This article investigates the form of European universities to determine the extent to which they resemble the characteristics of complete organizations and whether the forms are associated with modernization policy pressure, national institutional frames and organizational characteristics. An original data set of twenty-six universities from eight countries was used. Specialist universities have a stronger identity, whereas the level of hierarchy and rationality is clearly associated with the intensity of modernization policies. At the same time, evidence suggests limitations for universities to become complete, as mechanisms allowing the development of some dimensions seemingly constrain the capability to develop others.

In this paper we aim to understand if gender makes a difference in the path to promotion to full professor in Italian universities, drawing on data from 2013 to 2016. The new promotion system pursuant Gelmini Law (210/2010) in Italy implies to go through two steps. First, they have to obtain the national ASN system (fit-for-the-role national filter), based on merit measured via bibliometric and non-bibliometric indicators. This step does not mean to get a position, it only means to be able to apply for it at institutional level. We believe that discrimination based on gender may happen especially at institutional level as in comparison to ASN there is less transparency and more autonomy at institutional level. It is also hypothesised that discrimination based on gender may differ according to the percentage of women already at full professor rank by disciplinary field. We investigate gender inequality using a binary variable (promoted or not promoted along 2013 until 2016) controlling by scientific productivity, normalised number of available vacancies, result of national research evaluation (VQRdepartment of candidate's affiliation), age, current rank-and-file position. Multilevel logistic regression demonstrates that among those who obtained the ASN and at parity of other conditions, men have around 24% more probability to be promoted at parity of scientific production, which reveals a relevant gender discrimination. Our findings have implications on theory about inequality regimes and might serve to reflect on how to improve practices at institutional level.

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China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This paper examines whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies—the ‘Young Thousand Talents’ policy (Y1000T)—had, in the following years after recruitment, better research performance. We compare these recipients against other Chinese nationals who got PhDs in equally prestigious non-Chinese universities but continued to work abroad (mostly in the USA). Results of difference-in-differences regressions show that returning to China has an effect of positioning returnees both at the bottom and at the very summit of the distribution of quality of publications. Nevertheless, some Y1000T researchers seem to have prioritized the quantity of outputs, arguably to the detriment of quality. This is probably due to certain research evaluation criteria in place until recent times.

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