Failures in academia (2) - the Summer season: Early career

Tells the story of the two most significant career failures in the second stage of my academic career, as well as their unexpected upsides

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 4 Aug 2026 13:19)

In my January 2020 blogpost Be proactive, resilient & realistic! I talked about the challenges that even very famous academics have faced in their academic careers. Moreover, in our recent article Every Little Action Counts (Harzing & Sathish, 2026), we include being open about our failures as one of the example micro-practices under the “resist a hero narrative” label, in itself a specific representation of the more abstract concept of humility.

Now that I am semi-retired (see Retirement), I decided to “walk the talk” by reflecting not only on my own career failures, but also on the unexpected upsides that were associated with each of them. Whilst I am not claiming that there are upsides to every failure, our failures often represent cross-roads that can help us to reflect more deeply on the best path through the maze of our academic careers.

Before we start though, let’s get one thing straight. I am privileged! I am white and was born in an affluent Western country (the Netherlands) in the 1960s, an era characterized by wide-spread optimism and belief in social and economic progress. My education was largely free; even at tertiary level there were generous grants available for students who – like me – came from families with low incomes, and only a part of these grants had to be repaid. I did two full tertiary degrees, so received these grants for 7.5 years. This seems incredibly generous now but remember that at that time only about 5-10% of 18-year-olds went to university.

This certainly gave me a much easier start in life, but it doesn’t mean that my academic career was universally smooth. That said, I do not claim the set-backs in my career were unique or even particularly dramatic, although some of them – such as my all but failed PhD and my first redundancy – definitely felt like it at the time. However, I sincerely hope my story will help ECRs to realize that things that appear like major problems at the time can also have unexpected upsides, and might even be positive turning points in your academic career.

I will tell my own career story in four seasons: education, early career, mid-career, and late career. Your own challenges, set-backs, or failures will be different or may appear at a very different stage. But I do believe that the four morals that I derive in this white paper have some general applicability. And remember, this is a story about major cross-roads in my career; it is not about the many daily set-backs that we all experience as academics. Here are three universals that you may not be fully aware of:

  • Every academic gets rejections all the time; for instance, everyone experiences paper rejections, even editors of top journals see their own papers rejected.
  • Everyone has difficult colleagues/collaborators; in fact, you may well be “that difficult colleague” for others. We all have different personalities and preferences.
  • Every academic I know feels undervalued in their own university; especially research-active academics often receive far more recognition outside their university than within.

So, with that in mind, please join me on a journey through the seasons. If you want to skip to a particular section, just use the Tables of Contents below. If you are curious about what happened before my academic journey even started see This little girl: message to my younger self.

Failure 3: Didn’t get a “real” job

After I completed my second degree at tertiary level, I still had no clue what I wanted to do in terms of work. Remember: I still had no role models or mentors. This was a pattern that would continue throughout my academic career, and it was a key reason for becoming a dedicated research mentor myself in the later stage of my career, i.e. to give others the support I never had myself (see Upside 7: A great job I might not have found otherwise).

Another problem was that I didn’t graduate into a particularly clement job market. I sent out many dozens of applications for specific jobs but didn’t get shortlisted for any. And all the “cold applications” I sent out either went unanswered or resulted in a polite “we are not recruiting” answer. The fact that I didn’t a clear idea of what I wanted, or what my strengths were, will not have helped either. So, when my supervisor for my Masters’ thesis informed me of a freelancing opportunity at the Open University, I grabbed it with both hands.

The job involved writing a study guide and several chapters in a course book in industrial relations. This was an area that I was familiar with from my studies, and was at least somewhat interested in. Even better, I was asked to write a new course plan for a topic I was definitely interested in: international human resource management. But at a reunion with my former HEAO classmates, who had now all been in “proper” jobs for 5 years, the question: “so are you happy having a freelance job” did rather hurt, as it was clearly implied I shouldn’t be.

