The Economic History Profession in UK Higher Education

The Economic History Profession in UK Higher Education

Helen Julia Paul[1]

ABSTRACT[2]

The Economic History profession faces the same challenges as the rest of UK academe, especially from the Research Assessment Exercises. Interdisciplinary researchers are perceived to be at a disadvantage due to the RAE panel system. There is evidence that strategic hiring behaviour is occurring to boost RAE grades. Established staff are able to use this to their advantage, but it is likely to be to the detriment of later cohorts. This exacerbates an existing gender gap and may inhibit the future development of the profession.

I

There has been concern about the state of Economic History as a subject area. Its two parent disciplines have been moving further apart as Economics becomes more mathematical. In addition, the Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) have been criticised for creating distortions within the UKacademic community and for discouraging interdisciplinary work. A census of Economic Historians in UK Higher Education was funded by the Economic History Society (EHS). It shows that the demographic profile of the profession is different from its parent disciplines. Economic Historians tend to be concentrated at higher ranks. This may indicate that there will be difficulties in replacing these researchers. In addition, evidence is presented here thatthe RAEs do have distortionary effects on career development. Established researchers are able to demand a premium.Early career staff appear to pay a penalty. Gender effects are also significant. This may be partially due to a cohort effect, as the proportion of women entering academia was lower in the past.There is some good news regarding the importance of Economic History as a research interest, and the role of the EHS in promoting academic careers.

The RAE requires institutions to submit evidence of research outputs to subject panels.[3]A grade is given to each department. The last RAE in 2001 used a system from 1 (low quality) to 5* (high quality).Government funding is allocated according to grade. The system was devised to increase the amount of good quality research undertaken in the UK and to allow fair comparison across institutions. UK HE institutions were grouped into university and polytechnics, which traditionally offered more vocational skills. Polytechnics were all renamed as universities in 1992. The RAE system is supposed to ensure that good departments are recognised, even if their home institution does not have a traditional academic pedigree.

Interdisciplinary work does not easily fit into the panel system. Economic History could feasibly be related to at least five panels.[4]The RAE2001 Economics and Econometrics panel was to cover ‘all aspects of economics and econometrics, whether theoretical or applied (including, where appropriate, economic history).’[5] The History panel was to cover ‘all aspects of the study of the past except those specifically falling within the remit of other panels including, for example: Political, Economic, Business and Social History …’[6]Business History was put with Management under Panel 43. The RAE regulations require that panel members liaise with other panels or with experts to deal with interdisciplinary research. There have been concerns that these steps are not sufficient to protect this type of research and consequently safeguard academic careers.

There is little concrete information about how a panel will judge interdisciplinary work or output other than journal articles. Risk aversion would mean choosing mainstream work over interdisciplinary studies. This effect might be stronger in departments which are marginal in RAE terms.Missing out on a 5 or 5* grade might be similar to the silver medallist comparing himself to the gold medallist rather than to the rest of the pack. (Medvecet al found that silver medallists were less satisfied than bronze medallists, despite outperforming them.[7]) Therefore, the departments which got 5 instead of 5*, or 4 instead of 5, might be more cutthroat regarding the RAE than those with a 3 or a 5*. This could mean less support for early career staff engaged in Economic History. It may explain why there are few Economic Historians at the lower ranks, relative to the total number of Economic Historians.

An alternative hypothesis is that Economic History itself is in decline. It has been claimed that Cliometrics is outdated and furthermore that this is true of Economic History as a whole. It is difficult to test this hypothesis separately from the effects of the RAEs. Economic Historians are not only engaged in interdisciplinary work, but they are also based in different faculties. Many research articles and policy documents separate humanities and arts from social science and business. In the past, it has not been clear whether careers in Economic History follow the trends of particular parent departments or form a pattern of their own. This article aims to investigate some of the key issues and to form the basis for further research from future censuses. It provides some evidence that senior staff continue to reap the benefits of the RAE system, even if they work in Economic History. They have overcome any negative effects of working in a field which is allegedly in decline or hard to evaluate in RAE terms. There is some evidence that the opposite is true at lower ranks. Therefore, the RAE exacerbates cohort, and hence gender, effects for researchers in Economic History.

