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Transnational Mobility and International Academic Employment: Gatekeeping in an Academic Competition Arena

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Abstract

This article draws upon concepts developed in recent empirical and theoretical work on high skilled and academic mobility and migration including accidental mobility, forced mobility and negotiated mobility. These concepts inform a situated, qualitative study of mobility among international postdoctoral researchers in life sciences and engineering fields who were employed at US and UK universities in 2008 and 2009. Informed by epistemological methods in the Foucauldian tradition of discourse and governmentality, the study explores how policy discourse and technologies empower and limit scientists and engineers in negotiating employment arrangements across national boundaries.

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Notes

  1. Data have been drawn from a wider study; see also Cantwell (2011) and Cantwell and Lee (2010). The term “international” refers to individuals working and residing in a country other than their place of citizenship. Most of the workers in this study hold temporary work visas, though some are permanent residents (but not citizens) of the country in which they currently reside and some are able to work without immigration documents because of intra-EU rights of residence and work. The term postdoc is used to refer to junior scientists and engineers who have completed a PhD and are employed at universities on fixed-term contracts and are supervised by an individual or small group of more senior academics that hold permanent academic posts. Postdocs are sometimes also called research fellows, early career researchers, research associates and a variety of other terms.

  2. The lines of demarcation between those who seek academic jobs abroad and those who are employing academics from abroad are blurred. Employers can include institutional administrators whose job it is to manage science and engineering experts, and whose numbers are growing (see Slaughter and Cantwell 2011), but also to professors and principle investigators who supply scientific labor but also employ and manage (demand) this labor when staffing research projects and laboratories.

  3. This claim that science and engineering are tied to economic innovation is advanced by scholars of science and public policy, see for example Dill and Van Vought (2010), and is an assumption underpinning theories of science and technology such as Michael Gibbons and colleagues’ Mode 2 rubric (Gibbons et al. 1994). The supposition that innovations are preconditions for economic competition is also enshrined in official policy documents and statements generated by EU and US governments (see for example European Commission [EC] 2000, 2010; National Economic Council [NEC], 2009). See Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) for a critique of this position.

  4. The above quoted NEC report is available online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/StrategyforAmericanInnovation/. Similar policy narratives can be traced in Europe, emanating from both European Union and national sources. For example, European Commissioner Ján Figel stated, “Europe has been too weak for too long in bringing the worlds of university academia and business enterprise together, to achieve successful commercial exploitation of academic excellence” (Europa 2008). Attracting additional abroad students and researchers to European universities is a key component to the EC’s 2006 plan for “modernizing” higher education in the EU.

  5. Tremblay does not use the term boundary blurring to describe coordination of higher education and immigration policy. This is my interpretation of the evidence she presents.

  6. For a policy perspective from the US National Science Foundation, see Regets (2007); for an EU policy study, see European Commission (1998); for a UK policy analysis, see Somerville (2007); and for cross-national analysis within the OECD, see Tremblay 2002; 2005. The volume Competing for global talent, edited by Kuptsch and Fong (2006) offers multi-national policy and labor perspectives, as does The international mobility of talent, edited by Solimano (2008). The chapters of International migration, remittances, and the brain drain, a World Bank publication edited by Özden and Schiff (2006) offer policy and econometric analysis as do papers by Chellaraj, Maskus and Mattoo (2005); Borjas (2006), Hanson (2008) and Stephan and Levin (2001). Finally, Saxenian’s (2006) study, which is not an econometric or policy review, shows that universities in California are sites where transnational innovation networks that link Silicon Valley with other high-tech regions like Bangalore are constructed by transnationally mobile scientists.

  7. Marginson is informed by Bourdieu and uses the concept of “field.” I do not draw specific conceptual guidance from Bourdieu and talk of an “arena” to avoid confusion.

  8. Musselin uses the word “accidental” in the abstract but not the body of the article; however, the concept, if not the word, is a major theme in the concept of mobility she presents.

  9. Employment is a form of evaluation where potential employer and employee assess each others’ suitability. The evaluative aspect of employing international educational migrants extends to state’s immigration concerns. Temporary academic mobility can act as ‘getting to know you’ period when the potential migrant can ‘check out’ the host country and the host country can ‘check out’ the potential migrant (Kuptsch 2006).

  10. This study is rooted in the context of the Republican (Bush) and Labour (Blair/Brown) Administrations in the US and UK respectively. The Obama Administration has not changed the policy frame discussed here. The UK coalition government has changed immigration policy with respect to international academic recruitment, as mentioned in text.

  11. The caveat here is EU postdocs working in the UK who did not face visa restrictions. Nevertheless, some EU postdocs in the UK articulated their mobility as intra-European migration.

  12. In the UK, there are some constraints not present in the US, including human resource polices, and national and EU labor law, however, the general findings listed above remain true. Also, there are productivity advantages to hiring postdocs from abroad. For a more detailed discussion, see Cantwell (2011).

  13. Marginson’s analysis is informed by Gramsci and Bourdieu. However, this work also assumes a neo-liberal and globalized academy and the general shape of the argument is consistent with the present study and Foucauldian analysis.

  14. This is not a direct critique of Musselin’s work, which is bounded to intra-European mobility among British, French, and German academics, for whom mobility may well occupy this sojourner position. Rather it is critique of the applicability of the concept within a transnational frame that punctures the concentric boundaries of the European Union.

  15. Immigration is not pertinent because EU residents are largely free to reside in work across the union, excluding some restrictions placed on citizens of newly admitted Eastern European countries from moving to some countries in the West.

  16. The discussion in this section excludes intra-European mobility, which is addressed elsewhere in this article and is the subject of many other studies.

  17. See Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) and Slaughter and Cantwell (2011) for more complete discussions on this point.

  18. For example, the European Commission’s Lisbon agenda which establishes a “Competition Union.”

  19. A detailed elaboration of this point is beyond the scope of this article. See the end of Ackers (2008) and especially Jasanoff (2003) for a discussion of how new technologies and metrics that attend to human interests might be developed and advanced.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alma Maldonado-Maldonado and Jenny J. Lee for their support and good advice when I conducted this research. Additional thanks to Sheila Slaughter, Ilkka Kauppinen, Barrett Taylor, Bethan Cantwell and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on early versions of the paper.

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  1. College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Brendan Cantwell

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Cantwell, B. Transnational Mobility and International Academic Employment: Gatekeeping in an Academic Competition Arena. Minerva 49, 425–445 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-011-9181-3

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