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A Norm Less Universal than It Seems

Switzerland leads European higher education systems in internationalization, both in terms of outbound mobility, with the highest percentage of postdoctoral researchers going abroad, and inbound mobility, with more than half of its workforce being non-Swiss. In line with European initiatives of the late 20^th and early 21^th century, Swiss authorities and public research funders have advocated for mobility as an essential tool for fostering collaboration, research quality, and career advancement. However, the positive relationship between mobility and research performance often relies more on perception than empirical evidence⁴, and the existing literature has not reached a consensus on these links. For example, in the United Kingdom, the mobility of faculty has not proven to increase academic performance per se, but rather usually corresponds with a short-term decrease, which is attributed to adjustment costs⁵. In the Netherlands, nationals and non-mobile applicants for faculty positions have better chances of getting hired than foreign international scholars or mobile peers⁶. In Switzerland, highly mobile academics do not have more academic transnational ties than less mobile academics⁷, and the Swiss workforce’s rate of collaboration with foreign colleagues is among the lowest in Europe⁸.

Mobility as a Career Script 

Mobility patterns vary not only across national contexts, but also across disciplines. In the Netherlands and Germany, being mobile and being international are strongly valued in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields but are hardly a requirement in Social Sciences and Humanities (SHS) disciplines⁹. The decision to take a postdoctoral position abroad after earning a PhD in Germany is closely linked to epistemic practices of knowledge production, such as gaining access to specific equipment, methods, and resources abroad in Biology and Physics. In other fields, such as History, PhD holders tends to remain in the same country for their postdoc, potentially taking short trips for data collection¹⁰.

In Switzerland, in contrast, mobile research trajectories have become largely decoupled from epistemic reasons. Similar to their peers in STEM, SHS and Law PhDs are intensively socialized to a more standardized, narrowly defined requirement of being mobile: it generally implies going abroad at a specific time (ideally for a postdoc), for a specific duration (no less than one year), and in a specific format (in the form of a research contract or grant at a foreign university). This type of mobility can be described as a “career script”¹², i.e., a collective representation of what “needs to be done” in order to have a successful career. The solidity of the script and its circulation in a multiplicity of academic spaces helps explain why the mobility imperative appears to contribute to career decisions among Swiss PhDs. In the absence of alternative scripts, PhD candidates who see mobility expectations as conflicting with their private situation may end up leaving the career track altogether. This bears consequences in terms of talent management, as competitive researchers of all social characteristics may leave the research field for non-academic reasons. This also favors career inequalities, as women and underrepresented groups are less likely to have the resources necessary to facilitate or secure their move: for example, having a “portable” spouse¹³ to smoothly combine mobility aspirations with dual career situations, having a social network or holding Swiss citizenship that facilitate their return, etc.

Are Women Less Mobile after Their PhDs?
Going beyond Common Sense

EU data points to lower mobility among female postdocs compared to male postdocs in a majority of European countries. However, in the Swiss context, women leave the country at comparable or even higher rates than their male colleagues. This specificity may be more indicative of the necessity to comply with the mobility script in a highly competitive environment, rather than a sign of gender equality. Indeed, the mobility imperative results in somewhat differentiated experiences across gender: women show specific mobility patterns, for example, in the form of “living apart together” (LAT) arrangements across countries with a partner who stays in Switzerland. This often implies frequent long-distance commuting and additional organizational, financial, or health costs¹³. Others describe adjusting the choice of their host country as a result of family constraints in terms of location, i.e., picking a closer destination based on dual career decisions or care responsibilities

Mobility trajectories are partly shaped by gender, but also by the way that mobility intersects with employment conditions and other social characteristics, such as national origin, race or class. In Switzerland, postdoctoral mobility primarily takes the form of fixed-term positions or grants that offer little to no access to social protections such as unemployment or retirement benefits. Precarious employment conditions weigh unevenly across individuals, and disadvantaged groups are more likely to experience mobility as “geoccasional work” rather than as an experience of discovery and scientific fulfillment¹⁴.

Mobility as a Criterion of Excellence and Promotion – Challenges and Limits

Academic actors, mentors, and research or funding institutions participate in co-producing¹⁵ the mobility imperative. For example, some universities, funding agencies, or foundations have included formal mobility rules as a prerequisite for access to mid-career positions or grants. Paradoxically, the influence of the mobility script on career decisions both within and outside of academia, and the strength of the script at the postdoctoral level, renders mobility an ineffective criterion when recruiting for professorial positions. Hiring committees rarely use mobility concretely as a criterion of excellence at this advanced career stage, where compliance with the script is very high or, as in STEM fields, nearly complete. The mobility criterion is more often used at this stage as an exclusion criterion rather than a criterion of excellence per se. Furthermore, the informal nature of the mobility criterion during professorship recruitment – which never appears in job advertisements and only rarely in evaluation grids – makes it open for interpretation by the committee during deliberations. This informal nature of mobility as a criterion raises issues of equity and transparency.

The specificities of mobility in the Swiss system as a transdisciplinary, mandatory career script within a format of precarious – often repeated – employment helps to shape career trajectories through mechanisms that go beyond the individual’s scientific qualities and academic achievements. These results invite two reflections: The first is how to support sustainable academic collaboration across borders in more inclusive, equitable formats. The second is questioning mobility as a tool for assessing excellence in funding and hiring procedures in Swiss academia.