The structure of the Chinese academic labor market, 1997--2004

Universalism is critical to the development of science because it promotes the objectivity of knowledge. Particularism, on the other hand, evaluates scientists' contributions based on functionally irrelevant characteristics, including personal attributes and academic origins. Previous studies found a persistent significant correlation between prestige of Ph.D. granting department and prestige of hiring department. These findings raise a lot of concerns on the science being particularistic. This study aims at the Ph.D.s' status attainment in the Chinese academic labor market and examines to what extent that the Chinese scientific community is universalistic. Gender of the scientists is one of the key particularistic criteria used to assess Ph.D.s as job candidates. How gender status of Ph.D.s impacts the outcomes of status attainment in the Chinese academic labor market is analyzed particularly in this study. Moreover, the Chinese higher education has been undergoing fundamental reform since 1978. The marketization orientation triggered the competitive mechanism among the departments. More importantly, mutual selection replaced the national job assignment system, which potentially gave the departments more room for sponsorship and particularism. This study further examines how the reform impacts status attainments of Ph.D.s in the Chinese academic labor market. In the meantime, Ph.D.s' status attainment is also influenced by the structural characteristics of the academic labor market. This study studies the Chinese labor market from the perspective of inter-organizational relations and examines how the distinctive structural attributes influence Ph.D.s' status attainment in science.;The sample of this study is comprised by all the faculty members who work at doctorate degree granting departments in sociology, physics and chemistry, and obtained their Ph.D. in China between 1997 and 2004. The results show that prestige of hiring departments in China is influenced by a set of particularistic criteria. The higher education reform and marketization orientation did not lead the academic labor market to be more universalistic. With regard to the entire structure, the exchange structure of the Chinese academic labor market is very hierarchical and has become more hierarchical over time. Because the effect of prestige principle tends to be larger in a hierarchical structure, this result shows the rigid stratification of the Chinese academic labor market.