The Tenure Game: Building Up Academic Habits*

Faria, Jo�ão Ricardo; Monteiro, Gonçalo

doi:10.1111/j.1468-5876.2008.00423.x

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…These species face selective pressures from their local ecological (i.e., game or paradigm) environments, in which fitness advantages of some ideas and theories will be tested for their strategic advantage in those games. Games often incentivize development of habits that are productive for a species or group, such as academic habits that lead a tenured professor to continue being productive rather than resting on already accomplished laurels (Faria & Monteiro, 2008).…”

Section: The Evolutionary Implications For the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The game features of several academic processes have already been explored, including government regulation of higher education (Kauko & Niklasson, 1996), science education (Clough, 2000), higher education governance (Greenhalgh, 2015), university branding (Aula, Tienari & Waeraas, 2015), faculty development (Lee & McWilliam, 2008), ethical decision making (Medeiros et al, 2015), gender performance and leadership in higher education (Acker, 2010), graduate student seminar socialization (Fejes, Johansson, & Dahlgren, 2005), medical school recruitment and education (Brosnan, 2010;Hill, Bowman, Stalmeijer, & Hart, 2014), and the move to metricization (Grant & Fogatry, 1998;Kelly & Burrows, 2012) or audit culture (Spurling, 2015) in faculty evaluation. Related game-theoretic analyses have been applied to student acculturation to higher education (Bathmaker, Ingram, & Waller, 2013;Tønseth, 2015), tenure (Chatteree & Marshall, 2014;Grubbs & Taylor, 2013), publishing (Faria, 2005) post-tenure activities (Faria & Monteiro, 2008) and scientific norms of theory choice (Zamora-Bonilla, 2010).…”

Section: Let the Games Begin: Future Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From the GTA perspective, academic life is only one among a potentially infinite number of games. In this instance, scholars, students, teachers and administrators have identified and co-evolved a game that provides a variety of admirable and desirable forms of capital (Chatterjee & Marshall, 2014;Doerr, 2004;Faria & Monteiro, 2008;Grubbs & Taylor, 2013;Nevo & Nevo, 1989;Wolfinger, et al, 2009). It is reasonable to assume that scholars have the same types of interests as ordinary persons: -they prefer more income, more power, and more comfortable jobs; but they also seem to fiercely pursue fame and honors‖ and -scientific capital‖ or -credit‖ (Zamora-Bonilla, 2010, p. 298).…”

Section: Let the Games Begin: Future Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Spitzberg

2018

SMC

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A radical reformulation is proposed for explaining paradigm fragmentation. The broader topography of academic activities is conceptualized according to an academic game-theoretic analogue (GTA). According to this analogue, scholarly and academic activities reflect a competitive field of play and of plays. Criteria such as attention, compensation, awards, publications, tenure, and mobility become the scarce valued resources distributed in the game based on the plays that players enact. In an effort to reveal the heuristic potential of the theoretical analogy, these threads are traced across a broad array of humanistic and scientific theories and scholarship, including connections among Wittgenstein, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Lyotard. The field of Communication, and its many affiliated and cognate disciplines have been charted by a wide variety of paradigm maps (e.g., Altman & Rogoff, 1987;Anderson & Baym, 2004;Craig, 1999;Smith, 1988). There is little doubt that the communication discipline is fragmented, multi-faceted and complex (Barnett, Huh, Kim, & Park, 2011, p. 467). In fields such as communication (Eadie, 2011;Salomón, 2010;Stanfill, 2012), sociology (Puddephatt & McLaughlin, 2015), political science (Blokland, 2015) and social psychology (Green, 2015), such fragmentation has been singled out as a threat to their disciplinary status and credibility. This analysis suggests an explanation for scholarly activities that provide the raw data for such variegated maps. The analogy of game theory provides a high-level explanation for academic and scholarly activities, and provides a meta-account of the raison d'etre of scholarly activity, which is to pursue such activity while seldom recognizing its game-like nature.Disciplinary paradigms appear to be organic, ever-evolving systems of people and ideas. Kuhn (1970) proposed that paradigms may consist of very small groups, even as small as a dozen or two members, who share either similar exemplars or collective practices and beliefs. Scholarly activities are sense-making activities and language communities. As paradigms evolve, scholars often engage in sense-making to organize such paradigms along dimensions and boundaries that reflect the respective relationships among such paradigms (Foucault, 1988). Maps of these relationships represent meta-sense-making activities of these academic territories. Granting that -the map is not the territory‖ (Korzybski, 1931, p. 58), meta-theoretical paradigm maps are intended to bring order to the diversity of academic and scholarly activities that constitute a discipline (Charland, 2003;Wang, 2014). These organizing efforts reflect 

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Section: The Evolutionary Implications For the Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Let the Games Begin: Future Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Let the Games Begin: Future Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Spitzberg

2018

SMC

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“…Coupe, Smeets, and Warzynski (2006) present evidence that economists have strong incentives to be productive researchers early in their careers, but that the incentives weaken after advancement. On the other hand, Faria and Monteiro (2008) postulate that tenure standards generate efficient habits for all scholarly activities early in the career and that these habits persist post-promotion. Siow (1998) argues that professors with high research output are more likely to attract outside offers, suggesting that research incentives and rewards are strong even after advancement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Effects of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of teaching performance

Cheng

2013

Education Economics

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This study estimates the effect of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of learning, instructor quality, and course quality at the University of California, San Diego from Summer 2004 to Spring 2012. During this eight-year period, 120 assistant professors received tenure and 83 associate professors attained full rank. A differences-in-differences model controlling for teaching experience, study hours, response rate, and unobserved heterogeneity among terms, courses, and professors suggests that for a given professor, tenure does not have a significant impact on student ratings of teaching performance, at least in the immediate years after advancement. The results are similar for the promotion from associate to full professor.

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“…The relationship between incentives for publication and the quality of research has been studied by Faria (2005), within the framework of a differential game between authors and editors, and by Faria and Monteiro (2005) as a differential game between scholars and the head of research (the department). In these papers, appropriate incentives for publication (for instance, as a criteria for tenure) are shown to have a globally positive impact on the quality of academic research, justified by journal reputation building in the former paper, or by research habit formation in the latter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘Read or Write’ Dilemma in Academic Production: A Transatlantic Perspective

Besancenot¹,

Huynh²,

Vranceanu³

2009

The American Economist

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This paper investigates the production of research in business and economics. A scholar's reward is positively related to the quantity and quality of research. In turn, the quality of a paper depends on the scholar's ability to internalize new ideas and the overall quality of external research. The individual scholar is subject to a trade-off between writing more papers or reading in order to take in new ideas. In the Nash symmetric equilibrium, the quantity and quality of published papers are jointly determined. Under reasonable assumptions about the research production process, in equilibrium researchers write too many papers of too low a quality compared to the cooperative outcome. The model sheds some light on the effectiveness of various research policies currently under review by European policymakers.

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The Tenure Game: Building Up Academic Habits*

Cited by 20 publications

References 25 publications

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

Effects of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of teaching performance

The ‘Read or Write’ Dilemma in Academic Production: A Transatlantic Perspective

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