In this work we investigate the determinants of professors' career advancement in Italian universities. From the analyses, it emerges that the fundamental determinant of an academic candidate's success is not scientific merit, but rather the number of years that the candidate has belonged to the same university as the selection committee president. Where applicants have participated in research work with the president, their probability of success also increases significantly. The factors of the years of service and occurrence of joint research for the other commission members also have an effect, however of lesser weight. The specific phenomenon of nepotism, although it exists, seems less important. The scientific quality of the commission members has negligible effect on the expected outcome of the competition, and even more so the geographic location of the university calling for the competition.
Given the role of human capital in the current knowledge-based economy, organizations must attempt to optimize their human resources recruitment and career advancement processes. Such strategies are even more important in the case of higher education systems because of the role universities play in support of national industrial competitiveness, socio-economic development and social mobility.
In competitive higher education systems, universities are in constant competition in seeking out the best researchers and teaching professors from both at home and abroad. However in the higher education systems of several European nations such competitive mechanisms are often weak. In many cases, recruitment and advancement take place by means of relatively rigid procedures, frequently regulated by a central bureaucracy. For example, in Italy appointments to academic positions are not handled through local ad hoc search committees or advertisements in international scientific journals; instead all vacancies are submitted to the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) which every so often announces national competitions for all disciplines. Such centrally regulated competitions have come under heavy fire and the Italian word “concorso” has soon gained international currency as a term denoting a rigged competition, involving favoritism, nepotism and other unfair selection practices (Gerosa, 2001). A number of instances of court cases (Perotti, 2008;Zagaria, 2007) and injustice have been reported in letters published in such prestigious journals as Lancet, Science and Nature (Garattini, 2001;Aiuti et al., 1994;Biggin, 1994;Amadori et al., 1992;Gaetani and Ferraris 1991;Fabbri, 1986).
Problems of fairness in appointments to academic positions are certainly not limited to Italy: the international literature has dedicated considerable attention to the study of academic recruitment and promotion, largely regarding questions of gender and minority discrimination (Zinovyeva and Bagues, 2012;van den Brink et al., 2010;Cora-Bramble, 2006;Price et al., 2005;Trotman et al., 2002;Stanley et al., 2007). One of the conclusions is that discriminatory phenomena seem to develop above all when evaluations are based on non-transparent criteria (Rees, 2004;Ziegler, 2001;Husu, 2000;Ledwith and Manfredi, 2000;Allen, 1988). In effect, academic recruitment is often reported as an informal process in which a few powerful professors select new ones through cooptation mechanisms (van den Brink et al., 2010;Husu, 2000;Fogelberg et al., 1999;Evans, 1995). Such mechanisms often conceal the phenomenon of favoritism, which has been intensively examined in only a few nations, such as Turkey (Aydogan, 2012), Australia (Martin, 2009), Spain (Zinovyeva and Bagues, 2012) and Italy (Perotti, 2008;Zagaria, 2007). In Italy, there has recently been strong interest in the study of nepotism, which is a particular form of favoritism. While Allesina (2011) and Durante et al. (2011 and2009) report the unequivocal detection of the phenomenon, Abramo et al. (2014a) are more cautious: while they do not deny the presence of nepotism, they show that the probability of a “child” of a full professor in the same university not meriting his or her position is equal to that of any “non-child”. This result is in line with the findings of many sociological studies (Dunn and Holtz-Eakin, 2000;Lentz and Laband, 1989;Simon et al., 1966), which suggest that “children” employed in universities may have in fact received a substantial amount of qualifying career-related knowledge from their parents. Whatever the case for nepotism, it does not deal with the concerns for other forms of favoritism that clearly distort faculty recruitment and career advancement, particularly in countries characterized by scarce intensity of competition among universities. Thus Zinovyeva and Bagues (2012), examining the phenomenon in the Spanish university system, concentrated on the role of connections between the candidates and the evaluators composing the examining boards that decide on academic promotions. They show that the future performance of candidates who were promoted and had a weak connection with the evaluators was better than that of their “non-connected” colleagues. Conversely, successful candidates with a strong link to the evaluators register worse performance both before and after their promotion.
Given the troubling analyses and case evidence, it appears that the efficiency of various recruitment and advancement processes in universities should be subject to expost evaluation. After a given lapse of time it is indeed possible to quantify the level of efficiency of the personnel selections through comparative evaluation of the academics’ personal achievements in the scientific research sphere. The efficiency of the recruitment and promotion processes can be evaluated by comparing the selected to the rejected candidates in terms of their research performance over a peri
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