Managing seniority in academia : three perspectives

Abstract

Managing seniority is a rising but still an understudied theme in universities' Human Resource Management (HRM). In many European universities, the academic staff is ageing. In this chapter, we discuss the nature of seniority and consider it from three different perspectives that are interrelated in academic careers: the age, level of competence and hierarchy. At the individual level, these dimensions are overlapped in concrete and thus they are challenging to define and examine. All three dimensions are significant with respect to organizational HRM in universities, and they are connected with many ways to the traditions and practices of the academic work and careers in academia in general.