How can we explain the emergence and stability of academic career patterns?

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to explain the emergence and stability of career patterns as macro-level effects of a multitude of individual decisions. We utilize an idea of Barley (1989), who introduced career scripts as collectively shared interpretive schemes that mediate between institutions and individual actions. The concept has been applied to academic careers but has remained ambiguous and difficult to operationalise, which is why it has been mostly used as a descriptive label for empirically observed career phenomena. We operationalise the concept and demonstrate that scripts are important causal macro-level factors which, by shaping individual decisions, create field-specific macro-level career patterns.