output-oriented
manner, and therefore emphasis on performance has grown (e.g. Decramer et al., 2013;
Häyrinen-Alestalo and Peltola, 2006; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). It is important and urgent
to study academic careers: while the knowledge economy itself deserves increased attention,
the altered financial structure of universities has changed their employee relationships
extensively and at different levels.
Developments such as financial cutbacks in institutional research funding and focus on
individual performance (Baruch and Hall, 2001) demonstrate that traditional career
prospects with vertical career steps within a single organisation no longer dominate in
academia. However, the alternative and opposite approach, the boundaryless career
(Arthur, 1994), is unable to explain what is currently happening in this area. Dany et al.
(2011, p. 972) considered the contrast between the bounded and boundaryless career too
Employee Relations
Vol. 40 No. 2, 2018
pp. 396-411
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-12-2016-0241
Received 19 December 2016
Revised 22 September 2017
3 November 2017
Accepted 7 November 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
396
ER
40,2
simple and propose alternative approaches (see also Sullivan and Baruch, 2009) that
account “better for the simultaneous influences of both individual choices and
environmental constraints on careers”.
The specific focus of this paper will be postdoctoral researchers (postdocs) and their
relationship with their employers, universities in the Dutch higher education system. We
define postdocs here as “newly qualified researchers with PhD and/or MD backgrounds,
working autonomously in research at universities or related institutions but without a
tenured contract”(Stanford et al., 2009, p. 3). Within the universities, we will look at the
postdocs’direct working environment (e.g. their supervisors) as well as more indirect factors
(institutional and HRM policies).
The purpose of this paper is to understand how, in the context of labour market
instability, postdoctoral researchers experience their working conditions and their prospects
and opportunities. We have narrowed our research question to:
RQ1. How do postdocs perceive their personal career developments, and the relationship
with their employing organisation?
The contribution of this paper is to critically explore the reality of the postdoc’s work
conditions and the sustainability of their prospects. The next section presents the
conceptual framework, followed by the empirical context, the research methods, and our
data analysis. The paper then discusses the findings of our study on how postdocs perceive
their career prospects and their relationship with their organisation. It concludes by
discussing the theoretical and empirical significance of the content.
2. Conceptual framework
While studies on academic careers have continued to proliferate, the literature lacks a more
elaborate and consistent framework to investigate such careers. The ongoing development
of a researcher throughout an academic career is rarely addressed, particularly studies
taking a holistic perspective are scarce (Åkerlind, 2005).
In order to investigate the mutual interaction between personal agency and social
structures, we will use here the model as proposed by Gläser and Laudel (2015), who
attempted to contribute to close the gap between research on academic careers and career
theory. They explained the peculiarities of academic careers in contrast with general career
research by distinguishing three different types of careers through which academics move
simultaneously:
(1) A cognitive career, which refers to the content of their work. This type of career
consists of diachronic structures in research with different but also overlapping
branches.
(2) The community career, involving status-related experiences of the scientific
career and work roles in communities. This type makes a distinction between
four stages (apprentices, colleagues, masters, and elite). Typical collegial features
involve assessing the relevance, validity, reliability of the community’sbodyof
knowledge, acquire valid and reliable knowledge that is deemed relevant for their
work, identify gaps in such knowledge bases and consequently assess capabilities
and opportunities.
(3) The organisational career, which refers to a narrower conceptualisation of the
academic career, and contains typically a sequence of jobs. This type of career
differs per nation, such as the chair system (e.g. Germany), tenure systems (the
Netherlands) and tenure-track systems (USA-American). Purpose of the
organisation is to equip researchers with resources, despite that the work roles
defined by these organisational positions are rather unspecific (Figure 1).
397
Career
prospects of
postdoctoral
researchers
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