Social and Institutional Stratification in Access to the Professoriate

Friday, 11 July 2025: 09:00-10:45
Location: SJES007 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
RC28 Social Stratification (host committee)

Language: English

Recent studies suggest that the professoriate has remained disproportionately accessible to the socioeconomically privileged, e.g. faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD (Morgan et al., 2022) and most US professors receive their training at a small number of elite universities (Nowogrodzki, 2023). This concentration of privilege perpetuates limited socioeconomic and racial diversity within the profession which likely shapes their scholarship and reproduction. This session seeks papers that address the mechanisms of access to the professoriate, with a particular focus on tenure-track positions at elite institutions. Of special interest are:

  1. The role of social and/or institutional stratification in shaping access to the professoriate.
  2. The ways in which country or disciplinary differences influence access to faculty positions.

Both quantitative and qualitative papers are welcome.

Format: Regular session

Session Organizer:
Adél PÁSZTOR, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Oral Presentations
Privileged Pathways: The Academic Elite in Europe
Adél PÁSZTOR, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Circulation or Reproduction: Sociologists' Recruitment in Chinese Elite Universities 1982 to 2022
Xiaoguang FAN, Zhejiang University, China; Aurelien BOUCHER, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), China; Chao LING, Central University of Finance and Economics, China
Academics of Colour Accessing the Professoriate in Elite Universities in the UK and USA
Kalwant BHOPAL, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; Martin MYERS, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom