High Educ (2016) 71:399–413 DOI 10.1007/s10734-015-9912-8
Internationalizing Chinese higher education: a glonacal analysis of local layers and conditions Huacong Liu1 • Amy Scott Metcalfe2
Published online: 18 June 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract In this paper, we examine the local conceptions, interpretations, and implementations of internationalization at one Chinese higher education institution, to provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of internationalization in the globalizing educational context. In particular, we explore the analytical capacity of Marginson and Rhoades High Educ 43(3), 281–309, (2002) glonacal (global ? national ? local) agency heuristic by examining the local ‘‘layers and conditions’’ of our research site. We found two local conceptions, Xue Shu Feng Qi (a Mandarin phrase relating to the academic culture) and Jie Gui (a metaphor for internationalization) were used by local actors in relation to the inbound and outbound flows of scholars and disciplinary norms that influenced the global and national reputation of the department. We interpret these local concepts as salient ‘‘layers and conditions’’ of the glonacal agency heuristic, providing an empirical example to more fully understand the theoretical implications of this perspective in higher education research. Keywords Chinese higher education China Higher education Internationalization Globalization Academic culture Glonacal
& Huacong Liu
[email protected] Amy Scott Metcalfe
[email protected] 1
Department of Education Policy Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 405A Rackley Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA
2
Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
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Introduction In the past two decades, the internationalization of China’s higher education sector has been an important element of national policy as the country seeks to develop world-class research universities (Huang 2015; Mok 2002; Rhoads et al. 2014). According to Yang (2014), internationalization in China has taken three major forms: study abroad, curricular adaptations, and transnational programmatic development. In their study of the rise of research universities in China, Rhoads et al. (2014) defined internationalization as, ‘‘growing transnational ties and multinational economic, political, legal, and cultural interpenetrations’’ (p. 92). In contrast, the term internationalization has been used in the West as a catchall phrase for globalizing intentions and activities. A prominently cited definition of internationalization in Western higher education scholarship was first developed by de Wit and Knight (1997) and redefined by Knight (1994, 2004), as the ‘‘process of integrating an international and intercultural dimension into the teaching, research and service functions of the institution’’ (Knight 1994, p. 7). Integration is unproblematized in this definition, assuming a neutral or positive view of internationalizing activities. Yet, internationalization has been critiqued, in terms of its potential to exploit international students and the long-term impact of the strategy on institutional capacities and infrastructure (Beck 2012; Ilieva et al. 2014). China’s internationalization efforts are particularly fraught considering the country’s historical status as a ‘‘sending’’ nation that now aims to become a ‘‘receiving’’ nation (Mok and Ong 2014). As China strives to regain or retain its best and brightest scholars, the growth and strength of Chinese higher education will likely affect internationalization efforts throughout the world. We find that China’s globalizing institutions offer theoretical challenges regarding the process of internationalization as it has been described in the literature. We are less concerned with what counts as internationalization than with what matters in internationalizing environments. Marginson and Rhoades stated more than a decade ago: ‘‘Global forces are not so much analyzed or theorized as they are identified’’ in higher education research (2002, p. 281). In other words, the mechanisms of globalization are often not the objects of higher education policy analysis; rather, globalized policies and practices are described but under-theorized. In this paper, we examine the local conceptions, interpretations, and implementations of internationalization at one Chinese higher education institution, to provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of internationalization in the globalizing educational context. In particular, we explore the analytical capacity of Marginson and Rhoades (2002) glonacal (global ? national ? local) agency heuristic by examining the local ‘‘layers and conditions’’ of our research site. To date, there have been few studies that have fully applied the glonacal agency heuristic, a highly complex theory of interconnections between the global, national, and local layers of higher education. Vidovich (2004) noted that ‘‘More empirical research using a ‘glonacal agency’ heuristic for exploring patterns of influence may well lead to further refinement of the heuristic that Marginson and Rhoades offered as an exploratory tool—a beginning’’ (p. 352). While some higher education policy scholars have utilized a glonacal perspective, our study focuses exclusively on the local context, examining the ‘‘layers and conditions’’ that affect connections between the global–national–local layers. We found two local conceptions, Xue Shu Feng Qi (a Mandarin phrase relating to the academic culture) and Jie Gui (a metaphor for internationalization) were used by local actors in relation to the inbound and outbound flows of scholars and disciplinary norms that influenced the global and national reputation of the department. We
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interpret these local concepts as salient ‘‘layers and conditions’’ of the local hexagon of the Marginson and Rhoades (2002) glonacal agency heuristic, providing an empirical example to more fully understand the theoretical implications of the glonacal perspective in higher education research.
