Translating tenure track into Swedish: tensions when implementing an academic career system

ABSTRACT

Academic career systems have been in focus lately as a means to attract talented researchers and teachers. In this paper, we compare tenure tracks at three Swedish universities. The analysis relies on qualitative data, including interviews and policy documents, and revolves around three questions: How is the tenure track designed? What were the drivers behind the new tenure track? How is the tenure track designed to handle emerging tensions? We identify three common drivers and rationales: transparency, recruitment of early career researchers and long-term retention of staff. The article ends with a discussion of important considerations that were made when introducing the tenure track. The considerations derive from the tensions between research and teaching, between scope and funding and between the needs of the institution and the rights of the individual. The results are important in an increasingly competitive higher education sector aiming to construct and implement attractive career systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• tenure track
• management
• institutionalism
• isomorphism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Malin Henningsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2730-6291

Lars Geschwind http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2983-5573

Notes

1. The term ‘universities’ in this paper also includes university colleges.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Knowledge Foundation.