THE INSTITUTIONALISATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES: BRINGING GRADUATES' EMPLOYMENT INTO THE EXPLANATION.

• Author: Proteasa, Viorel
• Position: Report

Introduction

The re-emergence and recent development of social science programmes in Central and Eastern Europe is attributed to the post-communist transformation of higher education (Kaase, Sparschuh, & Wenninger, 2002; Wenninger, 2010). Social sciences in this part of Europe, as elsewhere, have been described and evaluated on different grounds, mostly pertaining to attributes of the departments, of the academic staff and of the curriculum. In most of these studies (Barbu, 2002; Ghica, 2014; Kaase et al., 2002; Stan, 1999, 2015; Wenninger, 2010), the borders of the disciplines are determined based, essentially, on administrative definitions i.e. belonging to social sciences is judged based on employment in such a department, while branches of science are considered "social" based on official documents.

Our research explores one of the less studied aspects of the institutionalisation of social sciences: the establishment of exclusive and overlapping occupational destinations for their graduates, an aspect often overlooked in the evaluations of the current state of affairs. How distinctive are different strands of social science disciplines, judged by the employment of their graduates? In the theoretical section of the article, we pull together different streams of theory in order to construct a consistent link between professionalisation and the institutionalisation of disciplines.

We dedicate another section to test our theoretical construct using a data set extracted from official registers within a graduates' tracer study, covering the Bachelor degree programmes in four social sciences disciplines of one university in Romania. Previously, we operationalize the theoretical construct for this specific context. In the third section we unfold our analysis and present our main findings. We end the study with a section of conclusions on the merits, limitations, and promises of our approach, outlining possible steps forward.

Theoretical considerations

One of the most influential substantive definitions of academic discipline is that of 'academic tribes' which are determined by research practices (Becher & Trowler, 1991). This perspective has been nuanced in a recent revision of the series of books on academic tribes by Tawler, Sounders and Bamber (2012). The revision extends the definition to "clusters of social practices that occur in higher education that are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the production, reproduction, circulation and use of knowledge in different forms" (Trowler, Saunders, & Bamber, 2012, p. 15).

In what we identified as a first text on the status of political science in Romania, Daniel Barbu was asking a "decisive question" which he considered "pending": "what has become of them?" (Barbu, 2002, p. 293). He was referring to the political sciences graduates, but we consider the question is relevant for social sciences, and the answer to it is still pending. Barbu (2002) did not include the employment of graduates within the definition of an institutionalised discipline, nor did he discuss the relation between academic disciplines and professionalisation.

However, such a link is consonant with neo-institutionalist causalities, which indicate universities as one of the main locus of the actions. DiMaggio & Powell (1983, p. 152) refer to professionalisation as "the collective struggle of members of an occupation to define the conditions and methods of their work, to control 'the production of producers' [quoted from Larson, 1977, pp. 49-52]", and establish a "cognitive base and legitimation for their occupational autonomy". In the neo-institutionalist account, the filtering of personnel, in our opinion rightfully advanced as an explanatory mechanism of professionalisation, is not sufficiently exploited in terms of its impact on the institutionalisation of the profession.

Coleman (1991) models this particular process of filtering the personel and terms it 'matching'--using a different terminology and engaging in a different quest. He argues that matching processes on the labour market are determined by "individual's own resources, [...] the resources of all others in the job market and upon the available jobs" (Coleman, 1991, pp. 4-5). One of the key assumptions is that "workers and jobs possess resources" (Coleman, 1991, p. 5), which are relevant for employers, on one side, and persons looking for employment--on the other side. Amongst the attributes which are of interest for the employers--hence can count as resources, Coleman includes education.

The employment question can thus be rephrased in relation to the qualities of the educational resources provided by social science programmes in relation to the labour market. We contribute to the body of knowledge on the institutionalisation of specific disciplines within the social sciences by providing insights on the interactions between discipline and graduates' employment.

