Analyzing Constellations of Multiple Competition in Science and Higher Education

Abstract Increasing competition in science and higher education has sparked contentious debate and scholarly attention in recent years. Despite their significant merits, prevailing accounts of competition fall short of capturing the competitive dynamics in science and higher education: Most of the time, actors in this sector are involved in not just one but several competitions. Universities as organizations, researchers as individual actors, and also state actors are simultaneously embedded in different, nested, and interdependent competitions, which we refer to as multiple competition. Individual and collective actors engage in heterogeneous—albeit interrelated—forms of competition for scarce symbolic and material goods like attention, reputation, ranking positions, research grants, high-quality publications, personnel, and employment. Furthermore, the multiplicity of competitions that individual academics, universities, and state agencies face might reinforce each other. Using theoretical resources from sociology and economics, we propose a new conceptual framework for analyzing constellations of multiple competition in science and higher education. We demonstrate the added value of this conceptualization for empirical studies by drawing on examples from different academic systems.