Institutional Differentiation and Social Stratification in European Universities: The Academic Profession Between "Research Top Performers" and "Silent Scientists"
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Date
2014
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Abstract
The academic profession has always been highly stratified. Through an analysis of academics from 11 European countries (N = 17,211), the role of a distinctive group of highly productive academics (upper 10 percent) is studied. The Opening Speech shows that this group is responsible for about a half of all articles published across Europe, and the pattern is consistent across 11 countries, 5 major clusters of academic fields, and across time. Our research tends to call into question the assumption regarding the relative homogeneity of the European (university-based) academic profession. From the perspective of knowledge production, the dividing line today is not only between academics employed in university and non-university sectors: it is also, perhaps more fundamentally, between highly productive academics and the remaining academics in the university sector itself. Based on research productivity rates, there are strikingly different academic communities across Europe and across individual countries. The policy message of this Opening Speech is that European universities in their struggles for more funding and recognition are so heavily reliant on the European research ultra-elite that every national reform agenda should explicitly take their role into consideration (as it should the role of non-producers, or "silent scientists").
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research productivity, academic productivity, research performance, social stratification in science, Lotka's law, CAP data, EUROAC data, European academic profession, European universities, highly performing academics, top performers, non-performing academics, skewed distribution, European research elite, cross-national study, time investment, research orientation, academic roles, teaching-research nexus, academic workplace, Eurpean academics, academic life, working time distribution, research time, research time distribution, correlates of research productivity, academic behaviors, academic attitudes, quantitative study, comparative study, star scientists, average academics, faculty work, academic inequality, divided academic profession, silent scientists, research non-performers, European higher education, cross-national patterms, patterns of productivity, Derek de Solla Price, Alfred Lotka, knowledge production, inequality in knowledge production
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Opening Speech, 5th Annual International Conference of the Russian Association of Higher Education Researchers, Moscow, October 18, 2014