Upside 3: A textbook and finding my passion for academia

Even so, I really enjoyed my work for the Open University, specially creating the course on International HRM with an accompanying English language textbook that I co-edited with my OU colleague (see here for the first edition). I found authors for fourteen of the sixteen chapters I had proposed and authored two chapters myself. Retrospectively, I am quite proud that – armed with only a Masters’ degree – I was “cajoling” much more senior academics and even famous professors into providing good chapters. Now more than thirty years after first being published, the textbook is in its seventh edition.

Whilst working at the Open University, I also realized I needed to do a PhD to stay in academia – a world I had come to feel very much at home in. However, I didn’t want to enroll in a formal PhD program in the Netherlands, where topics were often driven by the student’s supervisor. I was far too independent for that. Moreover, after having completed two full degrees and spending a total of 7.5 years in Higher Education, I didn’t relish attending more courses either.

So, I decided to do what many Dutch academics had done for decades: complete my PhD part-time while holding a lecturing job. My only problem was that, at the time, the Open University didn’t have a research tradition, and I didn’t have colleagues who could guide me in my research. However, as I was interacting regularly with a team of professors for the International HRM textbook I was editing, I asked two of them to be my informal supervisors.

In fact, my PhD resulted from this same International HRM textbook. I had planned a chapter on HQ-subsidiary relationships in it but couldn’t find an author for it. So, I decided to write it myself, and fully immersed myself in the literature in the field. Ultimately though, the topic wasn’t a good fit for the textbook. But as I had already done so much work on it, I decided I might as well do a PhD on it. And that’s how I kind of rolled into doing a PhD in International Business. Yes, I have always been the ultimate pragmatist :-).

Finally, there was also a personal upside to the freelance work: I was paid “gross”, i.e. tax wasn’t withheld before paying my salary. It was up to me to declare my income in the next tax return. Obviously, I did, but the delay between payment and the deadline for completion of a tax return meant that we had nearly a year to use the money before having to pay tax on it. So, we were able to use it as a deposit on our first house, thus reducing our mortgage considerably. As mortgage interest rates were around 9% at the time this was very welcome indeed!

Failure 4: My PhD was all but failed

I worked on my PhD manuscript for about four years in conjunction with part-time teaching-only jobs at three different universities in the Netherlands. As is true for many academics, much of my PhD work was therefore done in the evening and weekend hours. But hey, I was young and ambitious. So, it was just something you got on with. Moreover, despite the inevitable hick-ups and set-backs, my PhD progressed quite smoothly overall; I even enjoyed many aspects of my PhD journey. You can read more about it here: The process – a four-year journey.

However, I already knew that academic jobs were quite scarce in the Netherlands at that time. So, in order to be internationally competitive, I participated in conferences to create connections – I even won the award for the best thesis proposal at EIBA 1994 in Warsaw. I also published quite a bit during my PhD, including the two articles below based on my “detective work” around academic referencing practices and an analysis of the response rates I achieved in my survey.

The result of all this hard work was a PhD manuscript that weighed in at well over 100,000 words, tested 90 hypotheses, and had more than 650 references, including quite a few to my own published work. My thesis definitely had a lot of content. It provided a very rigorous review of the literature, and the methods chapter, and both of the two results chapters ran to about 60 pages each.

But the one thing my thesis didn’t have was a strong theorical framework. It was a rigorous application of contingency theory, with strong sensitivity to the cross-cultural research context, but this theoretical grounding was discussed rather briefly. I am an ultimate empiricist, give me data and I’ll do forensic research to get to the bottom of something. It is the kind of research that gives me joy (see also the necessity, meaning and joy framework in You finally made it to full professor, now what?).

So, in my PhD I simply did what I had seen done in most journal articles in International Business journals at the time: review the literature and then formulate and test a set of hypotheses based on that. But what my two internal examiners wanted was theory-driven research. So, despite a stellar report from the external examiner, the internal examiners believed the dissertation should not be approved. I have documented this story extensively elsewhere, so here I will just record my whirlwind of questions.

