Well, I hope you get your book contract soon and that it opens up more opportunities for you. It sounds like you're still interested in your subject, and if that's the case, it's admirable that you haven't given up on academia completely, considering the amount of time and energy invested in doing a PhD and the disappointing way things have worked out. There seem to be so many different influences on what happens to you after completion that you'd never dream of when you embark on a PhD...

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I think I'm right in saying international relations/politics is an ultra competitive area because its a) a relatively contemporary subject b) involves small departments c) and its international nature attracts international candidates. So I would hope wj_gibson's experience is not necessarily representative of a typical recruitment experience. Although, I applied for 4 jobs last year and was shortlisted for 2 (one involving months of wasted prep work), but foreign candidates with an enormous amount of experience (too much for an academic entry job) were offered the positions.

Edit: I wholeheartedly agree with the advice to look outside academia. My brother is earning twice as much as I would in an academic post, and he does half the amount of work. He was a budding academic, but left the field after working out exactly how much he was getting paid per hour.

Wow, that is a really tough experience. Yes, IR is a very competitive field (which is why I'm looking for non-IR jobs even though that is where my teaching experience is!). When I think about it, most of our department are non-UK nationals, which is pretty rubbish really.
Nottingham Uni have a very good rep with Neo-Gramscian approaches to globalisation, and Salford (as far as I can tell) is building a rep for it too, if you ever consider going back to academia... I too have done a pol theory-philosophy-sociology approach, although not crit theory/globalisation, I think most people now are adopting a more radical methodology given the limitations of IR as a field.
I had a close friend who was doing a neo-Realist analysis of nuclear proliferation and she couldn't get a job, so, I wouldn't say there's a problem with your research, just a growing sentiment against employing junior staff (especially in the last 18 months with the RAE).

Sleepyhead why is it "pretty rubbish"?

Were the staff employed very experienced, or senior well-regarded international academics, then of course it would be an excellent addition to the department. However, the staff they have employed are junior, first-job staff; and having sat in on the interviews, I find it difficult to believe that they were the best candidates. Furthermore, the Dept has not employed *any* of its own PhD students in the past few years despite expanding rapidly (this is not bitterness, I don't want a job there).
My students regularly complain about the lack of engagement and dedication these staff show to teaching, most often they simply read from powerpoint in lectures, and are rarely in their offices during office hours. The Head of Dept, who is my supervisor, agrees. He believes, that partly due to their ambition in gaining research reputations, teaching is of little relevance. From personal experience, there *is* a difference between the approach of staff who have been through the UK HE system and those who have not. For example, those staff who have not, seem to have a more lax approach to investigated plagiarism (they refused to investigate essays I knew to be plagiarised and told me that I should just find a reason to fail them - as a non-permanent member of staff I am not allowed to investigate academic misconduct).

Ahh so you meant staff recruited from abroad, like those who havent been here, lived here or even learnt how the British HE works and standards expected thereof?

Hmm, I kinda get that, we had one of these sorts as well.

I asked cos I was wondering so many non UK students come here, so young, study through their post grads, Phds and post docs, and sometimes join the staff crew, they are pretty ok..

Yeah, my old department now has a majority of non-UK academics working in it. Most of the non-UK ones are from North America, where it takes a lot longer to get a PhD, and where newly-qualified PhDs are invariably better qualified to teach a wider range of undergraduiate courses than their more narrowly-specialised British brethren.

But it's ridiculous. I received around 80K in UK taxpayers' money from the ESRC to do my research, and the idea of that funding was always in the light of the aged nature of the social science workforce in UK universities. The aim (as of 2000) was to ensure that sufficient funds were available to train a new generation of UK academics to ensure the survival of the industry as a world-class one. Alas, departments can simply hire who they like from overseas, as academia is one of those industries that has no visa restrictions. The money that financed my research would have better used in something like the NHS rather than being poured down the drain, as seems to have been the case with me. I strongly believe there should either be a moratorium on new PhDs or else the migration criteria in academia needs tightening up. As Sleepybug says, depts are hiring young first-time lecturers from overseas, usually out of a realisation that such people will gladly take on all of the onerous tasks that the long-term staff wiould like to offload onto some poor, unsuspecting soul, and know fine well that UK-trained PhDs are much too au fait with such practices to be relied upon to take them lying down. I know that's incredibly cynical, but I can't think of any other reason why it is the case.

