How complex domination enables selection: Academic hiring conventions in a Pakistani university

ABSTRACT

The heterogeneity of criteria and of the faculty members involved in assessing candidates for academic positions raises the question how colleagues can find a common operational mode that enables them to select candidates. In this paper, we draw on convention theory (CT) to examine how powerful actors foster quietude and confidence in prevailing conventions which perpetuate their privileges. Findings from a study of a university in Pakistan show how actors use coordinative power to amend regulations, but also highlight how participating colleagues may resist this. The findings help to explicate the notion of complex domination and enrich CT scholars’ understanding of factors that can exacerbate inequalities in hiring.

KEYWORDS:

• Convention theory
• complex domination
• engagement
• hiring
• university
• Pakistan

Introduction

A core issue in academic hiring is reaching an opinion on the qualifications of candidates that makes it possible to rank them for positions they have applied for (Musselin, 2002). Since there is a variety of criteria that can be used to assess candidates’ profiles (Lamont, 2009; Musselin, 2002) and committee members with potentially diverging views are involved, agreeing on the selection decision is not always a smooth process. Nonetheless, committee-based hiring procedures in universities constitute a widespread model of academic self-governance and professional autonomy (Bleiklie & Kogan, 2007). While some hiring processes end in public scandals, the vast majority of committees achieves an agreed ranking among a small number of candidates (Musselin, 2002). Understanding how committee members conduct hiring in practice is important, because their decisions determine future university staff and impact strongly on individuals’ careers (Cret & Musselin, 2010).

Recognising that the qualification of candidates is not a stand-alone fact but a social construction produced in the hiring process (Eymard-Duvernay & Marchal, 1997), convention theory (CT hereafter) suggests that conventions enable participating actors to make selection decisions and determine the profile of selected applicants (de Larquier & Marchal, 2016). Assuming different engagement modes available to actors, an important insight on the part of CT scholars is that coordinating activities requires reducing participants’ doubts and strengthening their confidence in the prevailing engagement mode (Thévenot, 2002, 2007). In this paper, we draw on an empirical study of a university in Pakistan to examine how top management promotes confidence in conventions which help to perpetuate their privileges. Interpreting our findings using CT’s notions of complex domination (Boltanski, 2011) and two-sided engagement (Thévenot, 2006, 2011), we highlight how participating actors who are considered to be more qualified can ignore rules or transcend them in order to pursue their interests, but also how less qualified actors can resist this form of domination.

We intend this research to enrich CT scholars’ understanding of factors leading to inequalities in hiring. Research in this field has in the past identified procedures for coordinating the hiring process (de Larquier & Marchal, 2016; Eymard-Duvernay & Marchal, 1997) and analysed how actors publicly justify selection decisions (Musselin, 2002; Rodriguez, Mearns, Lendaro, & Imdorf, 2012). Our focus on how top management influences selection decisions requires access to participants in actual hiring processes. An in-depth case study of one university allows this type of access. The context of our study, Pakistan, is useful for empirically elaborating the concept of complex domination and its boundaries, since Pakistan is a developing country with a colonial inheritance of power distance and structures of domination (Islam, 2004; Jhatial, Cornelius, & Wallace, 2014; Khilji, 2002).

Before we explore our findings on selection decisions at The Education University (a pseudonym), we introduce important concepts for our analysis and provide details on the study setting and how the data was analysed.

Analytical framework

Mainly originating from the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, CT started with a focus on dynamics of justification in moments of critique, with the publication of On justification: The economies of worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Later, Thévenot and Boltanski individually developed more encompassing views on human interaction, emphasising plural engagement modes and forms of domination. While these have received less attention, they are crucial for understanding how coordination takes place (Brandl, Daudigeos, Edwards, & Pernkopf, 2014).

Thévenot explicates various conventions human actors can use for coordinating activities, ranging from the most intimate modes, as in the case of close friendships, to publicly justifiable modes, as in the case of formal situations where actors are unfamiliar to each other.¹ Publicly justifiable engagement relies upon the need for public order (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The evaluation attached to this mode must possess a commonality and legitimacy to which third parties also subscribe. The equivalence-demands required by public generalising are highest in this mode. Boltanski and Thévenot have elaborated the requirements of common good and reality tests for six legitimate orders of worth (namely market, industrial, fame, civic, domestic, and inspired forms of worth) which could be activated or appealed to in order to avoid a sense of injustice on actors’ parts. Familiar engagement, on the other hand, is based on actors’ intimate interaction with a local human and material environment. In contrast to publicly justifiable engagement’s pursuit of common good, familiar mode of engagement upholds a personalised or localised good. Communication in this mode of engagement is based on highly customised clues of information and body gestures which are learnt and shaped over time within an immediate milieu. However, this engagement is more than just fixed habits, as it involves a highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and path-dependent attachment of actors with their familiar surroundings (Thévenot, 2007).

