Conference Agenda

Early career researchers (ECRs) play a crucial role in the renewal and long-term sustainability of academic systems, yet their voices are frequently marginalised in university decision-making processes related to promotion, career development, and research conditions. Despite increasing policy attention to ECRs across Europe, substantial disparities remain in the extent to which they are able to articulate their concerns and influence institutional agendas (Leišytė et al. 2025). Existing research indicates that ECRs often lack the power, legitimacy, and perceived urgency required to be recognised as influential stakeholders in both formal and informal governance structures.

This paper addresses the following research question: What mechanisms enable early career researchers (ECRs) to voice their concerns, both formally and informally, at universities across different European countries? Building on recent comparative studies (Leisyte et al., 2025), the study aims to deepen understanding of the institutional, social, and individual mechanisms that empower ECRs within university contexts. In particular, it focuses on country cases that already exhibit relatively strong formal representation of ECRs, in order to explore how formal structures interact with informal practices and individual resources to enable—or constrain—voice.

The study adopts a qualitative, comparative research design, drawing on semi-structured interviews with outstanding ECRs and policy or research management experts. Interviewees are selected through theoretical sampling to ensure diversity in gender, and discipline. The empirical focus is on two European country cases—Lithuania and the Netherlands—chosen due to their established formal mechanisms for ECR representation and documented levels of ECR involvement in university governance. The sample comprises 16 interviews with outstanding ECRs and 4 expert interviews. ECRs are defined as researchers who have obtained their PhD within the last 12 years, in line with the eligibility criteria of the Young Academy of Europe, and who demonstrate nationally and/or internationally recognised excellence, such as prestigious research awards, competitive grants, leadership roles, or membership in scientific organisations (e.g. Young Academies). Disciplinary diversity is ensured by including participants from both “hard” sciences (e.g. STEM fields) and “soft” sciences (e.g. social sciences and humanities).

The theoretical framework combines Bourdieu’s concept of capital—social, cultural, symbolic, and linguistic—with intersectionality theory (Mitchell et al., 2019) to examine how multiple, intersecting identity positions shape ECRs’ ability to express concerns and be heard. This approach enables an analysis of how access to different forms of capital interacts with gender, socio-ethnic background, disciplinary norms, and language proficiency to enable or constrain voice in academic settings. Data are analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), allowing for the identification of recurring patterns related to voice and representation.

By focusing on both formal and informal mechanisms of voice, this study contributes to the literature on academic governance, ECR careers, and equity in higher education. It provides nuanced insights into how institutional arrangements, cultural norms, and individual resources jointly shape the capacity of ECRs to influence decision-making. The findings are expected to inform university leaders, policymakers, and academic organisations seeking to strengthen inclusive governance structures and support the career development of early career researchers across Europe.

1. Background and Purpose

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the process by which the norms shaping the behavioral guidelines of faculty and staff within a university organization are eroded by norms introduced from outside the organization. While collegiality is a norm characterizing decision-making and member interactions within faculty organizations, this study examines the conditions under which this norm is maintained—requiring intentional effort—or is eroded/preserved through conflict with other norms.
Conventionally, collegial norms in university organizations have been discussed primarily in the context of decision-making. That is, the view that faculty organizations, as groups of professionals, should be decentralized and operated through consensus-based decision-making. This has often been linked to the argument that faculty councils possess excessive authority and is viewed as problematic for impeding "university-wide consensus formation under the leadership of the President".
However, such arguments oversimplify collegiality. Collegiality in university organizations is a concept captured through multiple dimensions. Therefore, it is not something that is simply replaced or extinguished by changes in decision-making processes. Indeed, several prior studies have repeatedly pointed out that concentrating authority in the President does not necessarily lead to university reform or improvements in educational quality (e.g., Kaplan 2004). For instance, it has been noted that centralization of authority is unlikely to yield results unless accompanied by approaches that address other internal organizational factors, such as organizational structure, routines, and relationships among members (Kezar 2004).
The co-existence of different norms within an organization increases conflict for members in advancing their work. However, whether this hinders or facilitates practice depends on the complexity of the initiative, the cognition and capabilities of the members, and the nature of the institutional arrangements (Besharov & Smith 2014). Yet, the relationship between such members’ cognition/practice and the conflict among internal organizational norms has not been clarified in prior research. This study examines the current state of collegial norms among university faculty and how they are altered by tasks related to university reform, with the aim of clarifying the conditions under which these changes occur.

2. Research Design

This study examines two cases undertaken at a medium-sized private university with multiple faculties. The first is a curriculum reform case (Case 1) involving the establishment of a new service-learning course, compulsory for all first-year students, within a single faculty at the university. The second case concerns the preparation of a self-study report for Accreditation (Case 2), undertaken within the same faculty. Both cases were driven by project teams consisting of multiple faculty and administrative staff members from the relevant faculty.
As a preliminary survey, a qualitative study was conducted in collaboration with faculty and staff members who participated in the projects to elicit their experiences of practical participation. Qualitative data were obtained from each participant through semi-structured interviews.

