The Ideal Candidate. Discursive Positioning of Applicants in Academic Organizations

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 09. Work and the Workplace

Abstract

Attaining membership status in organizations is crucial in academia. Scholars are recognized and acknowledged as professional subjects only through their institutional affiliations. But how do academic membership categories like “professor” and “grant applicant” actually work? Our contribution sheds light on the evaluative processes through which academic organizations turn candidates into formal members. Proceeding from Boltanski and Thévenot, we argue that evaluations in academic organizations are marked by an effort to establish orders of equivalence, thus enabling the peer community to make comparative judgments about the relative worth of the candidates. Candidates are therefore measured against a normalized template, i.e. an “ideal” version of the candidate that expresses valued qualities that organizational members are expected to have. To flesh out our argument, we take a historical comparative perspective on the selection and recruitment of academics in two organizational settings: German universities and grant-makers. Drawing on archived records that have been produced in the context of professorial recruitments and research grant applications between 1950 and 1985, we show how the expectation framework communicated in evaluative situations impacts the discursive positioning of prospective members. Becoming an “ideal candidate” means to adapt to a locally colored version of the formalized and permanent category “professor” in one case, while it requires the candidate to endorse a far reaching compendium of rights and duties ascribed to the informal “applicant” category by the grant maker in the other.

Authors

• Julian Hamann, University of Hannover

• Kathia Serrano Velarde, University of Heidelberg