To understand how actors promote confidence in conventions, it is useful to consider that conventions constitute sources of coordinative power for human actors (Dobbin & Jung, 2015) and that this coordinative power can feed into complex domination (Boltanski, 2011). Conventions provide participants with qualifications for coordinating things and generate asymmetries of positions within a relationship (Thévenot, 2015). In the publicly justifiable engagement mode, prevailing orders of worth constitute qualified and unqualified people, thereby constituting coordinative power (Oleinik, 2010). By defining legitimate asymmetries between actors, orders of worth enable more qualified actors to maximise their satisfaction, while less qualified ones accept that they must minimise ‘missed opportunities’ (Oleinik, 2011, p. 164).

Complex domination arises when actors who are considered more qualified can, in addition, ignore some rules or transcend others in order to pursue their interests, while others do not have this privilege (Boltanski, 2011). In other words, qualified actors have an influence over the mechanisms of ‘rules’ and their ‘ruleness’ (Boltanski, 2011). By using coordinative power in this way, actors can protect the conventions which sustain their privileges.

Nevertheless, under complex domination, domination over less qualified actors remains incomplete. Thévenot emphasises that actors have two potential stances towards their environment, which he labels two-sided engagement. Two-sided engagement refers to actors’ capacity to close or open their eyes towards particular conventions. It acknowledges their capacity to doubt, resist, and dissociate themselves from prevailing conventions, despite the presence of complex domination.

One side of the engagement, closing one’s eyes, refers to confidence in the world, resulting in a comfortable closing of eyes or ‘quietude’ (Thévenot, 2011). In the publicly justifiable engagement mode, confidence (termed ‘public quietude’) builds on the qualification of objects and persons in relation to orders of worth prevailing in the situation. In the familiar engagement mode, confidence originates from personally familiarised senses of reality, such as blind trust in symbolic forms, as occurs in rituals (Thévenot, 1990, 2006).

The other potential stance on actors’ parts, opening one’s eyes or ‘inquietude,’ refers to doubt in a convention. Doubt arises when actors recognise the sacrifices being made by operating according to one particular convention rather than another. In the case of publicly justifiable engagement, doubt, reflected in public inquietude, takes the form of elaborate critique of the prevailing order of worth. In familiar engagement, in contrast, doubt is reflected privately, for example, in feelings of unease. This two-sided engagement, according to Thévenot, is necessary for a living community – as it ensures the continuity of the democratic progress of a society (Blokker & Brighenti, 2011). On the other hand, the confident use of an engagement mode requires limiting inquietude (Blokker, 2014).

The above points suggest that selection decisions require reducing participants’ potential inquietude in the course of hiring processes, and strengthening their confidence in particular conventions. Boltanski’s notion of complex domination (2011) offers a potentially fruitful device for understanding how actors who are considered to be more qualified can promote quietude and thereby preserve their privileges. In our study, we examine how qualified actors use their coordinative power and transcend rules for cultivating particular conventions. We also seek to reflect on the boundaries of complex domination that indicate how less qualified actors can raise doubts about prevailing conventions and resist coordinative power.

Methodology

Study setting

To investigate academic hiring, we have used a single case-study approach. This approach allows us to capture the dynamics of a specific setting and to derive new theoretical insights from in-depth understanding (Eisenhardt, 1989). More specifically, our study follows the method of analytical generalisation (Yin, 2009) for empirically elaborating the concept of complex domination and its boundaries. The setting of Pakistan as a developing country with a colonial inheritance of power distance and structures of domination is suitable to this end (Ali & Brandl, 2017), as this setting points to considerable asymmetries among actors’ positions in academic hiring processes.

The Education University (TEU hereafter) (a pseudonym) is a public sector university in Pakistan. TEU had a long history as a Government College before it received its university charter. As an autonomous body,² like most public sector universities in Pakistan, TEU is authorised to create new posts related to teaching, administration, and research and development, and to recruit, appoint (on an ad-hoc as well as a regular basis), and promote administrative and academic staff – ranging from lower scale non-teaching staff to full professors. For all types of appointments, TEU is obliged to follow both its service statutes, which are developed in the light of its Ordinance³ and approved by the Government of Punjab – the province in which the university is located, and instructions from the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan. Service statutes provide details related to classifying services and recruitment methods.

Posts at TEU are categorised into two groups, group A and group B. All posts in the Basic Pay Scale (BPS) 17 and above, including the posts of teaching faculty, belong to Group A; all posts in BPS 16 and below belong to group B. According to the service statutes of the university, teaching posts starting from lecturer, BPS-18, to full professors, BPS-21, along with all other posts from Group A, must be filled by the Selection Board (SB hereafter) with the final approval of the syndicate. TEU is also obliged to form a scrutiny committee for deciding on the eligibility of candidates before forwarding the final list of candidates to the SB. The statutory requirements of the constitution of the scrutiny committee, the SB, and the syndicate are given in Table 1.

Table 1. Constituting members of official bodies involved in the hiring process at TEU.

