Academic Expatriation to Emerging Economies: A Career Perspective

Abstract

Although the globalization of the academic labor market offers many advantages to academic institutions and their students, less is known about its (dis)advantages for academic expatriates’ careers. This paper seeks explanations of how academic expatriates aspire to invest in their careers in emerging economies by engaging both with the evidence of intelligent career theory, and with the literature on academic expatriation to emerging economies and on higher education. On the basis of these different streams of the literature, this paper identifies and outlines the institutional practices that could influence academic expatriates’ careers. This paper suggests that future research on academic expatriation to emerging economies can develop in at least three directions, namely, (a) the institutional practices at academic institutions in emerging economies, (b) the careers of academic expatriates, and (c) a reciprocal relationship between institutional practices and the individual careers of academic expatriates.

1. Introduction

With the increasing globalization of academic work, many academic institutions and business schools around the world are recruiting their top scholars internationally. Although the globalization of the academic labor market offers many advantages to academic institutions and their students [1,2,3], the effects of such moves on the career development of academic expatriates remain unclear. This is especially the case for academic expatriates who move to academic institutions positioned in emerging economies. Specifically, research shows that academic expatriates in emerging economies have to cope with requests for last-minute teaching, difficulties with classroom management, no support structures, and a lack of assistance with work arrangements [3].

Indeed, emerging economies make every effort to create environments that attract international expatriation, but these efforts are often more devoted to the creation of an attractive lifestyle for expatriates and their families [4]. In turn, research shows that little effort is made to create institutional practices that would make the work and career development of academic expatriates comparable to the work and career-development opportunities provided at academic institutions in most developed economies [3]. Thus, to our knowledge, it is not known how academic expatriates aspire to develop their careers in the context of emerging economies and what the role of institutional practices is in this process.

With this paper, we aim to fill this gap. Investment in developing one’s career is one of the guiding motives for expatriate academics to move abroad. We therefore draw on intelligent career theory to conceptualize individual career investments. The theory posits that individuals develop their careers by using three types of investments, knowing-why (career motivations), knowing-how (human capital), and knowing-whom (professional network) [5]. To argue how academic expatriates invest in the three ways of knowing in emerging economies, we review the literature on academic expatriation to emerging economies and the higher-education literature. On the basis of this literature, we also identify and outline institutional practices that could influence academic expatriates ‘careers.

We define emerging economies as “low-income, rapid-growth countries using economic liberalization as their primary engine of growth” (p. 249) [6]. More recently, it was argued that emerging economies also aim to successfully finalize the transition into a knowledge-based and entrepreneurship/innovation-driven economy [7]. To define academic expatriation, we follow Richardson and McKenna [3], who noted that it is a self-initiated expatriation with an intention to stay in the host country for a longer period or at least until the end of the working contract. In the remainder of this paper, we first elaborate on intelligent career theory and discuss academics’ career investments. We then discuss how academic expatriates aspire to invest in their careers in the context of emerging economies, followed by a review of institutional practices at academic institutions. Lastly, we discuss future research ideas to further enrich the literature on academic expatriates’ careers in emerging economies.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Academic’s Career Investments: Three Ways of Knowing

Intelligent career theory, first developed by DeFillippi and Arthur [5], later revised by Arthur, Claman, and DeFillippi [8], provides a useful theoretical basis to understand academic careers. Characterized by the concepts of career self-management, international career mobility, and international career exploration [9,10], academic careers are cited as an example of a boundaryless career [11], which means that such careers are unbounded to any organization and are thus best understood as shaped by academics’ personal investments in their careers. Such personal investments help academics improve their teaching and research performance, which are global criteria for academics to achieve career success [10].

