Letter from the editors

Dear Colleagues, Welcome to our third issue of 2019, which contains a healthy dose of ‘culture’ for our readership. This includes articles on academic bullying and national culture (Finland and Estonia), disciplinary culture and Confucianism (in Taiwan), and how academic ‘tribal’ cultures incorporate teaching-only academics (in the Caribbean). Of course, culture is also an underlying part of other articles in this issue, such as the quality of Chinese partnerships with foreign universities and why female academics in the UK take on more ‘academic housework’.

Scepticism, critique and disagreement are an inherent part of the exchange of ideas at universities, but this does not extend to inappropriate behaviours, such as persistent personal criticism and outright bullying. The boundaries, prevalence and types of bullying also have cultural dimensions, as Meriläinen and colleagues outline in their empirical study of academic bullying in Finland and Estonia.

Opaque promotion processes may contribute to why women remain under-represented in senior academic positions in the UK (and everywhere else) but, as demonstrated by Burg and Macfarlane, transparency does help if women typically do more of the time-consuming and lowly esteemed ‘academic housework’.

Transparency in performance and reward is also a key part of Taiwan’s ‘Aim for the Top University Project’, which links funding to performance on rankings, publishing and bibliometric data. Chia Wei Tang’s research on two very different departments within a Taiwanese university provides insight into how implementation is mediated by disciplinary culture and Confucius values.

Disciplinary culture is a critical part of academic identity. Academics have been likened to ‘tribes’ working within knowledge-bounded ‘territories’. But how do these tribes accommodate teaching-only academics? Erik Blair and Georgette Briggs describe their ambiguous roles in a Caribbean university, likening them to a tribe that is ‘hidden in plain sight’.

Many Chinese students gain international education abroad, but there is an increasing number of Chinese-foreign partnerships in China. These programs require Chinese host universities to submit self-appraisal reports to the Chinese government. Hu and colleagues examine these reports and find a range of problems undermining teaching quality.

University managers desire more publications and grants from their personnel, but in terms of efficiency, does it matter if we measure publications, grants or both? Several studies have used either metric, but few have used both. Gralka, Wohlrabe and Bornmann put this to the empirical test in a German context and, perhaps reassuringly for research policy makers, find consistency across different research performance metrics.

Research capacity building is more than just growth in research inputs or outputs: it requires human capital development and supportive institutional culture. Lee and Kuzhabekova outline a conceptual model for building local research capacity, informed by interviews with academics in Kazakhstan. As one local mathematician explained, capacity building also means dismantling some existing cultures: ‘To develop the scientific potential, it is necessary to get rid of some people here… We have a problem: nepotism.’

As always, we hope you enjoy reading the articles and welcome your feedback.