The scrutiny committee	The selection board	The syndicate
The Dean of faculty concerned (Chairperson) The Chairperson of department concerned Two or three faculty members from department concerned	The Vice Chancellor (VC hereafter) (Chairperson) The Registrar (Secretary) One VC of another public sector university (as the Chancellor^a nominates) The Chairperson of PPSC^b (or his/her nominee) The Dean of the relevant faculty The Chairperson of the relevant department One nominee member from the syndicate Two persons of eminence, from outside the university, nominated by the syndicate Two subject experts (three in case of the selection of Associate Professors and Professors) nominated by the VC	The VC (Chairperson) The Registrar (Secretary) The Secretary Education Department, Government of Punjab (or his/her nominee) The Secretary Law Department, Government of Punjab (or his/her nominee) The Chairperson of HEC or his/her nominee) One VC of another public sector university (as the Chancellor nominates) Three deans of faculty (as the Chancellor nominates) Five eminent personalities (as the Chancellor nominates) Chairperson BISE^c Two Principles of University Colleges (as the Chancellor nominates) The EDO^d (Education) or his/her nominee Three members of the Provincial Assembly^e

Source: University Statutes.

^aGovernor of the province (Punjab in this case) is the chancellor of all universities in the province.

^bPunjab Public Service Commission, the authority for hiring of employees for all Punjab Government Departments.

^cBoard of Intermediate and Secondary Education of the concerned district/city.

^dExecutive District Officer of concerned city district.

^eThe supreme legislation body of the province, made up of politicians.

Data

Our data include observations and shadowing of the hiring process, starting from the announcement of positions to the ranking of candidates, interviews with actors directly involved in the hiring process, and informal discussions with internal applicants and newly appointed faculty members of TEU. Interviewees were chosen for their experience as members of different official bodies involved in the hiring process, such as the scrutiny committee, the SB, or the syndicate. The interviews were conducted in a conversational style to ensure that respondents felt at home while discussing occurrences in the hiring process at TEU. The interviewer’s acquaintance with the respondents and the informal settings of the interviews (most were intentionally conducted outside the respondents’ offices) helped to shift the mode of interaction during interviews from the publicly justified to the familiarly engaged mode, thereby making respondents more comfortable in expressing their genuine feelings and any inquietude about prevailing conventions. The interviews were conducted in Urdu and were tape-recorded, transcribed, and translated into English for this paper. Additionally, we consulted various documents. These included the university Ordinance, service statutes, and HEC notifications about recruitment policies. We also collected job announcements for faculty positions available on the TEU website.

We started our analysis by reconstructing the hiring process and identifying key participants, objects, and moments of uncertainty involved in the process. Common themes such as authority, Sifarish,⁴ merit, political pressures, and rules were identified through open coding. We drew upon the justifications provided by our respondents in order to analyse hiring decisions taken recently. We identified a number of key aspects of faculty hiring at TEU to distinguish conventions embedded in the hiring process. It was not a straightforward task to precisely distinguish between engagement modes, and between different orders of worth. We recognised overlapping zones between publicly justifiable and familiar engagement, and between different justifications. For example, fostering a more familiar and non-public mode to avoid justification may simultaneously involve references to specific orders of worth as supporting mechanisms. While this can be seen as a limitation, it is also possible to view such overlapping zones as indicators for complex domination.

In the following sections, we present our findings on how complex domination enables selection decisions at TEU. We start with the hiring process and its context, explicating sources for complex domination. Then, we present the prevailing conventions and highlight how top management changes engagement modes to ensure quietude, followed by an analysis of instances of public inquietude.

Hiring at TEU: Process and context

The hiring process at TEU starts with a job announcement in two or three national newspapers and on the university website; this is followed by entering applicants into the database and screening tests, in cases where applications are received in large numbers and/or if advised by the VC. Successful candidates’ applications, after the screening tests, are forwarded to the scrutiny committee, which decides on the eligibility of candidates against the requisite qualifications and experience prescribed in the job announcement and verifies the documents provided by the applicants for authenticity. Eligible candidates are then invited for interviews with the SB, which makes a final selection with the consent of a majority of members. Candidates are finally offered appointments, if the SB’s decisions are approved by the syndicate. For the eligibility of the teaching faculty, TEU follows the criteria given in its constitution and, in some cases, the criteria prescribed by HEC. Table 2 describes these criteria in detail.

Table 2. Eligibility criteria for different faculty positions at TEU.

Position	Criteria as per university rules Qualification/experience/publications	Criteria recommended by HEC
		Qualification	Experience	Publications
Lecturer	M.Phil. 1st Class or MA/MSc 1st Class in the relevant subject from a recognised University/College	First Class Master’s Degree in the relevant field, with no third division in academic career, from HEC recognised University/Institution	No experience required	No publications required
Assistant Professor	Ph.D. with two years or M. Phil with four years teaching experience in the relevant subject	Ph.D. in the relevant field from HEC recognised University/Institution OR Master’s degree (foreign) or M. Phil (Pakistan) in the relevant field from HEC recognised University/Institution	No experience required Four years teaching/research experience in a recognised university or a post-graduation Institution OR Four years professional experience in the relevant field in a National or International organisation	No publications required
Associate Professor	Ph.D. in the relevant subject with 10-year experience of teaching/research in a recognised College or University, 5 research papers published in journals of international repute OR MPhil or a degree higher than MA/MSc requiring at least 12-year experience in a recognised College or University, 5 research papers published in journals of international repute	Ph.D. in the relevant field from HEC recognised University/Institution	Ten years teaching/research experience in a HEC recognised university or a post-graduation Institution or professional experience in the relevant field in a National or International organisation. OR Five-year post-Ph.D. teaching/research experience in a HEC recognised University or a post-graduate institution or professional experience in the relevant field in a National or International Organisation	Ten publications (with at least four publications in the last five years) in HEC recognised journals
Professor	Ph.D. in the relevant subject with 15-year teaching/research experience in a recognised College or University, 8 research papers published in journals of international repute	Ph.D. in the relevant field from HEC recognised University/Institution	Fifteen-year teaching/research experience in HEC recognised University or a post-graduate institution or professional experience in the relevant field in a National or International Organisation OR Ten-year post-Ph.D. teaching/research experience in a recognised University or a post-graduate institution or professional experience in the relevant field in a National or International Organisation	Fifteen research publications (with at least five publications in the last five years) in HEC recognised journals

Source: University statutes.

