Accessing academic citizenship: excellence or micropolitical practices?

This chapter is concerned with access to academic citizenship (particularly full or limited academic citizenship, see Chapter 1) in higher educational research institutions (HERIs). Women are under-represented in these positions (EU 2019). Excellence is frequently the rationale for decisions about such access: the implication being that its assessment is a universal, gender neutral process. Thus, it is assumed that those involved in such assessments are detached automatons, who make decisions solely based on what purport to be universalistic criteria; assumptions that have been challenged theoretically and empirically (Nielsen 2016; van Den Brink and Benschop 2012; O’Connor and O’ Hagan 2016).