Functions and Consequences of Unemployment in Researchers' Careers

该项目的目的是探索研究人员失业对学术生涯延续的影响。该项目确定了失业与具体领域研究实践的具体“契合度”，确定了失业期间继续开展研究活动的方式，以及由此产生的对职业延续的影响。学术生涯中失业阶段的条件、过程和影响之间的这些联系尚未得到调查。它们处于劳动力市场研究和学术职业研究之间的无人区，前者只对不同职业之间的差异略微感兴趣，而忽略了概念和经验上研究的细节，后者对研究的细节敏感，但忽视了失业。为了应对这一差距，我们的项目确定了在失业阶段的情况下，能够成功地继续学术生涯的条件和机制。该项目的经验战略是一种混合方法，将比较案例研究与定量分析相结合，我们与德国高等教育研究和科学研究中心合作。该项目的核心是一系列关于研究人员失业的案例研究，这些研究基于对目前失业或过去经历过失业阶段的研究人员的半结构化采访。这些案例研究建立了特定领域的研究实践、研究人员处理失业阶段的方式以及失业对未来职业生涯的影响之间的联系。此外，对学术职业中失业阶段的标准化数据的分析将确定不同科学领域的职业中失业阶段的程度，以及失业的频率、发生次数和持续时间与职业的进一步发展之间的联系。

The aim of the project is to explore the impact of researcher unemployment on the continuation of academic careers. The project identifies the specific 'fit' of unemployment with field-specific research practices, the ways in which research activities are continued during unemployment, and the resulting effects on the continuation of careers. These links between conditions, processes and effects of phases of unemployment in academic careers have not yet been investigated. They lie in a no man’s land between labor market research, which is only marginally interested in variation between occupations and neglects the specifics of research both conceptually and empirically, and research on academic careers, which is sensitive to specifics of research but neglects unemployment. Responding to this gap, our project identifies the conditions and mechanisms that enable a successful continuation of an academic career despite phases of unemployment. The empirical strategy of the project is a mixed-method approach that combines comparative cases studies with a quantitative analysis on which we co-operate with the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies. The core of the project is a series of case studies of researcher unemployment, which are based on semi-structured interviews with researchers who are currently unemployed or experienced phases of unemployment in the past. These case studies establish the links between field-specific research practices, the way in which researchers deal with phases of unemployment, and the effects of unemployment on further careers. In addition, the analysis of standardized data on phases of unemployment in academic careers will establish the extent of phases of unemployment in careers in different scientific fields and links between frequency, times of occurrence and duration of unemployment, on the one hand, and the further progression of careers, on the other hand.