Understanding Faculty Research Productivity in Striving Research Universities
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Kreth, Quintin Charles
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Abstract
Over the last forty years, many institutions in the U.S. higher education ecosystem have changed their institutional strategy and/or identity to place a greater emphasis on research and graduate education. This widespread phenomenon, termed “striving” (O’Meara, 2007), has occurred for many reasons, most notably via strategic efforts by academic leaders to enhance institutional prestige and ensure long-term stability and prosperity. However, these efforts appear to have heterogeneous effects on tenure-track faculty, the traditional drivers of academic research.
This study examines faculty at striving research universities to improve our understanding of the patterns of workload and academic research productivity that emerge in research environments outside the academic elite, which are rarely examined in the research productivity literature. Critically, support and reward systems for research are weaker and less standardized at striving research universities than at established R1 universities. This results in a complex system of institutional policies that both hinder and support faculty research productivity at striving research universities – one with disparate effects on faculty. To examine these complex issues, this dissertation asks:
1. How do the publication profiles of striving research universities change during the striving process?
2. How do institutional expectations and support for faculty research productivity change at striving research universities, and to what extent does this vary for new hires and current faculty?
3. To what extent do the preexisting faculty of striving research universities contribute to research productivity gains during the striving process?
4. In striving research universities, what factors influence the amount of time spent on research by tenure-track faculty?
5. What factors influence the productivity and total research production of striving research university faculty?
Because individual faculty are an embedded unit of analysis within universities, this dissertation addresses these questions using a multi-method design. It combines a bibliometric analysis of institutional publication profiles in a comprehensive database, a qualitative analysis using a set of original interviews with research leaders at striving research universities, and a quantitative analysis based on a national survey tenure-track faculty.
This dissertation finds that faculty time allocation to research has the dominant effect on research production. Research productivity is amplified by a combination of researcher skill and social capital. Institutional policies supportive of research appear to have a weaker-than-expected influence on research production and productivity. Further, the transformation of institutional research profiles associated with striving appears to be a continuous process, with no sudden change around the time of their Carnegie Classification increase. Striving research universities experienced no greater turnover in their affiliate authors than peer institutions. The study also finds that the leaders of striving research universities use the hiring of new faculty as the primary human resource strategy to drive an institutional shift towards research. The transformation of evaluation and rewards systems is also discussed. Theoretical implications, policy implications, and opportunities for future research are presented.
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2025-01-24
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