Doing Economics

6.2 Institutional versus Professional Service
Opportunities for service will abound if you seek them out, and they will
abound both at your institution and within the various professional
associations you belong to (e.g., Economic History Association, Society for
Economic Dynamics, Southern Economic Association). The question then
becomes whether you should prioritize institutional service—that is, “local”
service, or service at your home institution—or professional service.
Here is how I like to think about that question. When I started out on the
tenure track, a senior health economist who was one of my colleagues told
me “You will get no credit whatsoever for loyalty to the institution.” And he
was right: an institution will never love you back. We are all (academic)
entrepreneurs whose research is to a large extent disembodied from the
institution where market forces have come together to have us hang up our
shingle. This is not to say that you should not be grateful that you have a

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job, and that you have a job where you currently work. The point is that one
should keep things in perspective, and not invest things with a power that
they do not have.
That being said, here is how I approach the institutional versus
professional service dichotomy.
First, anything you do in terms of professional service will almost surely
count outside of your institution, on the market at large. Conversely, a lot of
what you do in terms of institutional service is unlikely to count outside of
your institution. Therefore, between professional and institutional service,
the former is much more likely to raise your reservation wage than the
latter.
Second, even in places that try to protect their junior faculty from having
to do too much service, your institution will expect you to do a modicum of
service beyond attending departmental meetings. Thus, you likely face a
binding constraint when it comes to institutional service, though where
exactly that constraint binds is probably a bit fuzzy (i.e., “You should do
some departmental service”) rather than a bright line (i.e., “You need to sit
on at least two of our seven committees.”)
The conclusion is that at a minimum, you should do enough service to
satisfy your local institutional constraint, and when it comes to professional
service, you should do as much as you feel will benefit your career. One
indirect benefit of taking on professional service (which is usually taken on
on a voluntary basis) is that it can give you a get-out-of-jail-free card. That
is, when you get asked to do institutional service which you would rather
not do, it always comes in handy when you can point to all the professional
service you are already doing as a reason for declining.