Boundary-work and social closure in academic recruitment: Insights from the transdisciplinary subject area Swedish as a Second Language

This article explores practices of evaluation in academic recruitment in Swedish as a Second Language (SSL), an expanding and transdisciplinary subject area. As is common elsewhere, Swedish academia relies on a tradition of external expert review intended to ensure a meritocratic process. Here, we present an analysis of 109 written expert reports concerning recruitment to 57 positions in SSL during 2000–20. Because SSL lacks institutional autonomy, and is spread across several sub-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the material encompasses experts with diverse academic backgrounds. The SSL reports are broadly characterized by qualitative assessment. In contrast to other fields, the SSL experts seldom use quantitative proxy measures. Instead, they mainly rely on received conceptions of the boundaries of SSL as a means of justifying their inclusion and exclusion of candidates. This dominant regularity consists of attempts to define and delimit SSL and its core research areas, to locate the candidates in a core-to-periphery scheme with respect to these boundaries, and to rank them accordingly. This mechanism of social closure serves to restrict access to SSL to candidates with qualifications that conform to the experts’ own conceptions of SSL. As we show, the experts’ internally ambiguous conceptions of SSL tend to be constructed in relation to their own scientific habitus and investments. Beyond evaluating applicants’ possession of scientific capital, their distinctive style of reasoning around research qualifications and skills thus involves power-laden boundary-work, which leaves ample room for individual, yet habitus-specific arbitrariness.