For a few years now, the principles of corporate HR work have also been applied to dealing with professors. The professionalisation of the corresponding university or academic personnel management is therefore - slowly - increasing. There is a need for research in various areas. Professor Becker and his colleagues have been working on relevant topics for a long time - both practically and theoretically and empirically.
For many years, Professor Becker was involved in the conceptual and operational preparation of future professors (in the 1990s mainly habilitation candidates) for the job requirements in research, teaching, self-administration and chair management as initiator, young researchers' chairman, head of the promotion of young researchers and as a board member (department "young researchers") in the Association of University Professors of Business Administration e. V. (sources on this: Becker 2005, Oechsler, VHB, VHB/WK Pers). Networks within the association and in the subject areas were stimulated and sponsored, travel grants for international symposia were organised, information for offers and demand for specific business administration positions was collected empirically (in cooperation with colleagues Gaugler, Oechsler, Richter, Köhler and Zülch), methodological and didactic workshops were organised, workshops on third-party funds, appointment negotiations, chair management, etc. were held - in each case with the support of many colleagues.
Since the beginning of the century, our research has focussed on the placement of newly appointed professors and on incentive systems for "good teaching". A BMBF project, led together with our colleague Wild, has made a significant contribution to successfully using research to provide suggestions for shaping university practice, both in terms of placement (nowadays more commonly referred to as onboarding) and "good" teaching.
We are currently working more intensively on the selection of professors. The aim is to identify the sources of error in conventional selection methods in appointment procedures on the basis of arguments and empirical evidence and to propose procedures that can be expected to be significantly more valid.
Conceptually, we also develop the framework of academic personnel management (with its central elements of selection, placement, qualification development, incentives, "good" teaching). See also a small overview and a list of presentations and publications below.