Category: NOIBN

Academic Recruitment in Sweden is a Mess

Academic recruitment procedures in Sweden are a mess. There are at least four strong contradictory forces that impact them.

  • Meritocracy. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to find and employ the most qualified person on the job market, even if it’s just for six months. This is after all the public sector.
  • Labour laws. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to give a steady job to anyone who has worked at your uni for a total of four semesters in the past five years, regardless of their qualifications.
  • Funding. As Head of Department you cannot give anyone a steady job unless you know how to pay them long-term. Else you will have to fire someone soon, which will get you into big trouble both with the Dean and with the labour union.
  • Nepotism. As Head of Department you want to employ your buddy Bengt. He can be a recent home-grown PhD whom you want to give a break. Or he can be an old stalwart that you’d be ashamed to meet in the departmental coffee room if you didn’t help him.

This is coming to a head in a big way. Five years ago it became mandatory to advertise even the shortest academic jobs, the ones that were typically quietly given to Bengt before. At least one Swedish university largely ignored this and has now endured official censure and much bad press. Academic leaders currently don’t seem to know what’s best practice. I’ve asked around with just one of the questions involved, and nobody in charge seems to know quite what the answer is.

Remember, as Head of Department, because of funding constraints you generally cannot allow anyone to pass the labour law’s four-semesters-in-five-years threshold and get automatic steady employment. But when you advertise a short contract, chances are high that the most qualified applicant will be so near the limit that the short contract would effectively mean automatic steady employment. How do you deal with this situation, even ignoring any impact of nepotism?

So far I’ve never seen any department say plainly that “We realise that Berit has by far the strongest qualifications, but because of the labour laws we will instead employ Nisse, despite his weak CV”. I have however seen a case where the department suddenly discovered and described many flaws in Berit that made her an unattractive candidate, despite the fact that they had happily employed her on a series of short contracts up until the day when the labour law’s limit came into sight.

Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy

After almost 14 mostly dismal years on the academic job market, I find it a consolation to read an opinion piece in Times Higher Education under the headline “Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy“. In my experience this is also true for Denmark, Norway and Finland. In Norway, for instance, the referee board that evaluates job applications isn’t external to the department: it is headed by a senior employee of the department itself. With predictable results.

At Scandinavian universities, people who didn’t get their jobs in fair competition are often handing out jobs to their buddies without any fair competition. But I see encouraging signs that the PR disaster that recently befell Gothenburg University’s philosophy department may have put a scare into the whole sad business. At least temporarily. Meanwhile, I’m finishing my sixth archaeological monograph. Never having had a longer contract than 28% of one academic year.

Anticipation

14 months of no teaching gigs and several bad professional disappointments have brought me down a bit. So I checked my calendar for things to look forward to in the coming months.

Dear Reader, what are you looking forward to?

My Ancestry

Inspired by Karin Bojs’s and Peter Sjölund’s recent book Svenskarna och deras fäder, I’ve looked into my ancestry by means both genetic and genealogical. Here’s a few highlights.

  • Like most Stockholmers, I’m of mixed rural Swedish stock. My great grandpa’s generation contains 16 people born mainly in the 1880s. Only one of them was born in Stockholm. His parents were born in Värmland and Södermanland provinces. The other 15 were born all over rural southern Sweden: Bohuslän (two people), Småland (two people), Södermanland, Skåne and Närke. They went to Stockholm to find work, met and got married.
  • My Y chromosome is type R1b-M269, which is the second-most common one in Sweden and the most common one in Western Europe. My closest modern matches form dense clusters in England and New England. There’s clearly an Englishman in my recent pedigree, most likely in the 15th or 16th centuries judging from a combination of genetic statistics and genealogy. In the mid-1600s my paternal line was already in Värmland with Swedish names.
  • My mitochondrial DNA is the very common type H with my closest modern matches clustering in Finland. This means that my maternal line points east to a very great grandma in West Asia about 25,000 years ago. Of Europe’s three original major population components, this would represent the Ancient North Eurasians.
  • I found the first Rundkvist! In the 1800s a lot of rural Swedes quit using the patronymic and took family names instead. My grandpa’s grandpa Johan Jansson (1853-1925) took the name Rundkvist and moved to Stockholm from Fryksdalen in Värmland. His brother Magnus Jansson instead chose Söderqvist for some reason.
  • Update 14 March: Aard regular Lassi pointed out something enlightening. Parts of modern Sweden saw state-sponsored immigration from Finland in the decades around 1600. This is the simplest explanation for why I have a Finnish maternal line. Its earliest member known to me, Helena Helgesdotter, was born near Gothenburg in 1775.