II

A summary of past research

There have been previous censuses of Economic Historians, for example, Farnie’s Bio-Bibliography of Economic and Social History.[8]Farnie’s census includes individuals based outside the UK, emeritus staff and the names of some deceased researchers with their dates of death. The aim was to create a comprehensive list of published authors so that their works can be accessed. The focus of the EHS census was somewhat different. It looked for those who were based in the UK and were researching into Economic History, whether or not they had succeeded in publishing their work as yet. This means that early career researchers or those who have some obstacles to completing research are also included. Delays in publication may come from job insecurity, career breaks and teaching and administrative duties. The data from the EHS census can be used to investigate whether there are problems within the Economic History community. One of the major issues in the UK system is the effect of the RAE.

The RAEs have improved incentives to publish research. However, Elton noted that ‘all performance indicators distort performance’. He cited the impact of the first RAE’s when the number of refereed journal articles was used as a main indicator of quality. A large number of new journals were created. Researchers increased their number of publications by rehashing their work or splitting it into smaller chunks. It may also have encouraged short-termism as people rushed to publish articles. Elton has argued that the unintended consequences of the earlier RAEs were often longer-term and will be harder to fix when they do appear.[9]

Other issues have been widely discussed in the academic press. Notably, there has been concern that early career staff and those who had taken career breaks were discriminated against. Some attempts have been made to correct these distortions. There is stilllikely to be a strong cohort effect. The academic who gained a particular post might not be the best candidate, but simply be less risky as their work is already in print or focused on particular journals. Thisis a negative externality for academia. An entire cohort faced blocks to their career development simply because they were entering the job market at the wrong time in the RAE cycle.

The effect could be magnified if certain types of research were seen as being less likely to get good RAE grades. There are concerns about the way in which the RAE panels grade interdisciplinary work.A report commissioned by the UK HE funding bodies found thatdepartments and researchers widely believed that the RAE ‘inhibits interdisciplinary research’.[10] Around four-fifths of the academics surveyed engaged in interdisciplinary work.[11]The report stated that ‘overall, RAE 1996 panels did not strongly discriminate for or against interdisciplinary research, although the most interdisciplinary researchers received slightly lower ratings’.[12] The proportion of interdisciplinary research varied across fields and that there was lower interdisciplinarity for Economics (31 per cent). It is the perception, rather than the reality, of how RAEs will work that matters in the hiring market. The report noted that the most interdisciplinary researchers were affected. Some types of Economic History could easily fall into this category. Problems could be made worse if the researcher’s colleagues are not engaged in interdisciplinary research. This seems particularly likely in Economics departments.

There are quantitative studies considering academic careers rather than research output per se. With regard to Economics, there have been a number of articles on the current state of the profession. Some were collected in a special edition of The Economic Journal. Machin and Oswald considered the future supply of academic economists.[13] Booth and Burtonfocused on the role of women.[14]Blackaby and Frank conducted similar research into the representation of ethnic minorities.[15]Freeman conducted a comparison of the Economics profession in the UK and in the United States.[16]Blackaby, Booth and Frank later wrote a paper on the gender pay gap in academia in general.[17]

Machin and Oswald found that there had been a fall in the numbers of students entering doctoral programmes in UK institutions. This is particularly notable with regard to British applicants. They posited that this might be due to the decline in the pay of academic economists relative to the private sector. It might be also due to a pay gap between the UK and the US.

Booth and Burton used the Royal Economic Society Women’s Committee 1998 Survey. Some of their data has been presented in Table 1. so that it conforms as closely as possible to the ranks used in this paper.[18] The survey used to provide their data had an 85% response rate.They found no statistically significant difference between the relative positions of women in post 92 and older universities, or between departments with different RAE rankings.Women clearly occupy few of the top posts. Booth and Burton noted that cohort effects may show the evidence of discrimination which happened in the past. They also discuss alternative theories such as the various forms of human capital theory.

Booth and Burton’s findings are similar to those found by Mills et al.[19]‘With only 22% of all staff being women, Economics has the smallest proportion of female employees of all the social sciences […] Only 5 per cent (15 out of 295) of Economics Professors are female […] This is the lowest percentage in the social sciences and can be compared with around 25% female professorships in Anthropology and Sociology’.[20]History also is male-dominated. 70 per cent of staff are male, 24 per cent of staff are aged over 55. [21]Economic History appears to follow the same pattern as Economics and History. Wrigley’s survey of the Economic History Reviewshowed that 13.6 per cent of articles published in 1990-7 were written by women.[22]

