İşletme Enstitüsü Dış Araştırma Semineri / Gamze Arman, PhD

Speaker: Gamze Arman  - University of the West of England

Title: Impact of Career Shock Events on the Sustainability of Academic Careers: The Case of Boğaziçi University

Abstract: Career sustainability in academia can be disrupted by both individual and systemic factors, particularly during politically driven interventions that challenge professional and institutional autonomy. In this study, we focused on a unique career shock event (Akkermans, Seibert, & Mol, 2018) at Boğaziçi University, which began in early 2021 with the appointment of a new rector by the country’s president, bypassing established academic selection procedures.

We conducted 21 in-depth, one-on-one semi-structured interviews with active faculty members, as well as those who had recently resigned or been (forcefully) retired from the university, to capture a wide range of perspectives across different career trajectories and institutional positions. The interviews centred on personal experiences, perceptions and narratives, aiming to understand the impact of political interference on perceptions of career sustainability, both throughout respondents’ careers and in relation to this specific career shock event.

The results of our reflexive theoretical thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Braun et al., 2023) revealed that respondents’ experiences can be interpreted through the process model of sustainable careers (De Vos, Van der Heijden, & Akkermans, 2020) and the sustainable career ecosystem model (Donald, Van der Heijden, & Baruch, 2024), given the influence of multiple actors on individual academic careers. Although participants reported navigating various phases of the career shock event, the experience had a profoundly negative impact on all indicators of career sustainability, leading to reduced job satisfaction, diminished psychological well-being and declines in research productivity.

This study is one of the first to systematically examine how a specific, politically driven career shock shapes faculty members’ career sustainability. By incorporating key contextual dimensions such as institutional change, the national political climate, and longitudinal impact, it provides a nuanced understanding of career sustainability in constrained academic environments. The implications for the global higher education context will be also discussed. 

Location: Meeting Room 345, AB2