3. Results and Discussion

The following three points were confirmed as the main results of this survey.
First, in both cases, participating faculty and staff indicated a general appreciation of collegial norms but were unable to articulate specific advantages of decision-making processes, community formation, or behavioral norms. Passive interpretations, such as mutual non-interference or a "peace-at-any-price" mentality (avoiding conflict), were also observed.
Second, participants in Case 1 reported feeling the state of "tasks being coordinated and resolved while respecting others' opinions and freely expressing one's own" more strongly than in Case 2. In Case 1, compared with Case 2, the central figure of the initiative was not a titleholder (e.g., an administrator) but rather a person with extensive knowledge and experience in the task. Furthermore, mutual respect and the free expression of opinion were supported by interactions outside the specific task, which participants invested significant labor in maintaining and developing.

4. Conclusion

This study found that collegiality is ambiguously understood among university faculty and staff, with dominant norms of conformity from outside the university organization being interpreted as part of collegiality. Furthermore, despite requiring significant labor to maintain, collegiality is not afforded sufficient effort and is easily undermined by bureaucratic norms or market-oriented norms. While many international studies often do not account for interactions with norms and cultures outside the organization, this study demonstrates that there is room for theoretical modification when applied to other cultural spheres.

Digital environments have become increasingly embedded in academic work. In addition to core teaching and research responsibilities, academics use digital spaces to engage internationally in professional activities (Lupton et al., 2017). Across several digital platforms, this engagement encompasses a broad range of practices, including international research dissemination; networking and collaboration; following and interacting with scholars, organizations, and wider audiences for visibility or knowledge acquisition; and forms of digital scholarly activism. Despite its growing importance, research on academics’ external digital engagement remains fragmented, often limited to social media use or institutional policy perspectives (Kwestel & Milano, 2021; Veletsianos et al., 2019), underscoring the need for further research.

This need is especially critical for non-Western and non-native-English-speaking countries, where academics often face significant structural, financial, and linguistic challenges. In such contexts, while digital engagement may offer opportunities for international recognition and connection (Çalıkoğlu et al., 2025), it might also generate new forms of pressure and inequalities due to limited technological infrastructure, insufficient institutional guidance, uneven access to resources, and global systemic barriers (Ayoo, 2009; Ragnedda & Muschert, 2017; Wimpenny et al., 2022). Hence, understanding academics’ digital international engagement in such contexts requires particular attention to the interplay among agentic, structural, and systemic conditions.

Building on our broader project on academics’ external digital engagement in Kazakhstan and Turkey, the current study focuses on academics’ external digital international engagement in non-Western, non-native-English-speaking contexts. It explores how academics in these settings engage with digital spaces as part of their internationalization efforts and how these practices are shaped by individual orientations and agency, institutional environments, national higher education strategies, and global academic hierarchies.

Theoretically, the study is guided by an integration of (a) digital divides (Ragnedda & Muschert, 2017; Selwyn, 2004; 2010), conceptualized as multi-level and stratified inequalities and differences in access, use and outcomes within digital environments, (b) faculty professional agency (Eteläpelto et al., 2013), understood as a contextually constructed and achieved capacity to act, shaped by temporal, socio-cultural and individual conditions and resources, and (c) critical internationalization studies (Stein, 2021; Stein & de Oliveira Andreotti, 2016), which provide a lens to problematize whether and how digital environments mitigate, reproduce or intensify existing global hierarchies and inequalities in internationalization.

Methodologically, the study follows an interpretive qualitative design, using semi-structured interviews with approximately 50 academics from different institutions in Kazakhstan and Turkey. A purposive sampling approach is used to explore diverse participant experiences, ensuring variety across career stages, disciplines, and institution types. Interviews are conducted online in Kazakh, Russian, and Turkish, transcribed verbatim and translated into English, and analyzed through an inductive thematic analysis approach, using first- and second-cycle coding strategies (Saldana, 2016). Rigor and trustworthiness are strengthened through collaborative analysis within the research team, drawing on the team’s linguistic, contextual, and topical expertise across the two selected countries.

The study is expected to provide a conceptually integrated account of academics’ external digital engagement as a form of internationalization that simultaneously expands opportunities for international collaboration and visibility while also risking the reproduction of existing global inequalities. Rather than treating “digital external engagement” as a neutral professional skill, the study positions it as a multidimensional practice shaped by faculty agency, linguistic and platform norms, institutional expectations, and asymmetrical patterns of international collaboration, networking, and recognition. Recommendations are made for policy and practice to promote more equitable and sustainable conditions for academics’ external digital international engagement.