Though research on how various disciplines relate to the employment of their graduates is extensive (e.g. Andersson & Nilsson, 2016; Bevan & Cowling, 2007; Garcfa-Espejo & Ibanez, 2006; Jackson, 2014; Kittelsen Roberg & Helland, 2017; Laetitia Garrouste & Rodrigues, 2014; Leuze, 2011; Noelke, Gebel, & Kogan, 2012; Nystrom, Dahlgren, & Dahlgren, 2008; Rajecki & Borden, 2011; Reimer, Noelke, & Kucel, 2008; Teichler, 2000; Van Der Meer, 2011; Wolbers, 2007) we did not identify in the scientific literature a consistent theoretical, methodological and empirical approach to the particular link between insitutionalisation of disciplines and graduates' employment. However, we found kindred perspectives dealing with interactions between higher education and the labour market, such as those pursued by Reisz and Stock (2011, 2013), though with different research questions and a different methodology.

This paper provides an initial attempt at systematizing a direction for both research studies, as well as policy-making. We thus ask the following research question: how distinctive are different strands of social science disciplines, judged by the employment destinations of their graduates? We consider the matter is relevant especially in the context of the recent and concomitant (re-)institutionalisation of social sciences in Central and Eastern Europe.

Distinctive, non-competitive employment destinations are central to our account of institutionalisation. We operationalize distinctiveness using a concept borrowed from network science methodological approaches to the study of organizations: exclusivity. The Knowledge Exclusivity Index, introduced by Ashworth and Carley (2006), "measures the extent to which each actor is the only one who possesses certain skills, knowledge, or expertise" (p. 5). We extend the usage of the concept of exclusivity from individuals to disciplines--or rather to all those individuals who graduated from study programmes associated to a discipline. We set to identify exclusive employment destinations associated to disciplines, and non-exclusive overlapping destinations.

Thus, we relate the institutionalisation of disciplines--as determined by the research production and dissemination practices, with the exclusiveness of employment destinations--in relative terms. We will unfold this research design in the particular context of one university in Romania, which serves as a study-case for testing the explanatory mechanism of the institutionalisation of academic disciplines in terms of employment prospects of their graduates.

Our account is grounded on a presumption of correspondence between the normatively determined borders of the disciplines and the actual practices within academic departments. We do not explore how the faculty defines a set of employment destinations for their graduates, in order to maintain the focus of our argument. We acknowledge this issue merits an additional discussion and, as such, constitutes one of the limitations of our account.

The emphasis on exclusivity carries with it a bias towards a certain definition of the professions, in which the relationship between formal schooling and access to profession is strong. The source of this understanding of the profession is attributed to medicine, law and theology (see Oevermann, 2005; Reisz and Stock, 2011), and we will refer to it as a linear relation. Employment profiles where such a relation is not prominent will be referred to as generalist, catch-all. We acknowledge the normative underpinnings of our operationalization and its implications. We do not engage with the question if such an institutionalisation of disciplines is desirable or not, we rather advance a research design and an empirical investigation on the status-quo in this relation.

"Academic tribes" in Romania and graduates' employment

The theorethical framework we opted for gives prominence to the exogenous factors

shaping the disciplines, and especially tenure. The research questions we ask in this section reflect both this theoretical approach, as well as the empirical experience of the Romanian national context, familiar to academics in the other former communist countries as well. For more than a decade Romanian academics embarked on a "merry-go-round of evaluations" (Geven & Maricut, 2015, p. 665), which have emphasised especially research (Andreescu, Gheorghiu, Irimia, & Curaj, 2015; Proteasa, Andreescu, & Curaj, 2017).

The relative growth in publications--see for example country descriptions on the Scopus database--provides an indication that we may safely assume a link between such policies and social action within the academia, especially in terms of research production and dissemination. Recently, Proteasa, Paunescu and Miroiu (2017) suggested that tenure definition may impact the social practices of a larger share of the population of academics, compared to institutional evaluations--a topic which is thus rendered secondary in our construction of the link between disciplines' institutionalisation...