Understanding how institutional incentives and mechanisms for assigning recognition shape access to a permanent job is important. Using event history analysis, the paper looks at the time to promotion and the effects of some relevant covariates associated with productivity, social embeddedness, and mobility. We find that research productivity plays a contradictory role in contributing to acceleration toward obtaining a first permanent job while other variables are better predictors of a faster transition. In this system of fast access to tenure, other factors, associated with the social elements of academic life, also play a role in reducing time from PhD graduation to tenure. At the same time, mobility significantly increases the duration of the non-tenure stage. In contrast with previous findings, the role of sex is marginal. The heterogeneity of the duration of promotion for the different scientific domains is confirmed, with faster career advancement for those in the engineering and technological sciences compared with academics in the biological and biomedical sciences. Results show clear effects of seniority and rewards for loyalty, in addition to some measurements of performance associated with early productivity and the quality of the university granting the PhD as key elements to speed career advancement. Findings suggest the existence of a retention system based on granting early permanent jobs to those who combine social embeddedness and team integration with good credentials linked to potential future performance, rather than rewarding postdoctoral productivity and high levels of mobility. Some tensions between these microdynamics and the public discourse regarding merit and mobility are identified.
