Careers of the Professoriate

This book examines career patterns of the professoriate. Professors may appear as specialised individualists in their fields, and yet they follow pathways which are anything but unique. Drawing from a unique data set, the authors analyse the trajectories of the almost 2000 linguists and sociologists who hold full professorships in Germany, France and the UK in 2015. With a background in social theory, they reveal models, structures and rules that organise the professional lives and biographies of the most senior academics. This book presents the results of a systematic empirical study, which will be of interest to specialists in higher education studies as well as to linguists and sociologists, and to all academics more generally.