Abstract
Academic mobility has existed since ancient times. Recently, however, academic mobility—the crossing of international borders by academics who then work ‘overseas’—has increased. Academics and the careers of academics have been affected by governments and institutions that have an interest in coordinating and accelerating knowledge production. This article reflects on the relations between academic mobility and knowledge and identity capital and their mutual entanglement as academics move, internationally. It argues that the contemporary movement of academics takes place within old hierarchies among nation states, but such old hierarchies intersect with new academic stratifications which will be described and analysed. These analytical themes in the article are supplemented by excerpts from interviews of mobile academics in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Korea and Hong Kong as selected examples of different locales of academic capitalism.
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Notes
According to the HESA data in 2015, administrators now outnumber academics at more than two thirds of UK universities (Jump, Times Higher Education September 3, 2015). This growth in the proportion of administrators and ‘career managers’—often without serious academic backgrounds or experience—employed by universities has pushed up costs and corrupted universities’ scholarly missions (Ginsberg 2011).
I use the term ‘transnational’ academic mobility to highlight the idea of academics moving ‘between’ or ‘above’ or, in simple words ‘across’ territorial boundaries. So the emphasis is on individuals and movements which are occurring in ‘transnational space’ and not necessarily as part of official inter-action between nations. Thus, transnational should be differentiated from the conventional understanding of ‘inter-national’ (Kim 2009, p. 395).
Academic mobility and migration are not the same but share the crossing of territorial borders. Academic mobility includes short-term visits, while academic migration is more specifically referring to employment status.
BME staff are generally under-represented at senior levels in UK universities (see Bhopal and Jackson 2013).
The concept of ‘otherness’ here is taken as the quality that someone or something has, which is different from himself/herself or from the things that he/she has experienced (Kim 2010, p. 583). I use the term ‘cosmopolitan’ simply as ‘a perspective, a state of mind, or a mode of managing meaning’ (Hannerz 1996, p. 102) as opposed to the parochial and localised boundaries (Kim 2010, p. 584).
There is a radical shift in the mode of academic knowledge production. The new paradigm, according to Shore and Wright (1999: 559) is ‘the re-invention of professionals themselves as units of resource whose performance and productivity must constantly be audited so that it can be enhanced’. Stephen Ball in his article on performativity and commodification admits that the neoliberal aspects of reform have required him to make himself calculable rather than memorable (Ball 2012).
Some of my empirical research data is from my SRHE-funded research: ‘Internationalisation, Mobile Academics, and Knowledge Creation in Universities: a Comparative Analysis’, SRHE Research Award 2011/12.
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Kim, T. Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism. High Educ 73, 981–997 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0118-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0118-0