Dual appointments and research collaborations outside academia: evidence from the European academic population

ABSTRACT

The literature suggests that academic researchers with dual-appointment contracts, i.e. those employed concurrently by a university and an organization outside academia, have the potential to be more engaged in research collaborations with non-academic partners than colleagues contractually linked to a university only. Our results suggest that this relationship is not simple. Based on a sample of 7773 academic researchers in Europe, our findings show that the relationship between dual appointments and research collaborations is negative when the appointment involves an organization in the private sector and positive when the dual appointment is with an organization in the public sector. Our results also highlight that the profiles of academic researchers in dual appointments differ from those of academics mostly involved in research collaborations with non-academic organizations. The main differences relate to the academic researchers’ educational paths, international mobility experiences and contractual status. The implications of these findings for research collaborations between the academic and non-academic sectors are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual appointments
• research collaborations
• academic career
• European academics
• career trajectories

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Jacob Edler, Dimitri Gagliardi, Fumi Kitagawa, Paul Dewickfor and Alice Lam for extremely helpful comments. They also thank the participants at the CHER 27th Annual Conference 2014, Rome (Italy), a research seminar at the Manchester Business School (UK), 2014 and a research seminar at the University of Bergamo (Italy), 2013. We also thank the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission for making the MORE2 dataset available to us for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mattia Cattaneo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4400-089X

Hugo Horta http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6814-1393

Michele Meoli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9438-0782

Notes

1 There are also cases of dual appointments within the same university, when an academic researcher takes a position that is financially supported by two different faculties or departments within one university (Zemek 2008) or between those working in a university abroad at the same time as being employed by another university in the country of origin (Labrianidis and Vogiatzis 2013). These cases are not included in this article’s analysis.

2 The project, carried out by a consortium of European universities and research centres, surveys the mobility patterns, career paths and working conditions of researchers currently working in Europe in higher education institutions as well as researchers currently working outside Europe. The questionnaire used is divided into several sections: Section 1 collects socio-demographic information, Section 2 relates to education and training stages, Section 3 focuses on information regarding employment as a researcher at the time of the survey, Section 4 is about PhD training and PhD mobility experience, Section 5 refers to mobility as a researcher, Section 6 includes information on non-mobility, Section 7 reports the presence of collaborations with other researchers, Section 8 covers involvement with the non-academic sector and Sections 9, 10 and 11 conclude with miscellaneous questions and information on job attributes.

3 See http://www.eui.eu/Documents/MWP/AcademicCareers/SalaryComparisonEUreport2007.pdf [assessed September 10, 2016]

4 In our analyses, multicollinearity is not a major concern, as none of the variance inflation factors exceeds 1.5 (Belsley, Kuh, and Welsch 2005).

5 One may argue that the relationship between research collaboration and dual appointments is simultaneous. In practice, dual appointments imply that an academic researcher is hired in two different places at the same time. Such positions refer to two contemporaneous employment contracts, which generally last for longer than simple research collaborations. As all data are for 2013 (i.e., a cross-section framework), the structure of the data allows us to imply a lag between dual positions and research collaborations.

6 Details are provided in the results section, following the probit model estimates.

7 The number of observations in the regression analyses decreases to 7497 due to a lack of data across some variables for a few researchers.

8 The findings of individual probit models are provided in Appendix.