Academic Distinctions. Appointment procedures in settings of disciplinary change

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Julian Hamann
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 254562991

Researchers aim at securing and improving their positions. For this purpose they position themselves and others in a discursive game of subtle academic distinctions. The project understands the appointment procedures of professors as a procedurally regulated process that is embedded in disciplinary knowledge horizons, positioning senior academic staff on the basis of academic and non-academic distinctions. This positioning process is especially precarious in settings of disciplinary change, when the filling of institutional positions can be crucial and when academic distinctions of a discipline are contested. In these settings of change, appointment procedures are not only a mode of professorial reproduction, but also a pivotal procedure of institutionalising cognitive change. The inner disciplinary lines of conflict about the construction of subtle academic distinctions do only become fully identifiable retrospectively. Empirically, this is approached firstly by files of 50 selected appointment procedures in History and German studies between 1960 and 1980. Secondly, the project examines debates in the respective disciplinary publics about the change taking place. The distinctions mobilised in the appointment procedures are constructed in these debates long before the actual procedure is taking place. Applying qualitative methods of empirical social and discourse research, the project concentrates on how, firstly, heterogeneous distinctions of the participants of the appointment procedure are institutionally solidified during the staffing. Secondly, it focuses on the extent to which this process is linked to broader knowledge horizons, while thirdly shedding light on the impact appointment procedures have on disciplinary change. As a sociology of social sciences and humanities, the project contributes theoretically and empirically to examining the recruitment modes of professors at German universities as well as the institutional and personal configuration of disciplinary change.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants