Since the 1980s scholars have been increasingly confronted with expectations to orient themselves toward societal and economic priorities. This normative demand for societal responsiveness is inscribed in discourses aimed at increasing the usefulness, competitiveness, and control of academia. New performance criteria, funding conditions, and…

While it has been stressed repeatedly that academics nowadays have come to face extensive pressure, the extent and distribution of pressure to publish and to secure third-party funding has not been systematically investigated on a large scale. Based on the Zurich Survey of Academics, a representative large-scale web survey among academics working…

Using 20years of employment and job mobility data from a representative German sample (N = 1259), we employ optimal matching analysis (OMA) to identify six career patterns which deviate from the traditional career path of long-term, full-time employment in one organization. Then, in further analyses, we examine which socio-demographic predictors…

Longitudinal studies of entrepreneurial career development are rare, and current knowledge of self-employment patterns and their relationships with individual difference characteristics is limited. In this study, the authors analyzed employment data from a subsample of 514 participants from the German Socio-Economic Panel study (1984-2008).…

Current higher education is characterized by a proliferation of distance education programs and by an increasing inclusion of nontraditional students. In this study we investigated whether and to what extent nontraditional students are particularly at risk for attrition (vs. graduating) from distance education programs. We conducted a secondary…

Globalized labor markets confront many adults, both employed and unemployed, with demands arising from career uncertainty that have the potential to jeopardize their occupational planning. This article investigated how individuals in different regions of Germany, which are characterized by different economic opportunities, negotiate such demands…

This study examined teachers' uptake of formal and informal learning opportunities across the career cycle. Analyses were based on data from 1939 German secondary teachers in 198 schools. Results showed that formal learning opportunities (in-service training) were used most frequently by mid-career teachers, whereas informal learning opportunities…

In Germany, students are streamed at age ten into an academic or nonacademic track. We demonstrate that the randomly allocated disadvantage of being born just before as opposed to just after the cutoff date for school entry leads to substantially different schooling experiences. Relatively young students are initially only two-thirds as likely to…

This paper presents the first results of a project initiated in 2004 by the OECD in collaboration with Eurostat and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and aimed at developing a regular and internationally comparable production system of indicators on the careers and mobility of doctorate holders. A first data collection was launched in September…