Mechanisms Of Urban Decay

Downtown Kavalla’s mix of well-kept properties and hopeless ruins confuses me. I’ve seen similar in the Baltic States, but there it has to do with uncertainty about the ownership after the Soviet period, I’ve been told. That doesn’t apply here. So I googled real estate agencies and went visiting on my lunch break.

The first clue was simply that I couldn’t find most of the agencies at their stated addresses. One had closed down so recently that the sign was still there and the shop space hadn’t found a new tenant. The real estate market here isn’t exactly booming: demand is low. But eventually I found an open realtor’s office where a woman kindly yet sarcastically told me what I wanted to know.

Here’s why property owners don’t renovate old buildings in Kavalla, according to the realtor I spoke with.

  • You can’t get bank loans.
  • Low demand: even if you have the money, you’ll never make it back in this weak market.
  • Light repairs can be profitable, but there is a point of no return beyond which a property is too run-down for it ever to make you the money back. (I notice that a lot of the worst-kept buildings are low ones with a low potential ratio of tenants to plot acreage.)

Here’s why owners don’t tear the ruins down and redevelop.

  • Heritage protection.
  • Complicated bureaucracy.
  • Low demand.

Here’s why owners don’t just give up and sell their properties.

  • “Who would buy?” No demand for plot acreage. Might as well wait for a century or two.

Yet as I said, there are a lot of well-kept buildings here too, some of them recently renovated. One big difference according to my informant is that public property is usually much better kept than private property. I guess this is because private property has to support its own costs on site, while the government purse is nationwide. Case in point: see the picture above, with the beautiful municipal music school next to a once lavishly appointed ruin in private hands, both on busy Venizelou Street across from St. John’ schoolyard.

But my informant told me of one confusing case that seems to contradict much of the above. Kavalla is full of run-down tobacco warehouses from the early 20th century, when Western smokers still liked Turkish tobacco. One, on Filipou Street, is incongruously in great shape, very recently renovated. A sign proudly proclaims it to be the Euro Mania store, which if I understand correctly used to sell cheap stuff. But it’s closed and has started to attract spray-painted tags. I was told that the Euro Mania store did healthy business until a buyer recently offered the owner €9 million for it and perhaps made a small down payment. The condition was that the owner immediately close down his retail business and evacuate the premises. This seems to have been a handshake deal. But by the time the Euro Mania store had been completely cleaned out, the buyer withdrew his offer. And there it sits, one of Kavalla’s best-kept older private properties, making no money at all.

Odd Gender Pattern At Maths Olympiad

Cousin E pointed out something odd about the International Mathematical Olympiad. It’s an annual competition for high school students. And girls do super poorly in it. We ran some stats on the data for 2015 and 2016, and found that a national team with more than one female member gets less than half the median points per capita of an all-male team. With one female member, it’s 59-78%.

The question I want to address is not whether women are in empirical fact worse at maths than men. Nor do I, if this is the case, want to discuss whether it’s because of nature or nurture. I want to understand how the IMO works. Look at this.

1. Every country finds its six best maths students to make a team. In some countries, some of the best students are girls and beat out large numbers of boys to get on the team.
2. When these teams compete against each other internationally, suddenly teams with a female member do way worse than all-male teams.
3. Why are these girls super strong on the national level, but super weak on the international level? Is it because they are on male-dominated teams instead of working solo?

