Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
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Georg P. Mueller
Abstract
This article presents a simulation model of the production and the use of university diplomas as signs of excellence for academic labor markets. The model pays special attention to the decoding of such diplomas by the employers, who use them for selectively hiring jobseekers, whose diplomas differ with regard to performance, costs, and reputation. The model further assumes that for new, unknown diplomas, reputation is more important for recruitment purposes than real performance. Thus, the reputation of new diplomas influences their chances on the labor market as well as their attractiveness for future students. This has obviously consequences for their long-term market shares, which are simulated on the computer for the case of a competition between an established and a new diploma. It turns out that the cost-performance-space of diplomas contains niches of partial evolutionary stability, where established diplomas are able to defend their monopolistic dominance against the competition by certain types of new diplomas. The number and the places of such niches of stability seem to depend on institutional learning processes of the labor market and the reputation based strategies of the employers for the decoding of new diplomas.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