There is a variety of objects involved in the hiring process at TEU, which helps to strengthen confidence in the process. The presence of agenda items, application forms, evaluation forms, and candidates’ dossiers in the meetings of the SB fosters participants’ confidence. Formal invitation letters and honorarium cheques to the members of the SB reinforce their positive attitude towards the top management and motivate them to attend future meetings. Application-receiving diaries, data-entry sheets, lists of eligible candidates, interview-call letters for eligible candidates, minutes of the SB’s meeting, and appointment/offer letters make the hiring process appear formal and standardised, thereby enhancing stakeholders’ confidence in the legitimacy of the process. Such confidence in certified persons and objects results in a comfortable closing of eyes (Thévenot, 2015), especially if quietude brings benefits for the actors concerned.

A number of internal and external actors are involved in the selection process at TEU. The VC, the Registrar, Deans of respective faculties, and Chairpersons of the respective departments for which the hiring is taking place are key actors from within TEU, whereas senior professors of the respective subjects, VCs of other universities, politicians, and city government officials (as members of the syndicate) are among the actors from outside TEU. External members, particularly subject experts, play a crucial role for selection decisions, as their recommendations are sought as a matter of ‘norm’. All the actors have specific roles in the hiring process. The VC and the Registrar of TEU serve as the chair and the secretary, respectively, of the SB as well as the syndicate, Deans serve as chairs of scrutiny committees, external professors serve as subject experts, and all others as ordinary members of these committees.

The VC’s opinion carries more weight than that of any other member of the SB. Directly and indirectly, the VC has significant influence over the members and operations of all official bodies, with the power to ensure that rules are used as he or she wishes (Boltanski, 2011). The VC has authority to approve the members of the scrutiny committee, invite the members of the SB, approve the subject experts, and call the meetings of the SB as well as the syndicate. Informal discussions with some members of the scrutiny committee reveal that the chairs of scrutiny committees always try to enact what is advised by the VC.

We have a symbolic role. In most cases rules are clear about who is eligible and who is not and there is no ambiguity. Only when there is an applicant who does not meet the eligibility criteria fully but still the top management wants to oblige him, our job becomes challenging. In such cases, we try to accommodate the candidate because we have to follow whatever our chair says. And the chair of course has to respect the instructions from the top (member of the scrutiny committee).

The VC does not only hold significant authority, conferred by the law, but also uses subordinating staff’s structural dependence in order to perpetuate a superior position in the hiring process. Assistant Professors and Associate Professors who are members of scrutiny committees have huge structural dependence on TEU’s top management – Deans, the Registrar, and the VC. For the acquisition of rights and benefits such as promotions, increments, and leaves, they need to be in top management’s good books, and for this purpose, they need to follow instructions and signals from the top.

Interviews with a number of current and previous members of the SB and the syndicate revealed that the VC has a strong position in both of these bodies. Internal members of the SB, such as Deans and Chairs, are directly under the influence of the VC, who being their functional head, possesses authority over them. External members, especially subject experts, also tend to follow the VC’s signals, since they feel obliged on the grounds of having been invited by the VC to be members of the SB. An extremely experienced member of the SB, a very senior professor, revealed the following:

The VC controls all the decisions about who is going to be selected or rejected. He or she can create extra posts and can keep positions vacant whenever deemed necessary. External members of the SB are always thankful to the VC because they already feel obliged for being invited by him or her onto the board; it improves their profile. Why would they differ (from the VC in the SB meetings)? Apart from that, since the VC holds a greater percentage of marks or in other words his or her opinion has more statistical weight than others, everyone tends to await VC’s opinion or signals and follows suit.

The syndicate is intended to function as a referee for the decisions of the SB. But, in practice, it serves more like a signatory body for the SB’s decisions. In addition, the VC being the chair of the syndicate is anyway in a comfortable position to get the decisions of the SB approved by the syndicate:

In my ten years’ experience with the SB and the syndicate, I observed only a very few times when the syndicate did not approve the decisions of the SB. However, in the case of other administrative decisions, like budget allocation and so on, syndicate most often gets the decisions of the VC amended/revised according to the observations of its members (former member of the syndicate).

