Globalisation of researcher mobility within the UK Higher Education: explaining the presence of overseas academics in the UK academia

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that the power structure that lies within the UK elite universities dictates a division of labour through which the inflows of overseas academics into the UK academic labour markets are skewed towards these elite academic institutions where they are employed primarily in research-only posts. These posts, are less valued and are difficult to fill by UK academics. This explains the over-concentration non-UK academics within these posts and suggests that it is not a coincidence, but a result of a division of labour in which they are ‘used’ as a replacement labour.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• overseas academics
• selected
• globalisation
• academia
• manual labour

Acknowledgements

The support of the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors alone are responsible for the interpretation of the data. A previous draft of this paper has been presented at the 60th conference of the BSA and International and the International Workshop on Comparative Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Beit Maiersdorf 3–5 June 2013.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship in the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at University of Bristol the Migration Research Unit at University College London.

Notes

1 By academic staff, we mean staff employed at UK Higher Education Institutions as lecturers, researchers or both.

2 Press release 156 – Staff in Higher Education Institutions 2009/10: see http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1969&Itemid=161, viewed on 5 May 2011

3 For high-tech industries dependent on highly skilled workers, the region's ability to attract or ‘drain’ highly educated Asian immigrants provides clear competitive advantages. Not only has another country borne the social cost of educating these workers, their degrees will earn them more in the USA than they can at home, yet those workers still cost employers less than their domestic counterparts. The region's low-tech post-Fordist firms have also replicated the advantages of going abroad, or virtual globalisation, by targeting undocumented immigrants, particularly Latinas, as their primary labour source (Valle and Torres, 2000, 17).

4 Golden Triangle (GT) universities include Imperial College, King's College, the LSE, UCL, Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Most or all GT universities are members of the Russell group so the two categories are not exclusive. GT is not an officially recognised term, whereas RG is used as a category in HESA data sets. We created GT as a definition of the top of the top.

5 The RG is an association of 20 major research-intensive universities of the UK. These are: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial College London, Kings College London, Leeds, Liverpool, LSE, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Queen's University Belfast, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, UCL and Warwick.

6 In a separate analysis for another article, we found that the overseas staff's annual salary is lower than the UK staff annual salary by £943.65.