There are demographic issues for academia as a whole.[23] The proportion of full-time staff over 55 was 17.1 per cent in 2005/6. This varied across subject groups. ‘Education’ had the highest proportion at 27 per cent. Humanities, language-based studies and archaeology all had 20 per cent. A study carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) looked at the ranks of academics based in English institutions.[24] It used Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data for 2003-4. 83 per cent of full-time HE academic staff are based at English institutions.[25] Data from the report has been adapted to make it comparable to the data in this study and presented in Tables 2 and 3. The report defined 39 institutions which received the most research funding in 2002-3 as research-orientated. It is not clear which definition of funding or indeed whether it is an academic year or a tax year. However, it is likely that most of these institutions were old universities and include the top universities ranked in the Times Higher Educational Supplement’s World University Rankings.[26] Professors make up between ten and 14 per cent of the total number of staff (Table 2). Women only appear to hold 18 per cent of these posts (Table 3).

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) does classify Economic and Social History separately from History or Economics. Its demographic review showed that in 2000-1, there were 24 PhDs in Economic and Social History gained in British HEIs.[27] This compares to 10 in 1994-5.[28] The ESRC survey did look at staff in specialist Economic History units, and noted that they were ranked highly in the previous RAE. However, it noted that many Economic Historians actually worked in other locations. The data presented below shows that this is the case for most Economic Historians.

Aside from demographic and RAE pressures, the Economic History community may be facing its own specific problems. Warnings about the decline in Economic History have occurred at various points since the heyday of the Cliometric Revolution. Coleman criticised the move in the mid-twentieth century towards separate Economic History departments.[29] He argued that this isolated Economic Historians from trends in both Economics and History departments. Most of these specialist departments have now been amalgamated back into larger groupings. Coleman does argue the case for Economic History (as opposed to pure Cliometrics) in a more recent article.[30]

However, Economists may be less familiar with approaches in Economic History beyond pure Cliometrics. It is possible that a well-respected mainstream journal in Economics would be happy to publish a purely Cliometric article, which was not considered ground-breaking or even particularly convincing by other Economic Historians. Such an article would count towards a submission to the Economics and Econometrics RAE panel. Presumably, the panel would not be required to check with the interdisciplinary experts, as the paper had been published by a highly-ranked Economics journal. This creates disincentives to be truly innovative as it means sticking to work which mainstream Economics or mainstream History is familiar with.

III

The data used are from the Census of Economic Historians in UK Higher Education.[31] The data were collated from university websites in 2007 before the start of the new academic year. All university websites listed on the Higher Education and Research Opportunities in the UK (HERO) website were checked. All departmental or school pages relating to History, Business, Management and Economics were used. All staff research interests on these pages were then checked. Academics employed by an HE institution and who had some listed research interest in Economic, Business or Accounting history were included. Some were found in a variety of other departments such as Geography or Languages. They were located by looking at research groupings and also using the general search engine for the university. The census shows all those who expressed a research interest in Economic History or related fields. This does not mean that these people consider themselves to be, first and foremost, Economic Historians. They may combine Economic History with other work. They may label themselves as Archaeologists, Social Historians or Accountants. A list of people whose top priority was Economic History would probably duplicate the EHS membership list.

Some types of data are not available on the census. As it was not a questionnaire-based study, private information is not accessible. Private information includes salary, career breaks, and any issues of personal identity such as ethnic origin. It is not known whether individuals are tenured or not, although senior lecturers and above will be tenured. There is no way of measuring individual ability or effort. A listed interest does not necessarily imply that an individual is research active. Nor does a teaching-only contract imply that an individual is research inactive.

Doctoral students and emeritus staff were removed from the dataset. The job title for staff members was taken from their website. Sometimes, titles are ambiguous. For example, the rank of Fellow can refer to a temporary contract or the membership of an Oxbridge college. The ranks have been grouped into the following categories: Rank 0, rank unstated, ambiguous or not academic title; Rank 1, postdoctoral early career grades such as postdoctoral research fellowship or teaching fellowship; Rank 2, lecturers, both tenured and probationary; Rank 3, senior lecturers and readers; Rank 4, professors and chairs.[32]

The original census listed departmental location by region as listed in HERO, for example, South Western England. The data was recoded to identify location under two different systems. The variables ‘loc*’ refer to nations. Loc1. is England. The second system is to identify institutions within London (Lon), the rest of England (roe) and the Celtic Fringe i.e. Scotland, N. Ireland and Wales (cf). These systems would give rise to multicollinearity if used together.