Also, top management at TEU uses rules as smokescreens for implementing personal agendas. Rules and regulations provide considerable leverage to actors. The plurality of standards enhances the possibility of influencing selection decisions. For instance, the top management has discretion in choosing between eligibility criteria available in the university statutes and those provided by HEC; they are able to take advantage of alternate standards. Analysis of job announcements from the last five years reveals little consistency in eligibility criteria. TEU has switched from time to time between the rules in its statutes and the criteria prescribed by HEC, particularly relating to requirements respecting qualifications, experience, and numbers of research publications. For example, in a job announcement for Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and Professors in 2014, TEU set the requirements for qualifications and experience based on the university statutes, whereas the requirements for the numbers of research publications for Associate Professors and Professors were set according to HEC criteria. One year later, in another job announcement, the requirements for the numbers of research publications for the positions of Associate Professors and Professors were set as per the university statutes.

Finally, the eligibility criteria described in job announcements (Table 2) are rather rudimentary. Criteria are formal, mainly stressing merits that can be expressed only in numerical terms and keeping some requirements vague. The rudimentary nature of these criteria injects leeway into the mechanisms of candidate evaluation. This continuous investment in keeping criteria rudimentary strengthens conventions (Thévenot, 2015) which facilitate the influence of top management on selection decisions. The recruitment branch of the university and the respective scrutiny committees have a key role in the formation of information (Thévenot, 2007) provided by applicants, so as to render it qualified or unqualified, taking advantage of the vague criteria to hand. This consequently enhances the coordinative power of top management. A member of the scrutiny committee of the department of Business Administration told a noteworthy story in this regard:

Once we received some applications with Masters in Commerce (M.Com.) degrees for the positions of lecturers in our department, Business Administration. You know, we have a separate department of Commerce, and it was clearly mentioned in the advertisement that candidates must have Masters Degrees in the ‘relevant’ subject. For the positions in the department of business administration the ‘relevant’ degree was obviously Master in Business Administration (MBA). So, we disqualified all the applicants with M.Com. degrees. But, as happens quite often, later on we received instructions from top management that commerce is also a relevant subject for positions in business administration, and of course we had to obey these instructions. But there were also some applicants with Masters in Economics; they remained disqualified.

It is clear from the above excerpt that writing ‘the relevant subject’ in a job announcement, rather than mentioning the particular subject(s) that is relevant, leaves considerable leverage for the evaluators (Thévenot, 2015) and opens space to top management to give signals for selection.

In sum, hiring at TEU can be characterised by a standardised process, an asymmetry of positions, and a constellation of interests among participating actors, as well as by rules that provide considerable leverage to participants in the hiring process. This provides a fertile ground for complex domination.

Complex domination in action

In this section, in order to explicate the notion of complex domination, we portray how more qualified actors impose conventions that enable them to limit critique (i.e. to restrict inquietude) and allow them to realise their own interests. We use three examples: the hiring of internal candidates through open competition, the hiring of Sifarishi candidates, and the hiring of outstanding candidates.

Hiring of internal candidates through open competition

A prominent type of case in the hiring process at TEU is the selection of internal candidates in order to promote them to higher positions. According to TEU law, forty per cent of available jobs must be filled through promoting eligible faculty members to higher posts, while the remaining sixty per cent need to be filled through appointments from outside. But this law has been suspended at TEU. Members of the teaching faculty must always compete for fresh appointments to higher scales, instead of being awarded promotions. One effect of abandoning this law is increased dependence of faculty members on top management – courtesy of this unnecessary obligation to new appointment – for an otherwise routine matter.

As compensation for this change to the administration of TEU law, faculty members are expected to be prioritised in new hiring through so-called open competition. Publicly announced jobs, according to the law of Pakistan, are equally open to all citizens of Pakistan. No priority whatsoever should be given to any particular candidate. Nevertheless, TEU practises a system in which internal candidates achieve promotion under the guise of fresh hiring. Informal discussions with internal applicants to recently announced faculty positions from different teaching departments and subsequent shadowing of these candidates’ hiring process revealed that not only did top management give assurances to all internal candidates about their selection, but they were even told prior to the job announcements that positions were going to be advertised exclusively for them:

 … I am confident about my selection as AP. I mean they have to do it, otherwise there is no option for us to get promoted. That’s how it goes. You know, the Registrar asked our head of department, before announcing the posts, about the number of faculty members in the department who have completed their PhDs but are lecturers so far. He was collecting this information from all departments, to make sure they announce the right number of posts to accommodate all of us (Internal applicant for AP from Business Administration Department).

The Registrar has personally assured me that the university is going to hire me for the position of Assistant Professor this time … . This is justified, because I have been working as a lecturer for three years even after completing my PhD (Internal applicant for AP from Mathematics Department).

Following up on the proceedings of the SB, we came to know that both the above-mentioned respondents were appointed as Assistant Professors in their respective departments.

There are two ways of looking at this example. One is the suspension of the promotion law, and the other is the ‘how’ of prioritising of internal candidates in open competition in the SB. The first aspect points to the attempts of top management to foster domination (Boltanski, 2011) through investments in specific coordinative conventions (Thévenot, 2015), while by-passing the law. Such investments ensure the domination of top management in the hiring process. Managers are privileged to occasionally disobey rules which it is otherwise necessary to observe, becoming able thereby to achieve their personal agendas (Boltanski, 2011). By-passing rules enables the maintenance of a continuity of specific coordinative conventions which support powerful actors. On the one hand, faculty members always have to compete for fresh appointments, instead of being granted promotion, which is against the quota rules. On the other hand, internal candidates are ensured favourable treatment in this hiring process. So they are recruited at a lower internal level than the rule (40/60) lays down, but they are, nevertheless, greatly favoured in the hiring process.

