Uncertainty, Worth, Identity: How Early Career Academics Navigate Evaluative Landscapes

This dissertation explores the interplay between valuation and academic socialization, addressing the question: how do early career academics navigate evaluative landscapes? Having completed their doctoral education but yet to find stable employment, early career academics are generally viewed as the most vulnerable group of academic staff. Comparing how individuals within this group seek to demonstrate their worth in order to be recognized by others and advance in their careers, I try to make sense of their world. This task holds significance as those being socialized today will shape the cultures and practices of academia in the future. Notably, existing literature on academic socialization predominantly focuses on graduate studies, neglecting the early career phase and its function as a “status passage” in contemporary academia.

Drawing upon 35 in-depth interviews with early career academics in political science and history, the three articles forming the core of the thesis highlight various aspects of navigating evaluative landscapes: how to decide whose judgment to trust when evaluating the quality of one’s work and make future predictions (Article I); how to balance between more or less contradictory identity positions and learn how to perform these identities in legitimate ways (Article II); and how to negotiate the meanings of institutional career demands and individual aspirations (Article III). By focusing attention on the plurality of evaluative landscapes in political science and history, the thesis reveals different frameworks for assessing and measuring worth. Furthermore, learning about what counts and acting upon evaluative knowledge involves signaling one’s own identity and group-belongings, as well as imagining futures early career academics find desirable. Hence, I argue for the importance of identity and morality as sites of, and motivations for, navigating evaluative landscapes.

Confronted with the uncertainties and tensions of academic careers, this dissertation provides an understanding of academic career-making as a form of pragmatic problem solving, centered on how to legitimately claim, reject, perform, and balance between conflicting notions of worth. This kind of dissonance means that although early career academics in political science and history are exposed to an increasingly narrow regime of valuation, their response is not mere adaptation, but negotiation.