Hybrid Format
Sociological Explanations of Researcher Mobility – Conceptual and Methodological Challenges
Grit Laudel
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, February 22, 2023
Grit Laudel from TU Berlin answered two questions in her talk: how can one conceptualize academic careers in a way that accounts for epistemic reasons for organizational mobility? How can one investigate the epistemic dynamics of a mobile researcher’s career?
Abstract
While the general mobility of early career researcher is part of their career script, the specifics – which group to choose and the benefit a stay abroad promises – depend on the research early career researchers have done and intend to do. Thus, decisions to go to a particular research group in a particular organisation in a particular country are to a large extend driven by the content of a researcher’s career.
This observation raises two challenges. How can we conceptualise academic careers in a way that accounts for epistemic reasons for organisational mobility? How can we (as scientific laypersons) investigate the epistemic dynamics of a mobile researcher’s career?
In her talk, she provided a model and a method that have proven able to meet these challenges. She conceptualized the academic career as consisting of three analytically distinguishable but interrelated careers, namely an epistemic career that consists of a researcher’s evolving research topics, a community career in which a researcher progresses through work roles and statuses, and an organisational career in which a research progresses through a sequence of organisational positions. The epistemic career is most difficult to reconstruct. It can be achieved by a bibliometric analysis of a researcher’s oeuvre and its decomposition in research trails that the researcher followed across stages of their career. She demonstrated how this bibliometric analysis supports the reconstruction of epistemic effects of mobility, the growing epistemic independence of early career researchers from their group leaders, and changes of researchers’ inclusion in their scientific communities.
About
Grit Laudel is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Technical University (TU) Berlin. She used to be a PhD student at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne) and later obtained her PhD in Sociology at the University of Bielefeld in 1998. Throughout her career Dr. Laudel worked at various research institutes and universities in Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands respectively and holds her current position at TU Berlin since 2013. Her empirical research focuses on the impact of institutions on the content of research, i.e. on a question that links the sociology of science to science policy studies. Further information about her work can be found at www.laudel.info.