Explaining the role of international scholars in semi-peripheries. Evidence from Slovakia

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to examine the socio-demographic profiles of international scholars in Slovakia and the motivations which local higher education institutions have in hiring them. Slovakia is understood as a model semi-peripheral country in the global system of knowledge production. We rely on data from the Slovak Register of Higher Education Institutions Employees and an onomastic method which enabled us to identify particular international scholars. A multivariate analysis of public data allowed us to create an image of this heterogeneous group and reveal relationships between the share of foreigners employed by Slovak higher education institutions and the characteristics of these institutions. This supports the assumption that foreign-born faculty members serve primarily as a solution to the problem of qualified workforce shortages and should not be viewed as a sign of academic excellence.

KEYWORDS:

• Semi-periphery
• academic career
• foreign-born faculty
• academic mobility
• highly-skilled migrants

Acknowledgements

The feedback and comments provided by the two anonymous referees are greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kamil Luczaj http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1603-3259

Miloslav Bahna http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2544-3660

Notes

1 It is important to keep in mind that for Wallerstein, ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’ are characteristics of the economic processes within these countries, not the countries themselves. The phrase ‘semi-peripheral countries’ is a convenient mental shortcut.

2 According to Alatas (2003, 606), in social sciences there are just three core countries: the US, the UK and France, and countries such as Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and Germany should be considered semi-peripheral insofar as they are dependent on ideas originating in the social science centers, but also exert some influence on peripheral social science communities. This conceptualization is, in our opinion, too narrow.

3 Usually, local topics are unlikely to resonate with these audiences but some ideas do. Connell cites a brilliant example of an Australian gender studies scholar, who ironically learned about postcolonial theory via the metropole, since it appeared in the journals she follows (Connell et al. 2018, 53).

4 Unfortunately, after 2010, data on foreign researchers is missing for many countries (including Germany, France and the United Kingdom). Eurostat presents information on 17 European countries (see: Table 1).

5 In our understanding, Estonia was ‘colonized’ as a part of the USSR and – what’s crucial here – still have a large number of ethnically non-Estonians with connections mainly in Russia.

6 The Czech Republic is an outlier in the region mostly due to the high numbers of Slovak students enrolled at local universities, who profit from the lack of a language barrier.

7 Source: https://www.academics.com/guide/professor-salary-germany, Academics.com by Die Zeit. Salaries in Slovak academia vary widely according to different criteria, so it is difficult to find an analogic position for them in the local pay scale.

8 ‘Register zamestnancov vysokých škôl’ available at: https://www.portalvs.sk/regzam/

9 One such tool is names registers such as: https://www.behindthename.com. In this way, we can find out, first of all, what country the given name comes from and often also the subject's gender. This method worked well for most of the subjects, but failed in the case of Asian names, which are often gender neutral.

10 If undergraduate studies were completed in Slovakia and there were no other data, the subject was treated as Slovak.

11 If in doubt, we looked at the list of publications: if all were written in Slovak or English, the subject was treated as Slovak.

12 Problems with differentiating Czech from Slovak names seems to be less important as certain migration scholars exclude the Czech Republic from the list of foreign countries, since Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one country until 1993 (see e.g. Williams and Baláž 2008, 1927).

13 It should be noted that this register includes neither employees of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV), nor short-term employees.

14 However, as our onomastic search suggests, having a double affiliation with Slovak HEIs is a rare situation for foreign-born academics in Slovakia.

15 All faculties from the Matej Bel University and Technical University in Zvolen are excluded from our dataset.

16 Data from 30 June 2017. In rare cases of dual affiliation, we counted a subject as an employee of the bigger institution or of an institution which was the obvious primary employer according to the contract type (full-time veus part-time).

17 This observation is based on the reexamination of the Slovak Register of Higher Education Institutions Employees after six months.

18 There is a possibility that the overrepresentation of men can, to some extent, be a side effect of the onomastic method, as women are harder to identify based on their name considering that some of them change their last name over their life course.

19 Data for 2012.

20 We identified the nationality of 246 foreigners (85% of the final sample). In case of the remaining 43 people (15%), there was a strong indication that the person is a foreigner, but it was impossible to identify the particular country of origin. For instance, the fact of being a French native-speaker is not sufficient to uncover one's nationality, as French is widely spoken not only in France but also in Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, various African countries, or Canada.

21 The onomastic search identified 14 Austrians employed in Slovakia, or 5.7% of the entire sample.

22 The corresponding numbers for people employed within HSS and language fields were 13.8% and 14.7% respectively.

23 However, in the Slovak case, publication of HEI employees are registered centrally, and one publication cannot be dedicated to two universities in Slovakia simultaneously.

24 We included faculty members from Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine (register data) as well as Georgia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia (onomastic study).

25 7 guarantors came from Poland, 5 from Hungary and 4 from the Czech Republic.

26 i.e. being listed in the Times Higher Education list for 2017.

Additional information

Funding

The work of Kamil Luczaj was supported by Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland [grant number 0142/DLG/2017/10]. The work of Miloslav Bahna was supported by Slovak Research and Development Agency (SRDA) [grant number APVV-14-0527].