Knowing-why career investments are related to personal motivations to pursue a selected career path [8]. According to Baruch and Hall [12], academics seek to positively influence their motivation to perform by creating a scientific identity, and by developing a sense of self-appreciation for their cognitive and innovative competencies. Knowing-how career investments are competencies that refer to human capital, such as individuals’ knowledge, education, skills, and work experience [8]. Baruch and Hall [12] argue that academics invest in their careers by developing competencies that are essential for long-term academic career success, which involve research and teaching skills, and the ability to handle publication rejections. Lastly, knowing-whom career investments are linked to relational and professional networks that are helpful to career advancement. Such investments reflect academics’ urge to develop a scientific network to achieve success in terms of publications and research collaborations [8,13], and to develop a business network to generate research income [14].

2.2. Academics’ Career Investments in Emerging Economies

2.2.1. Knowing-Why Career Investments

Academic expatriates’ motivation to work in emerging economies reflects their knowing-why career investments [15]. On the basis of evidence in the expatriation and higher-education literature, academics from other parts of the world are motivated to further develop their career in emerging economies. For instance, scholars acknowledge that developed countries have economically grown more, which allows for academic institutions to invest more in education and research resources, and this attracts talented academics from all over the world [16]. Because much more talent is available, academic institutions in developed countries placed stricter rules and requirements regarding career-advancement opportunities, which leaves many academics with challenging career conditions at their home institutions [17]. For example, the abolishment of tenure positions in the United Kingdom reduced job security in academic institutions there [3,17]; tenure has always been a “luxury” characteristic of academic careers [12]. In academic institutions in Germany, job security is a prestige to higher ranks only, as nontenured positions are traditionally offered to junior academics [18]. In this system, it is essential to have a Ph.D. to stay within an academic career, and a second Ph.D. to be promoted to a professorial position [19]. Thus, tenured positions in Germany most likely come late in an academic career. In addition to these trends, heavy competition among academic institutions in developed countries increases pressure on them to improve their performance even more [14]. Such competition puts more pressure on academic staff in developed countries to deliver stronger and better results in terms of teaching, research publications, and other academic activities. Such pressure also often translates into other negative outcomes such as stress and burnout—issues that are common among many academics in developing countries [20].

By contrast, research shows that emerging economies seek to internationally hire more academics to meet international research and teaching requirements [1,2]. Bennion and Locke [21] demonstrated that, in Malaysia and Hong Kong, academic institutions seek to employ academic staff who obtain their Ph.Ds. abroad in developed countries, such as in the United States and the United Kingdom. Likewise, academic institutions in China aim to attract an increasing number of English-speaking academics from abroad [22]. The United Arab Emirates also aims to expand its higher-education systems by attracting and retaining qualified academics from abroad [23]. These trends are a strong signal to academics that they are needed more in emerging economies than they are back home; therefore, they likely consider their human capital to be much more valuable in emerging economies. For example, studies revealed that a motive of academics to move to emerging economies is to contribute to developing the country’s human capital with their expertise and skills that they have accumulated in their developed home countries [22,24]. Working in emerging economies can thus enrich the meaningful personal experiences of academic expatriates, who consider developing an academic career further in an emerging economy a fresh start [10].

2.2.2. Knowing-How Career Investments

Academics continuously feel the urge to develop skills and expertise that are essential for long-term academic career success, which involve mostly teaching and research skills [12]. In terms of teaching, research shows that academic expatriates are motivated to develop teaching skills that are required to deliver strong teaching performances [25]. Emerging economies need human resources that can help to facilitate the transition to a knowledge-based and entrepreneurship- or innovation-driven economy [7]. Therefore, academic expatriates could be expected to contribute to developing skilled human resources for an entrepreneurship- or innovation-driven economy. In a series of studies, scholars showed that many academic expatriates in emerging economies hold nationalities of developed Western Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, obtained their Ph.Ds in these developed countries, and/or also gained work experience there [9,22,26]. In these developed countries, the cultural values that support innovation such as risk-taking behavior are prevalent [27,28,29,30]; thus, teaching practices are also likely to be in line with such values. To develop a unique set of teaching skills in emerging economies, academic expatriates aim to transfer their technical knowledge and their own cultural values [31], and adapt their teaching style to local cultural standards [3,25]. This could result in a unique set of teaching skills and expertise that are accumulated both in the home and the host countries, which allow for academic expatriates to adopt the right teaching style in emerging economies while teaching students new theories and practices that are prevalent in their home countries.

