The ecology of a professional field : Higher Education in Sweden

• Ever since Andrew Abbott’s seminal work on the system of professions, research on the professions has acknowledged, in principle at least, the necessity to consider professions in their relation to other professions. The division of labour, jurisdictional conflicts and intra-organizational interactions between professions have received their due share of scholarly attention. But less effort has been spent on understanding other ways in which a profession can be shaped and conditioned by its relations to its professional surroundings.In this paper, we examine how the reproduction and expansion of the Swedish corps of university teachers were conditioned by the manner in which universities were intertwined with the professional labour market which they increasingly supplied with PhDs. We argue that Swedish universities depended on these labour market niches to absorb an over-production of PhDs – thereby simultaneously establishing secure career paths extra muros and securing a pool of future would-be university professors. Equally important, the university and its teacher corps were shaped by these interconnections. First, individual career trajectories served as the warp that linked the university to neighboring organizations. Second, disciplines have their specific hinterlands of employing organizations, and the extent and type of external career paths differentiates the teacher corps with regard to its conditions of reproduction and expansion.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Sociologi med utbildningsvetenskaplig inriktning

Sociology Education

Sociology

Sociologi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)