Given the significant transformations underway in academia, it is pertinent to ask whether the traditional notion of entering the profession in response to a calling is still relevant. This article draws together hitherto unconnected strands of German and Anglo-Saxon literature on callings, then analyzes biographical narratives of 40 social…

This paper addresses the growing problem of retractions in the scientific literature of publications that contain bad data (i.e., fabricated, falsified, or containing error), also called "false science." While the problem is particularly acute in the biomedical literature because of the life-threatening implications when treatment…

In Portugal, research productivity is nowadays essential for the positive assessment of academics, research units and study programmes. Academic inbreeding has been highlighted in the literature as one of the factors influencing research productivity. This paper tests the hypothesis that inbreeding is detrimental for research productivity,…

Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one…

On the basis of ethnographic and historical material this article makes a comparative analysis of the relationship between public events, ceremonies and academic rituals, institutional identity, and processes of transition and power at two universities, one in Mexico and the other in South Africa. The public events examined here play a major role…

Early career researchers are faced with the expectation of their scientific communities to conduct independent research, which is reflected in the development of independent new research lines. This change must take place under conditions that vary between national career systems. Case studies for a chair system (Germany) and two tenure systems,…

By comparing three types of hybrid organizations--18th-century scientific academies, 19th-century institutions of higher vocational education, and 20th-century industrial research institutes--it is the purpose here to answer the question of why new hybrid organizations are continuously formed. Traditionally, and often implicitly, it is often…

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the…

One of the unintended consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) in universities is often feared to be a division between elite institutions focused on research and large institutions with teaching missions. However, institutional isomorphisms provide counter-incentives. For example, university rankings focus on certain output parameters such…

For decades, debates over medical curriculum reform have centred on the role of science in medical education, but the meaning of "science" in this domain is vague and the persistence of the debate has not been explained. Following Bourdieu, this paper examines struggles over legitimate knowledge and the forms of capital associated with…