Bidding for successful academic enculturation: the story of a home-trained, home-based non-Anglophone scientist

ABSTRACT

Academic enculturation, or the socialisation into a target academic community, is a crucial event in the trajectory development of aspiring scholars. It is a protracted process subject to the interplay of a constellation of factors. With the aim of uncovering potential contributors to positive enculturative outcomes, this paper reports on the case of Wang, a home-trained, home-based Chinese scientist who earned full professorship at the relatively young age of 36. An in-depth, semi-structured interview is conducted in which Wang gives retrospective accounts of significant experiences in his journey. A range of supplementary information, including representative publications, an up-to-date list of scholarly achievements, and his personal webpage at the official institutional website, is also collected to corroborate and add nuance to Wang’s self-told story. Data are analysed using the method of inductive content analysis and discussed within the framework of situated learning theories. Varying extents of mutual engagement with/as the master and mutually facilitative dual engagement in target communities are found to characterise Wang’s enculturative success. Implications are drawn on how similarly positioned novice researchers can be supported in their quest for enculturation during and beyond graduate studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic enculturation
• situated learning theories
• legitimate peripheral participation (LPP)
• Chinese scientist
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the context of this paper, academic enculturation and academic socialization will be used interchangeably.

2 The National Key Laboratories is a list of prestigious laboratories, either affiliated to universities or in the private sector, that receive funding and administrative support from China’s central government.

3 IEEE is the world’s largest and most widely recognized professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering and associated disciplines. According to the organization’s official website, IEEE only awards Fellowship to an elite few of its members ‘whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation’, which makes the distinction a high ideal for many in the field.