For U.S. research universities, cluster hiring has become a popular means to add faculty members in university-defined priority fields. The expectation of advocates is that these faculty members will collaborate on high-impact research. Utilizing a national sample of 168 cluster-hire faculty members from eight U.S. research universities, we find…

Increasing competition among research universities has spurred a race to recruit academic labor to staff research teams, graduate programs, and laboratories. Yet, often ignored is how such efforts entail negotiating a pervasive hierarchy of universities, where elite institutions in the West continue to attract the best students and researchers…

Since the 1980s scholars have been increasingly confronted with expectations to orient themselves toward societal and economic priorities. This normative demand for societal responsiveness is inscribed in discourses aimed at increasing the usefulness, competitiveness, and control of academia. New performance criteria, funding conditions, and…

It is widely recognized that universities all around Europe have taken on a more market-oriented approach that has changed the core of academic work life. This has led to a precarious situation for many junior scholars, who have to seek research funding to cover their own wages in an increasingly fierce competition over scarce resources. Thus, at…

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's "Research Excellence Framework" (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to…

There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and "hyper-competition." Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research.…

The role of competitive funds as a source of funding for academic research has increased in many countries. For the individual researcher, the receipt of a grant can influence both scientific production and career paths. This paper focuses on the importance of the receipt of a research grant for researchers' academic career paths utilizing a…

Ranking systems such as "The Times Higher Education's World University Rankings" and Shanghai Jiao Tong University's "Academic Rankings of World Universities" simultaneously mark global status and stimulate global academic competition. As international ranking systems have become more prominent, researchers have begun to examine whether global…