In terms of research, studies show that funding is an important resource that determines how academics conduct research, what their research topics are, and which skills are required to perform the research [32]. Academic expatriates likely feel the urge to explore research topics and approaches that are relevant to the local economy, and to develop the required research skills to obtain more access to funding. For instance, businesses in emerging economies could benefit from academic expatriates’ research and use the knowledge to drive more innovation. Academic expatriates likely want to apply their research more to the needs of local businesses to obtain more business collaborations and external research funding options [33].

2.2.3. Knowing-Whom Career Investments

To further realize knowing-why and knowing-how career investments, academics feel the urge to build new relational and professional networks or expand existing ones that are helpful in achieving their career goals [15]. Academic expatriates in emerging economies have several reasons to actively build such networks.

First, academic expatriates in emerging economies could be actively networking with academics from developed countries to create and sustain international research collaborations. Although any academic may desire to do this, for academic expatriates in emerging economies, the desire may be much stronger, as research conducted in emerging economies is often not accorded the same value as research conducted in developed countries [10]; thus, international research collaborations with academics from developed countries may benefit academic expatriates’ research in several ways. First, research indicates that academics acknowledge that international research collaborations are highly valuable because they have great impact on their productivity and visibility in the global academic community, especially due to the higher citation rates of published papers [34,35,36,37]. Evidence exists that international research collaborations increase the chances that papers are published in journals of greater impact than the research of national collaborations [38], which may be even more true for national collaborations in emerging economies. Moreover, because academics from different countries are involved in such collaborations, scholars argue that published papers are advertised globally, and a larger audience thereby reads and cites these papers [39]. International research collaborations have proven to help academics produce both better and more research, especially when tasks are evenly distributed to everyone who is involved in the collaboration [34,40]. Academic expatriates are also likely motivated to create international research collaborations to develop stronger research skills. Research shows that such collaborations offer opportunities to develop increasingly better research skills as academics obtain access to their collaborators’ expertise, resources, and tacit knowledge [41].

Second, academic expatriates are also likely motivated to network with academics from developed countries to gain support. For instance, research shows that academic expatriates in emerging countries seem to face many challenges associated with adjustment hardships that are not only work-related, but also concern the general hardships of adjusting to a new life [42]. Scholars show that, through international research collaborations, academic expatriates can form networks with valuable relationships that can assist them in coping with these hardships [37]. In particular, these networks offer more opportunities to form relationships with peers that are culturally closer to academic expatriates [10], and may therefore be perceived as stronger support systems [15,43].

Lastly, research shows that, in emerging economies, influential social networks offer individuals a “priority” status and may thus be helpful in generating the required resources to perform good research and to further develop one’s career. In China, for example, such influential social networks are referred to as “guanxi”, and they are considered to be social resources that individuals develop and deploy to attain favors and career-related benefits [44,45,46]. Guanxi is even incorporated in human-resource management (HRM) practices [47]. Similar social networks can be found in South Korea [48]. Additionally, in the United Arab Emirates, “wasta” is an important, powerful network that influences career development [49]. Academic expatriates, therefore, also feel the urge to expand their professional network with influential locals to gain access to such influential networks.

2.3. Institutional Practices at Academic Institutions in Emerging Economies

Although research on institutional practices at academic institutions in emerging economies is limited, we identified several practices that could limit academic expatriates in investing in the three ways of knowing. Institutional practices refer to the institutional regulations, customs, and taken-for-granted norms prevalent in the host institutions that shape local organizational behavior [50].

2.3.1. Research

The literature suggests that, in emerging economies, research agendas are influenced by political agendas; therefore, academic institutions often limit academic expatriates in their freedom to decide on relevant research topics and to freely publish their work [51]. There are fewer opportunities for academic expatriates to conduct impactful research; according to scholars, this can also decrease their chances of publishing their research in leading journals [52]. Academic institutions in emerging economies respond to publication challenges by requesting their faculty members to publish in lower-quality journals that are more accessible, as differentiations between top-, middle-, and low-ranked journals are less relevant, and the quality of a journal no longer matters that much [51].

