International relocation of inpatriate managers: assessing and facilitating acceptance in the headquarters organization

The shortage of qualified managers to assign to overseas positions has necessitated rethinking of the viable candidates pools. A relatively new group of global managers have emerged, inpatriate managers. These are foreign nationals and third-country nationals who are relocated to the organization's domestic headquarters to serve as a “linking-pin” to the global marketplace. This paper examines challenges to effectively incorporating these inpatriate managers into the domestic organization. The various issues with inpatriate manager adjustment to the domestic macro and organizational culture are examined. In addition, the necessary social support in work and non-work contexts is discussed.     

Fostering College-Going Expectations of Immigrant Students Through the Sympathetic Touch of School Leadership

This article intends to support the efforts of administrators, teachers, and community activists to center race, equity, and anti-deficit perspectives within the practice of school leadership. By drawing upon methods of critical race studies, and Du Bois's 1935 Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Does the Negro need separate schools? Journal of Negro Education, 4(3), 328–335.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] concept of the sympathetic touch, the author provides examples of anti-deficit approaches to sympathetic leadership in a large, diverse high school in California. Through reflections and recollections upon this case study, the author underscores ways for school leaders to formulate the conditions for college-going expectations for low-income immigrant students. This retrospective account includes concrete leadership examples, political strategies, and scenarios to illuminate the relevance and utilities of the sympathetic touch in educational leadership. In effect, the article calls for school leaders to harness anti-deficit and anti-oppressive mindsets in the work of inclusion, equity, and social justice.     

A Policy Entrepreneur in the Information Society: Shaping the Interdisciplinarity of Brain Research in Korea

This paper aims to show the historical contingency of policy entrepreneurship in science by analyzing the case of brain research in South Korea during the last decade of the 20th century. This decade saw an increasing emphasis placed upon the development of information technology and its use for societal changes. The rise of the “Information Society” in Korea was an important context for shaping the field of brain research as an amalgam of multiple disciplines which led to the passage of the Brain Research Promotion Act; the first law in the world enacted to promote brain research. This paper, through focusing on in what context someone takes up an entrepreneurial role, shows how the concept of interdisciplinarity has been shaped by, and how it has influenced the development of brain research and its related policy measures in Korea. It ultimately reveals the contingent and transient aspect of a policy entrepreneur and his effect on building a new field.     

The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers.     

From a Means to an End: Patenting in the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ and its Effect on Research Practice

This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools.     

Situated Knowledge Production,International Impact: Changing Publishing Practices in a German Engineering Department

In this paper, I analyze how recent calls to internationalize publication behavior affect research practices at an automotive engineering department in Germany. Automotive engineering is a field with traditionally rather scarce publication activity and strong connections to industry. Substantial authority to define suitable research problems and ways of organizing knowledge production on a daily basis was therefore reserved for local academic elites as well as corporate partners. However, as engineers are increasingly expected to prove their performance through publishing in international peer-reviewed journals, the judgment as to what should be considered “interesting” or “robust” research is partly relegated to a gradually globalizing community of academic peers. This generates a variety of tensions with established ways of coordinating epistemic work at the department studied here. For example, the thematic interests of journals tend to exert a disruptive centrifugal pull in the context of an otherwise highly modular research culture, and possibilities to publish in international venues are unequally distributed across individual research projects. But while department members agree that there is a lack of fit between current practices and new expectations towards their publishing behavior, their opinions about the conclusions that should be drawn differ significantly. Some researchers argue that profound organizational changes are necessary to foster the academic rigor of German engineering research. Others believe that evaluation criteria should simply be adapted. This situation is arguably characteristic for research areas with a traditionally strong orientation to local stakeholders, and it suggests a need for more deliberative, participatory approaches to research evaluation in such fields.     

Projectification of Doctoral Training? How Research Fields Respond to a New Funding Regime

Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one that is limited in time, scope and content. This article demonstrates how the public funding of doctoral programs expands this model of project research from experienced academics to the socialization process for the new academic generation. This process of “projectification” underlies funding-driven institutional changes in doctoral training. A multi-level comparative study of German policies, funding mechanisms and organizational frameworks for doctoral training demonstrates the emergence of a specific model of predefined PhD projects. The investigation of doctoral training practices reveals that socio-epistemic preconditions regulate whether research fields adopted or rejected this demanding model. This result contradicts widespread claims about a radical change in doctoral training and suggests focusing on the actual practices of field-specific doctoral research.