Globalization and Academic’s Workplace Learning

Abstract

Globalization is the major confronting challenge of higher education worldwide. And internationalization has become a response of higher education to meet the demands and challenges of globalization. In the recent decades, Chinese government has developed different policies to steer education reforms in order to achieve the aim of internationalization. The internationalizing process has produced contradictory changes in academic workplaces. This study explores how globalizing processes affect academic work and academics’ workplace learning in China. It reports on a series of policy changes, and the effects of these policies on the workplace learning of academics. The changing policies positively affect academics by bringing rich information and resources to their workplaces. But at the same time, academic work is becoming increasingly restrictive and controlled. The self-interests of the academics are reconstituted in terms of the interests of government and university, producing tension in academics’ workplaces. Moreover, the conflicts among different policies cause confusion. We argue that the changing policies in relation to the internationalization of higher education have affected academics in both positive and negative ways. Therefore, there is a call for policy-makers to adjust the existing policies in order to create a better policy environment for academics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuhong Wang

Xuhong Wang is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She previously studied and worked at Tsinghua University and the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in education policy, higher education, and international education. She is currently looking at the impacts of globalization on Chinese higher education, and how globalization shapes academic work and academic identity. Address for correspondence: [email protected].

Terri Seddon

Terri Seddon is a professor of leadership studies at Australian Catholic University and was previously at Monash University. Her research examines education and educational work in global transitions, focusing particularly on workplace learning and leadership in tertiary, adult, and postcompulsory learning spaces. This research program is anchored by the concept of “boundary politics,” and asks questions about knowledge, authority, citizen formation, and the conditions for practical politics that are making and remaking societies, schooling and an emerging global order.