Academic expatriates may also face challenges in finding time to conduct research, as evidence exists that the time for research may not be equally distributed among faculty members in emerging economies. For instance, in China, teaching hours are based on seniority [17], which means that younger academics have more teaching hours and less time to perform research than their older peers do. In research-intensive academic institutions in China, full professors usually teach four hours a week, associate professors teach approximately six hours a week, and assistant professors teach eight to nine hours a week; these teaching hours are even doubled in teaching-intensive academic institutions [17], which leaves younger academics with limited or no research time. Research shows that this inequality among faculty members results in differences in teaching loads and other administrative workloads [53]. In China, cultural beliefs also seem to also support inequality between males and females [53]; therefore, compared to males, females are expected to spend much more time on teaching and administrative tasks than on research [54,55,56]. Academic expatriates’ nationalities may also play an important role in influencing how much research time they receive. International branch campuses in emerging economies aim to recruit Ph.D. holders from the country in which the parent institution is based; accordingly, they allow these “priority” candidates to negotiate more on employment contracts and agreements [17,57]. Priority candidates can thus create a better balance among teaching, service requirements, and research time. Academic expatriates from countries that are classified as native English-speaking seem to receive this priority status, as they are the preferred candidates for many academic institutions in emerging countries, which is the case in, for example, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia [17,21,57].

Although not a prevailing argument in the literature, some claims also support that funding to attend research conferences is controlled by powerful members of academic institutions in emerging economies [57]. Therefore, academic expatriates may also perceive inequality in terms of the support for funding to participate in international research conferences and internationally promote their research.

2.3.2. Teaching

Although academic institutions in emerging economies could benefit from new teaching skills and different teaching approaches brought in by academic expatriates, academic expatriates are limited in adopting innovative teaching approaches. Management practices are influenced by the “as-is” scores of a society’s culture (House et al., 2004). Emerging economies are characterized by a relatively higher “power distance”, and they adopt rule orientation in their practices (Ford, Connelly, and Meister, 2003). In such cultures, employees are expected to follow the rules set by authority figures and to avoid risky behaviors (Hofstede, 1983; Dorfman, Javidan, Hanges, Dastmalchian, and House, 2012), which tends to discourage academic expatriates from using different teaching approaches and workstyles (Austin et al., 2014). Academic expatriates could also thus be limited in adopting different research approaches.

2.3.3. Career Advancement

Lastly, scholars argue that, in emerging economies, the rules concerning career-advancement opportunities appear to be controlled by powerful members and are less transparent [23]. Priority candidates that are recruited from preferred developed countries are likely to be better able to negotiate about advancements in terms of promotions, salaries, and other career-related benefits [23,57], which also results in perceived unfairness from academic expatriates’ perspectives.

Table 1. Overview of (1) academic expatriates’ career investments in emerging economies and (2) institutional practices that limit academic expatriates’ career investments.

Career Investments	Academic Expatriates	Institutional Practices
Knowing-why	Motivation to move to emerging economies to use skills and knowledge to develop national human capital. Motivation to move to emerging economies to develop a meaningful career.	No freedom to decide on research topics and where to publish the work. Encouragement to publish in lower-ranked journals. Limitations in attending research conferences. Inequality in career-advancement opportunities.
Knowing-how	Motivation to develop research and teaching skills to facilitate emerging economies’ economic goals. Adapting research to local business needs to obtain more access to funding. Motivation to transfer different cultural norms and values while teaching	Inequality in the distribution of research and teaching time. Limitations in using innovative teaching and research approaches.
Knowing-whom	Motivation to form more ties with businesses to generate research income. Motivation to form more ties with influential locals. Motivation to form international research collaborations to develop research skills that are in line with international standards, to improve research productivity, and to create a support system.	Limitations in attending research conferences. Limitations in creating international research collaborations.

provides a summary of the key findings of this literature review.

