Contract employment policy and research productivity of knowledge workers: an analysis of Spanish universities

Abstract

This article investigates how contract employment practices adopted by universities—fixed-term contracts and permanent contracts—impact research productivity measured in terms of publications in scholarly journals. The empirical application considers the Spanish public higher education system for the period 2002–2008. We report an inverse U-shaped relationship between the rate fixed-term contracts and the research productivity of Spanish universities. That is, contract policies based on fixed-term contracts are conducive to research productivity; however, beyond a critical threshold value increases in the proportion of fixed-term contracts are associated with declining research productivity. These findings reveal that contract employment policies shape research productivity, and that flexible and balanced contract practices are critical for enhancing universities’ research productivity. The results suggest that the excessive use of fixed-term contracts might create an unstable working environment that limits the universities’ capacity to capitalize on their knowledge workers. Policy implications and future research avenues are discussed.

Keywords:

• Contract employment
• knowledge workers
• research scientists
• universities
• research productivity

Acknowledgements

For their ideas and insightful comments that helped us to improve the paper we are grateful to Rodrigo Rabetino (University of Vaasa, Finland), László Szerb (University of Pécs, Hungary), Yancy Vaillant (Toulouse Business School, France) and Ferran Vendrell-Herrero (University of Birmingham, UK).

Notes

1. Additional qualitative information on the characteristics of public universities’ evaluation systems was obtained through an informal round of contacts with scholars from various European countries. For their valuable comments, we are indebted to Rodrigo Rabetino (University of Vaasa, Finland), László Szerb (University of Pécs, Hungary), Yancy Vaillant (Toulouse Business School, France) and Ferran Vendrell-Herrero (University of Birmingham, UK).

2. Qualitative information provided by colleagues from various EU countries (see footnote 1 for details) reveals that publications are the main indicator to evaluate scientists’ productivity. However, the weight of research productivity in the evaluation equation is uneven across Europe. In the UK, the quality of research outputs of schools and university departments is evaluated every six years within the Research Exercise Framework (REF). In the 2014, REF research outputs represented 65% of the final assessment of research quality of the analyzed unit (http://www.res.org.uk/details/mediabrief/5158051/EVALUATING-RESEARCH-QUALITY-How-peer-review-panels-should-make-their-REF-assessm.html). In other contexts, the relevance of publication records is less parameterized, and the public administration empowers either university departments (Finland, Germany, and Italy) or accreditation agencies (Hungary) to decide on the weight of research productivity in the scientists’ evaluation scorecard.

3. Because university names might appear in different ways (i.e. English and Spanish spelling) in the search tool available at the SCOPUS website, we double-checked the entries from the database in an effort to ensure that, for each university, all publications are correctly included in our data-set.

4. Note that papers published in period t are not included in the computation of the research productivity variable to avoid ‘double-counting’ problems resulting from the overlapping of time periods.