Credential Privilege or Cumulative Advantage? Prestige, Productivity, and Placement in the Academic Sociology Job Market

Take me where I want to go: Institutional prestige, advisor sponsorship, and academic career placement preferences

“…More importantly, their research also found that these effects were independent of any pre-employment productivity, and that pre-employment productivity had no significant impact on a candidate’s position within the “prestige hierarchy.” Similar results have been found for faculty hires in mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, sociology, and several other disciplines [12,15,39,40]. Recent work in the field of sociology [13] showed that the accumulation of resources and opportunities coupled with prestige has market advantages, and provides evidence that institutional prestige is especially important in determining employment opportunities at more prestigious schools, net of key individual characteristics. Here, symbolic capital (i.e., the prestige of institutions within the field of academia) then plays a role in the development of prestige hierarchies.…”

“…There has been considerable work addressing the opportunity aspect of the academic labor market, with studies estimating the impacts of ascriptive (e.g., gender, race, nationality, institutional prestige) or achieved (e.g., publications, grants, awards) characteristics on career placement and outcomes. Previously investigated academic career outcomes include institutional prestige [11,13], salary [21], early career productivity[22], and rank/advancement [23]. …”

Academic Hiring Networks and Institutional Prestige: A Case Study of Canadian Sociology

“…Among these are the qualities of the individuals seeking jobs. For instance, a candidate's scholarly productivity (i.e., publication record, citations, and awards) is strongly associated with an increased likelihood of getting a tenure‐stream job, as research output in graduate school is perceived to predict future research potential (Buchmueller, Dominitz, and Hansen ; Headworth and Freese ). Specifically, first‐authored articles in flagship journals have the largest positive effect on hiring outcomes (Headworth and Freese ).…”

“…For instance, a candidate's scholarly productivity (i.e., publication record, citations, and awards) is strongly associated with an increased likelihood of getting a tenure‐stream job, as research output in graduate school is perceived to predict future research potential (Buchmueller, Dominitz, and Hansen ; Headworth and Freese ). Specifically, first‐authored articles in flagship journals have the largest positive effect on hiring outcomes (Headworth and Freese ). Expectations for publishing have only increased over time with new hires at top departments in the United States having about twice as many publications as those who secured assistant professor jobs in the 1990s (Warren ).…”

“…One of the most researched factors in academic hiring is related to institutional or departmental prestige; however, these studies have almost exclusively focused on the American context. The common conclusion in the literature is that a “prestige principle” plays a prominent role in the stratification of the higher education system; that is, the prestige of one's graduating institution is a significant determinant of the prestige of one's employing institution (Baldi ; Burris ; Han :251; Headworth and Freese ). Status‐based inequalities in academia are reproduced through hiring practices that often reward institutional prestige above other indicators of merit related to human and social capital (Baldi ).…”