The promotion through fresh appointments that top management has invested in has resulted in shifting the power asymmetries from departmental Chairs and Deans to top management. The suspended law vested significant authority in departmental chairpersons and Deans of faculties, since they were required to evaluate departmental members and nominate them for promotion. These capacities on the parts of lower and middle management clearly restricted the domination of top management over the hiring process.

Signalling the prioritisation of internal candidates in fresh hiring entails considerable uncertainty for participating actors as to the coordination of activities and orders of worth for producing rankings. Top management addresses this uncertainty by cultivating private arrangements and proximate non-public agreements, which are based on familiar modes of engagement (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). In order to wishfully scrutinise the candidates and prepare a favourable ranking to put forward in the meeting of the SB, the VC engages with subordinating staff such as those who work in the Registrar’s office or the recruitment branch, and members of the scrutiny committee, in a closely proximate and intimate environment. While talking about their interaction with the top management, our respondents used Urdu words such as Ishara, Tabeadari, Tameel, Hidayat, and Hukam. The close, but not exact, English synonyms of these words are ‘to signal’, to obey, ‘to follow or to perform as asked’, and ‘to order or to command’ respectively. These words in the Urdu tradition are not typical for publicly justifiable engagement modes; they are used for more closed and intimate environments, such as in the case of friendship or a close circle of colleagues. Sometimes, the respondents directly used English words such as ‘signals’, ‘instructions’ ‘gestures’, and ‘moods’. The frequent use of such words by our respondents while describing the interaction between top management and others indicates a familiarly habituated environment (Thévenot, 2001) of handling applications at TEU. This type of engagement also prevails in the interaction of Deans and Chairpersons with their subordinating staff in scrutiny committees.

Nevertheless, the publicly justified engagement mode must not be underestimated in the hiring process at TEU. It is particularly noticeable in the meetings of the SB. Since the process before the meeting of the SB is handled entirely by the actors employed at TEU, it is easier for the VC to get things done in his/her favour in non-public modes of engagement, but the meeting of the SB also involves external members, including experienced professors from other universities. Since these professors represent norms, the prioritising of internal candidates over external candidates in the SB needs to be based upon justifiable principles. The board attempts to make the ranking of candidates publicly justifiable by drawing upon various orders of worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). The following excerpt from an interview with a senior faculty member, a very frequent member of the SB meetings, is quite revealing in this regard:

Interviewer:

What do you say about giving priority to internal candidates over external candidates?

Respondent:

Once the post is advertised, there is open competition, no priority is given to internal candidates; all are equal. We have a separate procedure for promotions, there is a quota – 60/40 – that’s there, employees can be promoted (respondent is referring to the law here).

Interviewer:

Are there any ethical considerations or any norms prevailing at TEU which favour internal candidates?

Respondent:

They have the advantage of being internal since colleagues tend to protect them, and this time it has happened, by the way. You know, because they have served and are currently serving. Apart from that, they usually perform better (in interviews) because they (already) know the culture and other things.

Interviewer:

What is your personal stance on this?

Respondent:

I am a strong advocate of giving priority to internal candidates; because they have the right, and right should not be snatched away from anyone, that’s what our religion teaches, and that’s what God wants …..

Interviewer:

Is this only in the case of regularising a contractual lecturer?

Respondent:

It happens at all levels, Lecturer, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and full Professor. In fact, the higher the post or designation, the higher is the probability of the selection of internal candidates.

The respondent starts with a justifiable engagement mode, but then changes to the familiar mode and brings to the fore what actually happens on the board, and what he feels about it all. He draws on religion-based arguments as well as referring to the rights of the internal candidates, indicating recourse to the civic order of worth in order to give priority to internal candidates while making selection decisions in the SB. There are also arguments referring to the industrial order of worth, for instance, when he talks about the efficiency, experience, or adaptability of internal candidates, and the domestic order of worth, when he talks about personal protection given by colleagues to the internal candidates. Similar justifications are used in the board when arguing in favour of internal candidates.

However, top management does not always find it easy to draw upon a particular order of worth in order to reach a consensus of the board in favour of hiring internal candidates. For this reason, they attempt to engineer situations (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) for more familiar action modes where they can rank candidates within a close circle of friendly colleagues and subordinates. Sometimes, the VC does not finalise selection decisions ‘there and then’ in the meeting of the SB, but gets the ratings of each candidate from the SB members and keeps his or her own ratings pending. When the meeting is over, the VC finalises the ranking of candidates privately. While this is not allowed by the law, external SB members keep quiet in such cases. An SB member explained his awareness of the VC’s room for manoeuvre:

The VC can easily manipulate the entire ranking of the candidates, by giving significantly high marks to his or her favourites and significantly low marks to other candidates, even if the ratings given by the board are the opposite. Because the VC owns the greater share of evaluation marks compared to other members, and also knows what marks other members have already allotted to each candidate … . In the tenure of a previous VC, it was even noticed that in a bid to accommodate particular candidates after the meeting of the SB, the VC and his team allegedly used to alter the ratings given by other members of the SB. But you know all this is possible only when decisions are not finalised during the meeting.