Back In The Saddle Again

rodeoI’ve been away from my various desks for almost two months while excavating and then enjoying some time off. Here’s what’s on my plate right now. Saddle. I mean my saddle, in which I’m back.

  • Landscape archaeology conference, three days in Uppsala. I’m giving a paper on my Bronze Age project.
  • European Association of Archaeologists, Annual Meeting, five days in Vilnius. I’m chairing a session on castle excavations and giving a paper on our fieldwork methods during the past three seasons.
  • Apply for grants. I’ve got 35 kilos of animal bones that need osteological attention. And I only have my subsistence covered through March.
  • Apply for advertised uni jobs in two neighbouring countries.
  • Finalise proof corrections for The Mats P. Malmer Greatest Hits Collection, published by the Royal Academy of Letters, and send the book off to the printers.
  • Co-write coin paper. I’m going to be second author on a paper about the coins from Skällvik Castle, headed by a dear friend from grad school.
  • Post-excavation work. The finds need to be catalogued and the reports written.
  • After all this is done, I can sit down in earnest to write a book on Östergötland’s Medieval castles at 75% of full time.

What Motivates People To Start Boring Businesses?

Why?
Why?

I wonder what motivates people to start companies that make or provide boring stuff. What causes a person to devote decades of their life to an organisation that manufactures soap or installs archive shelving? It doesn’t surprise me that people take boring jobs: everybody needs a job and most jobs are boring. But what makes a person suddenly think “What I really want to do with my life is run a squeegee company”?

Maybe what they really think is “I want to make more money and avoid taking orders, and the only business I really know anything about is the squeegee business. I am resigned to the fact that I must spend my life doing boring things. Instead of just working at a factory that makes squeegees, I’m going to start a factory of my own. It’ll be boring and pointless. But I will make more money, and I will have no boss.”

My incomprehension is probably typical of Swedish middle-class culture. I don’t particularly need money, because I despise conspicuous consumption and most of my family’s needs beyond housing and subsistence are covered by the public sector. My kids don’t have trust funds, for instance. Uni tuition is free and state study loans are favourable. My main career priorities are fun, intellectual satisfaction and academic recognition, neither of which a chain of stationery stores would be likely to provide.

Satnavs and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

One of the best pieces of economic advice I know is ”Don’t throw good money after bad”. Or in other words, when you consider whether you should continue to invest in a project, don’t let the sum you’ve already invested figure into your decision. To do so is known as the ”sunk cost fallacy”, and leads to ”escalation of commitment”. A good way to avoid this is to decide beforehand what your exit conditions will be, and then stick to them. A bit like saying “I’m going to play the slot machines until six o’clock or until I’ve lost $50, whatever comes first”.

Google Maps offers a beautiful real-life illustration of this. It’s particularly instructive because unlike the case with your financial investments, this software can tell you with a high degree of accuracy what the outcome will be if you escalate your commitment – and if you don’t.

I’ve never had a dedicated satnav in my car. My route planning has always been “look at the map, find the shortest path, see if any major highways are near that shortest path”. But recently I’ve begun using Google Maps. I tell it the endpoints of my trip and the means of transportation I’m using. It computes a couple of itineraries and tells me how long each is likely to take. “Path A is the fastest and path B will take 17 minutes longer”. I then start driving along path A. I invest in it.

Now, I don’t check Google Maps continuously. My smartphone is not in a dashboard holder and I have no lighter cable for powering it. I check the status of my investment maybe once every two hours of driving, or when I get the feeling I may have taken a wrong turn. And sometimes in unfamiliar territory I find that I have indeed veered off path A. Should I retread my tracks and get back on that path? I ask Google Maps again.

The software has no memory of recommending path A to me. It has no sense of commitment whatsoever. It just knows where I am now and where I want to go. So in many cases it tells me “Path C is the fastest. You could take the later stages of Paths A or B instead, but that would take 10 and 13 minutes longer, respectively.” Escalated investment in my original project would clearly just be stupid. I chose path A at the outset because I trusted Google Maps, so why shouldn’t I trust it now that I’ve left that path? On the strength of new information, I invest in path C instead.