From organizational careers to careers "without boundaries"? The case of the Faculty of the University of Valencia

Abstract

This question is addressed by examining the individual trajectories of academic staff at a public university in Spain over the last forty years from a neo-institutional perspective. Research fails to establish if the path from beginning a career to achieving permanent status has passed through regulated processes or through processes subject to little or no regulation and in this case, if it is a recent phenomenon. It is hypothesized that the beginning of a career has become more uncertain with the proliferation of routes, although the career continues to develop further in a standard manner for most academic staff. The questions are examined through the use of data available on permanent staff which enables us to identify their avenue for entering the profession and to calculate how long it took to achieve permanence. The data suggest that the avenues for entering have proliferated but the initial career processes continue to be standardized: to an increasingly lesser degree in proportion to change in the institutional configuration.