Lest anyone gets the wrong end of the stick, I should point out that I'm not simply saying "gis a job"; however, I do think there is something very wrong with the system at present. It has always been competitive, of course, but at the moment (in my field anyway) the term "impossible" would be more accurate, and I really can't see how that benefits anyone.

I think its a two-way system. Departments believe that having a range of international staff makes them seem more dynamic (especially within a subject area that has an international focus), and international staff enjoy the way in which the UK system has relatively easier access to secure jobs. A new member of staff in our dept from a European country explained that he wanted to move here because now he had a family he wanted a permanent job.
The system is not working, that's clear. It is in universities' interests to produce high numbers of PhDs, but there are no incentives to then employ them. I don't know if a moratorium is a good idea - its hardly fair on those wishing to do a PhD, but there needs to be something put in place - I would argue extra funding for those depts that take on new UK researchers especially ones that have been government funded through research councils, but that's unlikely.

hehehe gibson you confused sleepyhead and phdbug and made sleepybug!!!

Anyway yes i totally agree about the US phds who have more coursework experience...sad but true...

No problem, PhDHead... ;-)

To be honest, if word starts getting out about the state of the job market in certain academic fields, then we might end up with a de facto moratorium anyway in that people are discouraged from studying for them. I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to study for a PhD in Politics at present, unless they intend to use it to work in another field and have tailored their research accordingly (e.g. local government; think-tanks).

I think it is an even more serious problem when you consider that the UK government aims to open about 15 new universities over the next 5-10 years. If the number of available candidates for lectureships drops then does academia (well, IR anyway) then end up with a sudden dearth of lecturers? Who knows?

There should certainly be incentives to keep PhDs on, though, even if 2-year research contracts.

This all makes very interesting (and quite frankly worrying) reading. At my university, certainly in my dept the majority of the staff are British with a few lecturers who are not nationals, but they tend to lecture in the fields relating to their own country and there are at least 2 members of staff who have done their BA, MA and Phd at the university which gives me some hope. Having said that, in other depts if you see two Brits you shout snap! Don't get me wrong, I have NOTHING against foreign lecturers, some are amazing and bring a lot to the education offered, but some are frankly ridiculous. I had a lecturer in my first year who quite simply could not speak English. He had a basic grasp but his accent made it impossible to understand him, but as soon as you went into technical language (social science) he would ask us for translations and for an explanation of what terms meant - and no, it wasn't a clever means of getting us to dig deep, he had a notebook which he wrote the answers in asking us to repeat it in basic english so he could understand. If we asked questions in class he would often have to 'get back to us' as he didn't know the answer - and I'm talking first year core course. There were several like that, and whilst there is no suggestion that as an academic they weren't brilliant and leaders in their field, as lecturers they were, quite frankly, rubbish.
Within my main field the foreign lecturers bring something that cannot be gained within the English system, namely an indepth and detailed knowledge of their field and a 'feel' for it - for example there is a Russian who teaches Russian history - she has something about her and about her knowledge and her means of teaching it as more than set of facts that makes her courses amazing and I'd happily argue that it would be difficult to find someone better suited to that position. I do feel quite strongly though that something has to be done for homegrown students or an entire generation of people who would make amazing teachers and researchers will be lost. I do wonder, having read the comments here, whether it is not simply a case of the best person for the job and that is awful.

Ok now i am a lil confused....does that mean NON uk folk trained in the UK HE ORDER are problematic too?

Cos I am one of these, and people say I am pretty good (pat on the back!)...and am worried that my UK peers and friends might think I am not right?

No, I think in that case you would be viewed (by me anyway) as an equivalent of a homegrown student, on the grounds that we would both have passed through the same postgraduate research and training experience, oriented toward the UK system.

It's more when someone with no links to the UK system, but whose CV outputs are no better than someone from within the UK system, gets a lectureship here that resentment emerges.