‘Without him, I probably wouldn’t be here at all’ – The micro-politics of early-career sponsorship in higher education

ABSTRACT

The literature on the lived experiences of early-career researchers (ECRs) has not fully leveraged the analytical potential of the concepts of ‘sponsorship’ and ‘gatekeeping’ when examining the importance of senior scholars in their work lives. This article conceptualises the micro-politics of seniors’ sponsorship of ECRs based on 19 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups at a Danish university. Sponsorship can take the forms of co-authoring, creating network contacts, or securing funding. The micro-politics of sponsorship enable seniors to mobilise opportunities for juniors, often at the ‘backstage’ of academia. Sponsorship strengthens the interviewees’ feelings of job-related security, but not all ECRs are sponsored. According to the interviewees, sponsorship relationships develop for academic reasons, such as shared research interests, but are also a matter of luck, personal chemistry, and ‘homophily’, leading to subtle processes of inclusion and exclusion in academia. Regardless, sponsorship is widely considered a taken-for-granted, legitimised practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Sponsorship
• gatekeeping
• academic careers

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers and editor for excellent feedback in the review process. We would also like to thank our colleagues on the ‘Gender and Networks’ project Maria Lehmann Nielsen, Thomas Kjeldager Ryan and Mathias Wullum Nielsen as well as Lise Degn and Emil Bargmann Madsen for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the research participants in this study for sharing their thoughts and stories with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of funding

Aarhus University, USM-grant 2018–502

Ethical approval

When we carried out the data collection there was no ethical approval board at Aarhus University, however, the research project was approved by the university when we applied for funding.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Aarhus University, USM-grant 2018-502: [Grant Number Aarhus University, USM-grant 2018-502].

Notes on contributors

Ea Høg Utoft

When the research was conducted, Ea Høg Utoft was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has since taken up a position as Assistant Professor of Gender & Diversity at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Her main research interests are gender and diversity in higher education, as well as feminist knowledge production and epistemic injustice. In 2021, Dr Utoft received the Gender, Work & Organization Emerging Gender Researcher award, and in 2022, her PhD dissertation received the Danish Association for Gender Research’s Kraka Award for pathbreaking gender research. Dr Utoft’s research is published in Gender, Work & Organization, M@n@gement, Evaluation and Program Planning, and the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

Mathilde Cecchini

Mathilde Cecchini holds a PhD in Political Science and is employed as an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University in Denmark. Her main research interests are citizen-state interactions, discrimination and inequality in public organizations and professional networks in knowledge academia. Moreover, she has also has an interested in methodological and ethical issues in research. Her work has for example been published in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Health Risk and Society and Societies.