Careers in academia : does context matter?

Within mainstream research in this area, careers have been considered mainly as individual journeys. However, career processes represent powerful social actions whereby a society or a subset of society reinforce their value system. Limiting the analysis to the individual and her characteristics implies either the implicit adoption of an instrumental view of this process at the system level or the dismissal of any system level view. Therefore, in our analysis of careers in the Italian Academia, we embrace a contextual approach where careers are considered the epitome of powerful social processes that shape the Italian academic system and somehow reflect the whole social system. We reconstructed career episodes for a sample of 1231 researchers and professors in economics and analyze the determinants of their careers, considering scientific productivity (publications), human capital (PhD), age, tenure, sex and geographical mobility. We develop our hypotheses and analyses on the basis of a detailed description of how the specific nature of this context matters. Consistently with our expectations, results reveal that merit and human capital do not determine (nor influence) careers in the Italian Academia, in clear alignment with the overall depiction of social processes in this specific country