The above quotation highlights how variation in procedures can help to prepare a familiar engagement mode, avoiding the requirements of justification, thereby giving more leverage to top management to influence selection decisions. The quietude of the board members, particularly on the parts of external members, in such situations, is either due to their respect for the VC or due to their opportunist behaviour, exchanging favours with the VC. In either case, quietude is embedded in the domestic order of worth. In other words, scaling down a situation from a public to a familiar engagement also demands publicly justifiable activities from participating actors.

Hiring of Sifarishi candidates

Sifarish is a highly useful tool enabling job applicants in Pakistan to influence hiring decisions, particularly in the public sector. ‘Embedded in family- and kinship-based social structures, Sifarish has become the standard means of getting things done by public functionaries’ (Islam, 2004, p. 322). The post of the VC itself is considered a political position. The Government tends to appoint to such positions individuals who will act as its right hands. In most cases, a professor’s political connections enable him/her to attain the position of VC. Therefore, politically appointed VCs are extremely dependent on local politicians. In turn, politicians, due to their strong influence over VCs, become a source of Sifarish for job applicants. The following excerpt illustrates this relationship:

 …  But external candidates (where they are prioritised over internals) come with pressure; forcefully, they pressurise top management through politicians. There is a recent example; we had this Ms Sara (name changed) with us for last 6-7 years (serving as lecturer on a contract basis), but this Ms Najma (name changed) has got appointed, I know how she got appointed. There is strong influence (Sifarish) sometimes, (otherwise) Ms Sara would have been hired …  (Excerpt from an interview with a senior Professor and member of the SB).

The respondent was not happy with the fact that this candidate (Ms Najma) was hired only due to her Sifarish from an influential politician, even though he took part in the hiring process and, being the Dean of concerned faculty, had a key role in the selection decision. His disappointment about the decision, however, is due to the notoriousness of Sifarish, which can be interpreted as a qualification embedded in the domestic order of worth. Using Sifarish to justify decisions is contested in Pakistan. While it is deeply rooted in Pakistan’s culture, it is also hated as a means of getting things done. Despite its overwhelming prevalence in practice, neither committee members nor candidates are willing to publicly acknowledge their use of Sifarish. It tends to remain an open secret, leaving some margin of face-saving for the participating actors. Thus, to avoid referring to Sifarish, the VC can make up situations through private arrangements with his/her subordinates and lackeys within the board, where he/she can shift the mode of engagement from the publicly justifiable to the familiar.

Hiring of outstanding candidates

Outstanding candidates, who possess extraordinary academic records and attract serious attention from the SB during interviews, create limits to the discretion of the VC at TEU. If a candidate receives undisputed approval from SB members, the VC does not intervene and appoints the candidate. In some cases, the VC needs to create extra positions to accommodate outstanding candidates, given the fact that open positions have already been reserved for internal faculty members or Sifarishi candidates. This is illustrated in the following statement by an SB member:

 … You see, members (of the SB) are selected by VC on choice. He invites his friends and ex-colleagues. In case a really outstanding candidate appears, he/she gets attention, and sometimes gets selected, but generally the selection is made before the day of the meeting of the SB.

Outstanding candidates illustrate the limits of the VC’s discretion to promote a familiar engagement mode. If a candidate possesses an extraordinary academic record and shows undeniable performance in the interview, the VC avoids taking an action which cannot be justified. The coordination in the board is done in a publicly justifiable mode of engagement in this case.

Public inquietude at TEU

In spite of asymmetric positions at TEU, actors involved in administrative processes sometimes raise their voices and resist top management’s signals. In some cases, this can have negative consequences. The following quotation from an informal discussion with a faculty member sheds light on this:

In the time of a previous VC, I once refused to favour a student who was a relative of the VC. Actually, my chairman asked me to give the student passing marks although he knew that the student did not deserve it. Upon my refusal, the chairman straightaway intimated to me that the competent authority would not be pleased by this gesture. Anyway, I refused; perhaps because I was new at that time, and got a bit emotional. But, I still remember the after-effects of that … I received three consecutive explanation letters the very next month, on different petty issues … 

Although this example is not directly related to hiring, it points to the possibility of inquietude among actors at TEU. When there is severe resentment with top management, actors otherwise subject to the quietude side of engagement, raise their voices.

Inquietude can be found at TEU not only in expressing doubts ‘there and then’, but also in raising one’s voice after the selection process is completed. For instance, an appointment of four professors during the tenure of a previous VC created massive controversy among faculty members. These professors were hired despite their apparent lack of experience and publications. Three of them were hired by the same VC as Associate Professors, which was also questionable, in the cases of two of them in particular because of their irrelevant and incomplete experience compared to criteria prescribed in the job announcement. All three were former pupils of the VC. Talking about these professors, a senior faculty member revealed views as follows:

When Dr. Tasarraf (name changed) (a previous VC), who was previously a VC at another university, came to TEU, he brought his team of devotees from that university to TEU. Everyone knows how he managed to appoint all of them in different departments. Such things have happened here many times (Anonymous member of the SB).

