Author
Listed:
- Hyosun Kim
(Department of Education, Sangmyung University, Seoul 03016, Korea)
- Sooyong Lee
(The Institute for Educational Research, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Korea)
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the adaptation process of female Ph.D. holders working in universities who shifted from being irregular employees to regular employees. The study adopted a qualitative approach using in-depth interviews to investigate participants’ experiences and discover any inconsistencies, as well as how they are alleviated. The basic findings of the study indicate that the adaptation process is more feasible when the gap between the personal aspect of job adaptation and the organizational environment and satisfaction with it decreases. The participants in the study joined the labour union to convert to regular jobs. However, after transitioning to full-time positions, the participants did not realize the structural aspect of the contracts they had signed. Although they expected to make their unfair situation more fair through the transition of their job positions, they still faced structural discrimination. As the participants were women with doctoral degrees, their professionalism was considered a cardinal value, and their job satisfaction varied according to the degree of matching between their work and their expertise. Moreover, during the evaluation period, they began to establish themselves as legitimate members of their teams through the employee evaluation procedure of full-time employees, which is conducted mutually rather than unilaterally. Through its in-depth interviews with transitioning university staff, this study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how female faculty adjust to changes in their life and position in the organization following a change in their status. These findings prove that higher education institutions need focus on career development for female students as well as their faculty and staff members. Such a focus also requires more active actions by university and college members.
Suggested Citation
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:10:p:5347-:d:552069. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.