Faculty hiring networks-who hires whose graduates as faculty-exhibit steep hierarchies, which can reinforce both social and epistemic inequalities in academia. Understanding the mechanisms driving these patterns would inform efforts to diversify the academy and shed new light on the role of hiring in shaping which scientific discoveries are made. Here, we investigate the degree to which structural mechanisms can explain hierarchy and other network characteristics observed in empirical faculty hiring networks. We study a family of adaptive rewiring network models, which reinforce institutional prestige within the hierarchy in five distinct ways. Each mechanism determines the probability that a new hire comes from a particular institution according to that institution's prestige score, which is inferred from the hiring network's existing structure. We find that structural inequalities and centrality patterns in real hiring networks are best reproduced by a mechanism of global placement power, in which a new hire is drawn from a particular institution in proportion to the number of previously drawn hires anywhere. On the other hand, network measures of biased visibility are better recapitulated by a mechanism of local placement power, in which a new hire is drawn from a particular institution in proportion to the number of its previous hires already present at the hiring institution. These contrasting results suggest that the underlying structural mechanism reinforcing hierarchies in faculty hiring networks is a mixture of global and local preference for institutional prestige. Under these dynamics, we show that each institution's position in the hierarchy is remarkably stable, due to a dynamic competition that overwhelmingly favors more prestigious institutions.
翻译:我们调查结构机制在多大程度上可以解释在经验教师雇用网络中观察到的等级和其他网络特点;我们研究一个适应性再联线网络模式的大家庭,这种网络模式以五种不同的方式加强等级制度内的机构威望。每个机制都确定新雇用的可能性,根据机构威望分从某个机构获得新雇用,这种评分来自该机构,这种评分来自招聘网络的现有结构。我们发现,真正的招聘网络的结构不平等和中心模式最好由全球安置权力机制来复制,在这种机制中,从某个机构获得新的聘用,与以前从经验教师招聘网络中招聘的人数成正比。另一方面,偏差的网络可见度措施通过一种地方安置权力机制得到更好的重新定位,在这种机制中,从一个特定机构获得新雇用的可能性与以前雇用网络的优等数成比例,这从机构威望中推断出。我们发现,真正的招聘网络的结构不平等和中心模式最好由全球职位定位机制来复制,而这种结构的稳定性则显示,这种结构的稳定性机制是稳定的。