The issue has been exacerbated due to a recent inquiry initiated by the syndicate against one of these professors, which resulted in judging the appointment void ab initio and repatriating the professor to his former university. The decision was based on severe irregularities found in the process of hiring, including tampering with marks given by members of the SB. The issue was hyped by the media, with the publication of the story in many national newspapers. These reported that a subsequent inquiry is now under way to probe the appointment of other professors, based on the information provided by the repatriated professor during the inquiry against him. This example reveals that some of the actors who were involved in the hiring process, despite their resentment and distrust of the decisions, were unable to raise their voices while the selections were being made. However, later, when they were in a better position to express their doubts and resentment, they did so powerfully, ensuring the reversal of these decisions.

Concluding discussion

A core point made by CT scholars is that conventions are powerful ways for aligning opinions of diverse participants in hiring processes and for determining how the quality of candidates is evaluated. Given that there are plural conventions that can be potentially used for coordinating hiring activities in practice, our paper addressed what determines particular actual conventions, using an example from a university in Pakistan. We propose that asymmetries in participants’ positions that give rise to domination are useful for understanding these conventions, and that by investing in conventions, actors can influence who succeeds in selection processes.

Our motivation for this paper was to enrich CT scholars’ understanding of the conditions for inequalities in hiring. The notions of complex domination and engagement from CT, on which we draw for this purpose, enable us to understand how actors leverage rules and promote quietude in hiring processes. CT views the realisation of actors’ power as dependent on the acceptance of prevailing roles, authorities, and qualifications by all other individuals involved in a process. This acceptance is fostered by both the opportunist behaviour of less powerful actors involved, furthering their own interests by ensuring smooth coordination and at the same time refraining from expressing their resentments and doubts about the prevailing conventions and also by actors’ confidence in relevant persons and objects which illustrates the operation of quietude in human engagement with the world (Thévenot, 2011). There are, of course, different ways of conceptualising power too, which imply less or no collaboration from subordinate actors. Furthermore, CT encourages researchers to search for sources for asymmetries among actors not just in the formal hierarchy of organisations but also to consider the broader context of coordination, especially taking account of networks and industry.

The events at TEU, a public sector university located in Pakistan, suggest that rudimentary and heterogeneous laws and regulations play an important role in providing leverage to top management in the hiring process. Since legislation in Pakistan has a colonial inheritance (Jhatial et al., 2014), it has a strong element of the perpetuation of domination through rules (Boltanski, 2011). Elites have historically ensured, in legislative processes, that laws serve the purposes of law-makers. According to CT, rules are incomplete and require interpretation (Reynaud, 2005). For analysing more precisely how actors manage to enable the interpretation of actual rules in a concrete setting, studying the moment of issuing new rules and the events unfolding thereafter can be one fruitful way forward (Kozica & Brandl, 2015).

The accounts of actors interviewed for this study can offer also hints on the boundaries of complex domination. Because in the TEU example complex domination is manifested in creating private arrangements, limits of domination become visible when participants have confidence in public-engagement modes for ranking candidates, as in the case of very outstanding candidates. Furthermore, boundaries of domination are noticeable when faculty members achieve resistance through public inquietude, as in the event that was accompanied by media attention. In the event of public inquietude, actors can resist domination by using an order of worth to critique an unjustified action. In contrast, in the event of public quietude, oppression becomes irrelevant as actors display confidence in the convention and, in specific cases, in the certification of persons and objects it coordinates. The two distinct ways for limiting domination show that actors are capable of ensuring professional autonomy in committees and that they may employ different avenues for raising doubts beyond the organisation (for instance, the media). Future research building on the two-sided engagement with conventions can help in understanding the progress of democratic decision-making in universities and other organisational settings in different places. For instance, borrowing from identity literature, a more detailed examination of a person’s concrete circumstances (Brandl & Bullinger, 2017) can reveal why actors who are otherwise subject to the quietude side of engagement with the world, express their doubts. Similarly, a closer study of the robustness of objects can offer a starting point for examining what assures actors’ confidence in public arrangements.

In sum, when we acknowledge that specific conventions provide the power for coordinating hiring and that there are several engagement modes involved, we need to ask what makes actors subscribe to the prevailing set of conventions. In this paper, we sought to understand how asymmetries in organisational positions foster the relevant conventions and we showed some limits to this. We studied this in a university setting where the hiring process traditionally involves multiple internal and external participants, which might stimulate considerable debate, thus requiring ways of finding a common operation mode.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Qamar Ali http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1252-8630

Julia Brandl http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9586-6461

Notes

1 Other modes of engagement are planned action and exploration. We do not explicate these modes here since the distinction between publicly justifiable and familiar engagement is sufficient for our purposes.

2 According to the constitution of Pakistan, public sector universities are autonomous in all administrative matters.

3 The Ordinance of the university is issued by the respective provincial Government, or the Government of Pakistan in case of a federal university, at the time of its establishment. It provides a complete nomenclature and definitions of all authorities of the university.

4 An Urdu word with the dictionary meaning ‘recommendation’, but in practice stronger and deeper than this. A candidate who influences the hiring process through strong recommendations from either a politician, or a bureaucrat, or any influential person is called a Sifarishi candidate.