The internationality imperative in academia. The ascent of internationality as an academic virtue

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates internationality as an academic virtue that is highly relevant for research biographies. The discursive trajectory of this virtue is assessed by comparing ascriptions of internationality in 216 academic obituaries from the US, UK and Germany, from physics, sociology and history, and from the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Our analysis reveals that internationality as a virtue is more prevalent in German than in US obituaries, that it plays a greater role in physics than in history obituaries, and that, independent from national and disciplinary contexts, the ascription of internationality increases over time. The results are relevant for research on academic values and on the internationalization of academia. By drawing on obituaries, the analysis conveys how ‘internationality’ developed as a discursive construct, and how it turned into an imperative that academics increasingly have to comply with in order to be deemed honorable.

KEYWORDS:

• Internationalization
• discourse
• academic values
• obituaries
• academic biographies

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Debora Eicher and Katharina Kunißen as well as two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This definition of internationalization differs from ‘globalization’, which describes the flow of information, people and resources across borders. Each country may respond differently to globalization, and internationalization is one way to respond (Altbach & Knight, 2007).

2 The obituaries were collected from a total of 59 publications, including academic journals (e.g., British Journal of Sociology for UK Sociology, or Journal of Modern History for US History) and publications from respective professional associations (e.g., Footnotes for US Sociology, or Physikalische Blätter for German Physics).

3 Quotes from German obituaries have been translated by the authors.

4 To account for the small sample size, we also tested the more robust Kendall rank correlation coefficient for comparison (Chen & Popovich, 2002). All findings point in the same direction.

5 R = .150 (p = .028).

6 There are no significant interaction effects between the discipline and the country obituaries have been published in.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Foundation.