3. Implications for Research

This paper employs a career perspective to understand academic expatriation to emerging economies. Specifically, we provided insights into how academic expatriates aspire to invest in their careers in the context of emerging economies, and what the role of institutional practices is in this process. We reviewed three bodies of literature that reflect (a) the evidence on the boundaryless career, (b) the literature on academic expatriation to emerging economies, and (c) the higher-education literature. Academic expatriates view their expatriation as an opportunity to develop a meaningful career, pursue their research direction, strengthen their research skills, and broaden their international network of scholars. Institutional practices can impede academics’ career investments. Future research on this topic should develop in at least the following three directions: (a) the institutional practices at academic institutions in emerging economies; (b) the careers of academic expatriates, and (c) a reciprocal relationship between institutional practices and the individual careers of academic expatriates.

Regarding the institutional practices of academic institutions in emerging economies, we encourage researchers to focus on exploring the underlying assumptions behind institutional practices and their career “imprinting” effects over time [58]. Accordingly, we refer to the literature on career imprints that shows how institutions, with their systems, structures, strategy, and culture, can shape individual career paths [59]. Concerning the underlying assumptions in institutional practices, one relevant stream of research includes studies that show that relatively limited talent-development practices are available at institutions in many emerging economies [60]. Indeed, research on talent management and development in emerging economies indicates that many organizations do not yet have all the necessary practices in place [61]. One reason for this is that a different level of labor-market competition exists in emerging economies [62,63], and informal mechanisms also exist that define promotions and individual career progression [64]. Thus, investigating institutional priorities and understanding the assumptions behind many host-institution practices would explain why such contexts might be challenging for academics’ career investments.

Regarding the careers of academic expatriates, it would be interesting to employ a career perspective on one’s adjustment in a host country [65]. Thus far, expatriate adjustment was mainly studied from a cultural or social perspective [66,67,68]. Little research was conducted to consider international adjustments from a career perspective [69]. This is particularly interesting because, unlike organizational assignees, academics often pursue self-initiated expatriation [26]. They are also often referred to as examples of “boundaryless-career” actors [11]. Individuals with boundaryless careers follow their individual career guidelines and consider themselves to be independent of their employer [11]. It is potentially not surprising that many boundaryless academics do not want to stay in institutional environments that are strictly regulated and guided [70]. However, research shows that, even in developing countries, institutional promotion scripts define careers [71]. Thus, research on the tensions between individual views on how to develop their careers and opportunities for academic work and career development at host institutions could shed further light on career-management practices in the academic institutions in emerging economies.

Concerning the reciprocal relationship between institutional practices and the individual careers of academic expatriates, in addition to the aforementioned idea that the host institutions’ HR and management practices influence how the careers of academic expatriates unfold, researchers could also address the idea that academic expatriates shape their host-institution environment, and thus influence changes in HR and other management practices. This research would be in line with many recent career studies that position career actors as both agents of their own personal development [72] and as agents who enact or shape their immediate environment [73,74]. Regarding career agency, there is already a growing body of the literature that conceptualizes and studies international assignments as a context for career building and even offers a perspective on the alignment between agents’ and principles’ (institutional) priorities [75]. However, little research exists that addresses how expatriates transfer and translate their expertise [76]; therefore, little is known about how they shape host institutions’ practices. Moreover, most of this research was conducted in multinational corporations rather than academic institutions [77,78]. Addressing how academics transfer their knowledge and shape host institutions’ practices would thus offer an important opportunity for future research.

4. Practical Implications

Academic institutions in emerging economies can use this paper to better understand how academic expatriates aspire to invest in their careers and how to strengthen their institutional practices and policies. Although much was accomplished by many emerging economies to an attractive lifestyle both culturally and socially [79], it is often forgotten that one of the key reasons for academics to expatriate is to continue their career development in environments that could provide resources and opportunities for their development [9]. For institutions, this means that they should be guided by both their own institutional development priorities and by the career priorities of academic expatriates.