Academic Immobility and Inbreeding in Russian Universities

The academic productivity of universities depends on academic staff as well as on management structures at these institutions that are able and qualified to provide conditions for productive work, reasonable decision-making, and proper career incentives. However, academic norms should not be underestimated. In a university, as a professional organization, there are both administrative and academic control systems, and the latter is based on academic norms. One of the most important norms is concerned with talent recruitment and its priorities, policies, and practices. A university’s decision to hire or not to hire their own graduates is one of the key decisions: it defines the characteristics and quality of people recruited, as well as how the management of academic teams is structured. For Russian universities, a rather high level of hiring from within (inbreeding) is traditional, and the reasons for it are cultural, infrastructural, and financial. In this chapter, we examine the causes of inbreeding and its consequences in the context of productivity, social norms, and emerging organizational structures. We use data from a set of detailed interviews with top management (vice-rectors and deans) of regional Russian universities collected in 2012. Interviews were focused on employment policies and the causes and consequences of inbreeding.