ABSTRACT
Hiring procedures and career management modes are so different in the three countries I studied that it is preferable to specify country by country the institutional framework in which hiring decisions are reached.1 This will allow for identifying all compulsory paths and phases, as well as the requirements for following them and getting from one to the next. The fact that such tracks and hurdles exist in all the countries studied refl ects the professionalization that the academic profession has undergone in the last decades.2 To the question raised by Karl-Ulrich Mayer in a paper presented in 2000, “Wissenschaft als Beruf oder Karriere?” [Academia: profession or career?], it seems increasingly reasonable to answer “Karriere,” given how much more explicit, formalized, and regulated the basic requirements, procedures, and hurdles have become.3 One hardly becomes an academic by chance, and every country has set up its own tracks and hurdles, its own procedures and decision-making levels.
