"Welcome with your application!" : A study of the objectivity and impartiality in appointments of lecturers at Swedish universities

This thesis is about hiring processes in the university sector. More particularly, the focus is to identify if the employment of lecturers obeys the principle of objectivity, impartiality and meritocracy. The thesis is based on a so-called mixed method research. Partly, the extent of compliance is tested in a quantitative survey of six Swedish universities, partly each one of the 73 employment notices is analyzed in a qualitative text analysis. The source of information is public government documents from the examined universities. The survey is limited only to include employments until further notice. Therefore, all sorts of temporary employments are excluded. The focus is on the academic subjects of social science, sociology and political economy. Furthermore, the thesis only investigates employments from the years of 2011-2019. To create an understanding in what way the state institutions should handle their exercise of power, the theory Quality of Government (QoG) is being used. The theory is also used for analysis and as an inspiration for the assay scheme, which is used to assess if the employments are considered “narrower” or “more open”. The variables used in the survey are; notification time, number of applicants, the use of peer review, language of the announcement, and a type of “employment conversion”, made possible by law. The result of the thesis shows that there is an extensive amount of employments which in one way or another violates the principle of impartiality. For example: 24 percent of the employments has less than 2 applicants. 17 percent of the employments is missing impartial peer reviews. 89 percent of the employments are only given noticed in Swedish. 29 percent of the announcement texts are written in a narrow, excluding way. To sum up, we can see indications of partial employments. There are distinctive variations between the universities and among the academic subjects. The most important conclusion of this thesis is that all partial employments are a problem, with shortcomings in quality and in public trust as consequences