  • I had just secured my first permanent job in the UK. Would that job offer even stand without a PhD?
  • Without a PhD would my academic career be over before it had begun?
  • We were due to move countries for my new job a month later. We had already bought a house and the removalist was booked. Would we need to cancel all of that?

All these and more questions were swirling around in my head and led to many sleepless nights. My distress was compounded by the way the news had been communicated, a letter in my departmental mail tray which could have been seen by anyone. This was further complicated by the complete lack of clarity about what the examiners’ decision meant in practical terms; the only options in the regulations were rejection or (conditional) approval. My outcome was neither. About five months of uncertainty followed…

If you are interested in the full story, you can read it here: On failures in academia: My PhD journey.

Upside 4: A highly cited monograph and journal articles

Fortunately, my new employer didn’t withdraw my job offer. They even worked hard to find a loophole in their regulations, allowing me to submit my thesis there as a member of staff within a year of joining them. In complete contrast to my earlier experience, it was approved without any changes by two external examiners, both well-known academics in International Business and Comparative Management. They praised my manuscript for the rigorous research training it reflected, which was rather ironic as I was completely self-taught.

My PhD manuscript was a finalist for two dissertation awards that year, the Gunnar Hedlund Best Dissertation Award at the European International Business Academy and the Barry M. Richard Best Dissertation Award at the Academy of Management. Stripped of its statistical appendices and lightly edited, the same manuscript was also published as research monograph called Managing the Multinationals in Peter Buckley’s Horizons in International Business series, published by Edward Elgar (see image below).

As I was so junior and unknown, Edward Elgar didn't grant me any royalties unless I sold over 750 copies. They also made me do all the page formatting myself. After three weeks of wrestling with their formatting guidelines, the book was delivered "camera-ready”, having been printed on my own laser-printer at home :-). Ironically, with 649 Google Scholar citations my PhD is now the most cited book in the Horizons in International Business series. Only two other books garnered more than 200 citations, and they were written by famous academics. Most only got 40-50 citations, if that.

The book ultimately sold around 650 copies, not bad for a research monograph costing £110 pounds (in 1999, it is £151 now). In addition to individual sales, the book was also acquired by nearly 200 university libraries. Most of these were in the Anglosphere (United States: 82, United Kingdom: 26, Canada: 10, Australia: 6, Ireland: 4), but copies were bought by a substantial number of libraries in Germany (16) and the Netherlands (8) too, and there were holdings in several Southern European and Northern European countries, as well as in Turkey and Israel. What surprised me most was the book's popularity in libraries in Asia: Malaysia (5), China (3), Taiwan (3), Japan (2), Singapore (2) and the Philippines.

Beyond the book, published in 1999, my PhD was the source for six more articles in highly ranked journals between 2000 and 2003. Obviously, they were not a straight reworking of my PhD manuscript, that would not have been allowed. They required new framing and additional analyses, and several required additional data collection. But they were all based on the work I did during my PhD. The last article – on country-of-origin effects in MNCs – won the Roland Calori Prize for the best paper published in Organization Studies 2003-2004.

Moral 2: The long way around may lead to better outcomes

Not getting a “proper” academic job, and all but failing my PhD were certainly not an auspicious start to an academic career. But ultimately, I think that – for me at least – it led to better outcomes. If I had got a FT academic job after finishing my Masters’ degree, still quite common at Dutch universities at the time, I would probably have been pushed into a teaching-only career and might not have had the courage to protest.

I certainly felt a bit like the little duckling venturing outside the straight and narrow line of what was expected. I had done things differently by not getting a regular job and by not doing a PhD in a formal PhD programme. It clearly had both negative and positive effects. But for me it set the tone for the rest of my career: I continued charting my own course.

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Copyright © 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 4 Aug 2026 13:19

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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