The segmented mobility of globally mobile academics: a case study of foreign professors at a Korean university

Interstices: Workplace satisfaction, inclusion, and the cultural adjustment of expatriate academics at South Korean universities nationwide

“…Comparatively speaking, results presented thus far somewhat back up conclusions drawn recently by Kim et al (2021) in their qualitative study of expatriate faculty at one Korean university. The authors, building out their concept of "segmented mobility," found that the study's participants were, "separating the professional realm from personal, cultural, or linguistic spheres" (2).…”

“…This also raises the issue of socio-economic and language status. Recall the previously mentioned Manev and Stevenson (2001) results, wherein managers of similar background and status were more apt to share expressive ties, and the Kim et al (2021) results asserting an expectation to use English at the work place, but to not necessarily integrate. Korea is a developed country and a global top-15 economy.…”

“…Further, Korean universities, unlike some universities elsewhere (i.e., in Japan, Israel, and Norway) do not stipulate that a (Korean) fluency be obtained as a requisite for job retention or promotion and tenure, a fact not brought up in the Kim et al (2021) research mentioned earlier. In short, more akin to expatriate faculty opinions expressed in Gress and Shin (2020b), rather than a sense of entitlement, results overall point to expatriate faculty perceiving themselves as seeking some flexibility in standing Korean university organizational norms, with reasonable expectations of being included, and of this inclusion being facilitated by English usage.…”

“…The study of expatriate faculty is now a well-established topic of inquiry in comparative and international education and is integral to our understanding of higher education (HE) systems (see Bedenlier and Zawacki-Richter, 2015). While English speaking, and primarily developed, economies continue to both send out and take in the largest number of expatriate academics worldwide (Kim, 2016), globalization processes have led to the creation of new centers (Altbach et al, 2009), including increasingly competitive centers in Asia, that attract this subset of highly skilled mobile knowledge workers (David and Motala, 2017; Jöns and Hoyler, 2013; Kim et al, 2021). East Asian universities, for example, have begun to hire more expatriate academics in conjunction with their internationalization drives.…”

World class universities and international student mobility: Repositioning strategies in the Asian Tigers

“…These policies underscore the growing sense that universities in South Korea need to improve institutional quality to attract more international students, a need that has become critical as an economic response to a serious domestic student shortage (Byun and Kim, 2010). Meanwhile, in order to foster institutional excellence under a WCU rubric, the government has allocated funding to universities on the basis of specific evaluations, and universities have responded aggressively in a way that has spurred deep institutional changes, including a culture of research productivity (Jung, 2014; Shin, 2009), the adoption of English as the academic lingua franca (Byun et al, 2011), the recruitment of overseas faculty members (Kim, 2011, 2016b; Kim et al, 2021; Park, 2018; Shin and Gress, 2018), an increasingly centralized form of institutional governance (Shin, 2011), and a dependency culture on US-dominated global rankings and other “imported” measures of excellence (Byun et al, 2013; Deem et al, 2008; Mok, 2007; Palmer and Cho, 2012).…”