Korkeakoulututkimus -tiimi

Higher education research team meetings - spring 2015

• 13.5 at 9-11 OPK 338

Terhi Nokkala, Tatiana Fumasoli and Bojana Culum:

Reputation game and networking for careers – early career female scholars as strategic and organic networkers

This paper investigates how academics perceive and practice networking in connection with their career trajectories. By focusing on the “reputation game” it sheds light on how networking shapes opportunities and constraints in career progress, and on how academics are able to engage with networking. In Nokkala et al. (forthcoming), we explored academic networking perceptions by focusing on early career women in social sciences and identified distinctive rationales, attitudes to and practices of networking. Female early career academics acknowledge that networking can be instrumental, at the same time they favour an organic approach, that is networking serves multiple purposes: career objectives, research interests, personal relationships, self-satisfaction.  This paper problematizes these findings according to higher education system, disciplinary affiliation, institutional setting, gender, and socialization. It systematically compares the networking strategies of academics in eight European countries, across all disciplinary fields, in universities and universities of applied sciences, between male and female, as well as junior and senior academics. We expect that gender represents only one of the factors affecting academic networking and illustrate the differences as well as offer some possible explanations.