Theoretical framework Empirical research in the Chinese context has offered both macro-perspectives (e.g., Chen and Pan 2009; Gao 2014; Huang 2014; Liu et al. 2002, 2003; Pan and Xiao 2008; Tam and Chen 2010; Zha 2012) and institutional-level analyses of the internationalization process (e.g., Feng 2012; Yang 2004, 2005b; Yang and Welch, 2011, 2012). For example, Yang and Welch’s (2011) study of a regional university in Xinjiang Province highlighted an interesting case of internationalization largely owing to its unique culture, political environment, and its geographic location. Feng’s (2012) study provided an institutional perspective on recent developments of globalization of higher education in China, with a focus on transnational educational operation through branch campuses established by foreign universities. Despite primarily studying decentralization and marketization of an academic unit in China, Yang’s (2011) study shed light on the challenges experienced during a period of curriculum reform for a computer sciences program and the underlying dilemma regarding whether to maintain a teaching focus or develop a research emphasis in the context of internationalization. We sought an analytical approach that would allow for a closer examination of local practices while situating these within policy environments that promote or curtail international academic exchange. Marginson and Rhoades called for higher education research that was more explicitly interconnected, stating: ‘‘We need work that attends to local response and reality, explores local institutions, and considers local practices. More than that, we need to study how local actors and institutions extend their activities to the international stage’’ (2002, p. 286). A glonacal approach signifies attention to global, national, and local forces and the interplay between them. The agency aspect of the heuristic is necessary to recognize actors and agents at the organizational and individual levels. Marginson and Rhoades explained that, ‘‘at each level—global, national, and local—there are formal agencies and collective human actions that are central to understanding globalization and higher education’’ (p. 289). The graphical representation of the glonacal agency heuristic is an overlapping set of hexagons, one each for the global, national, and local dimensions. The hexagons are formed by nodes representing human agency in polities, economies, and higher education and organizational agency in governmental and non-governmental bodies, economic groups and markets, and educational and professional agencies. In this way, each hexagon has three nodes for human agency and three nodes for organizational agency, tied to the other hexagons by ‘‘connections and flows,’’ which are described as reciprocity, strength, layers and conditions, and spheres of activity. ‘‘Reciprocity’’ emphasizes the flow of resources and the movement of agents between layers. ‘‘Strength’’ describes the magnitude of the flows and the degree of influence. ‘‘Layers and conditions’’ are ‘‘historically embedded structures on which current activity and influence are based, and the current circumstances that make it possible for lines of force and effect to move from one level to another, global, national, and local’’ (Marginson and Rhoades 2002, p. 292–293). Finally, the scope of influence is understood through ‘‘spheres.’’
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Many scholars have utilized the glonacal approach as part of a larger body of the literature concerned with ‘‘glocalization’’ (Drori et al. 2014), a more complex view of globalization that is concerned with local effects. With regard to internationalization, Hou et al. (2015) employed the glonacal agency perspective to examine the transnational development of quality assurance programs in Asia, with a particular emphasis on Taiwan. Cho and Palmer (2013) referred to a ‘‘glonacalized campus’’ as the university of the twenty-first century. Oleksiyenko (2015) has utilized the glonacal approach in his study of disadvantaged students in Hong Kong who seek international higher education opportunities to promote social mobility. These studies and others have shown the resiliency of the framework over time and the wide range of higher education topics to which it can be applied. We find that the glonacal approach fits well with studies of local academic culture in globalizing contexts, particularly that of academic departments with a high number of internationally educated faculty. While faculty are certainly influenced by global, national, and local policy structures, their work lives are also influenced by their institutional location (Lee 2007). Local concepts emerged from the study, challenging and expanding our understanding of the glonacal perspective. We view two local conceptualizations, Xue Shu Feng Qi and Jie Gui (described below), as part of the ‘‘layers and conditions’’ of the glonacal agency heuristic, local strategies, and cultural dynamics that make up part of the filter through which the intentions of actors and agencies flow or are impeded between the global, national, and local spheres of influence. At the level of the academic department, we undertook a micro-analysis with the local ‘‘hexagon’’ of the glonacal agency heuristic in full view in order to follow the trajectories of the connections and flows to and from the national and global dimensions. It is here at the local level that we might see resistance as well as reciprocity, and a reconfiguration of practices and dispositions to enable greater global–national–local movements.
Methods We selected an ideal single-case design (Yin 2009) for our examination of the effects of academic culture on Chinese internationalization from a glonacal perspective. Our study focuses on the School of Economics (SOE) at Pacific University, a pseudonym. Pacific University is a 211 Project1 institution. Owing to its location, Shanghai, Pacific University has attracted a large number of returnee scholars from the West since internationalization efforts began there in 2004. Most of those Western-trained returnee scholars went to SOE, the largest academic unit within Pacific University. In 2004, SOE seized the opportunity of a policy change in the central government to become a Project 9852 Innovation Platform in Economics, sponsored by China’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance. Yang (2014) noted in his recent overview of internationalization of Chinese institutions that the so-called soft sciences have attained much lower levels of internationalization than their hard sciences counterparts in China. He explained that this is partly due to ‘‘the varied 1
Project 211 is a priority-funding policy that allocates extra money to China’s top universities. It was first announced in 1993, and implemented in 1995. It now includes 116 universities.
2
In 2004, China’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance jointly decided to fund a number of Project 985 Innovation Platforms and the Project 985 of Philosophy and Social Sciences innovation Programs, to promote the formation of a group of world-class disciplines and to promote the development of social sciences disciplines.
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ideologies, paradigm, and discourses inherent in the humanities and social sciences and high dependency on language to convey their meanings’’ (p. 155). As the first social science school in China to conduct radical reforms toward internationalization, SOE is an ideal case to examine the more challenging social aspects of internationalization in the Chinese context. Furthermore, the field of economics is arguably one of the more interesting areas of disciplinary change within the Chinese higher education academic landscape. Since the nation’s economic movement toward global participation in the 1980s as led by Deng Xiaoping, Western economic theory has co-existed with Marxist economics in universities and has received more government funding and support in research, and curricular development. Faculty members who were trained abroad not only absorbed Western culture, but also became experts in Western economics. Their return to the Chinese higher education landscape is significant for the discipline of economics as well as representative of a larger system of national economic reform. Data were collected from March to April 2011. The collection of data involved semistructured interviews, observations, analysis of departmental documents retrieved from the school’s website, and a close reading of national higher education policy since 1985. Semistructured interviews were conducted with all eight members of the Western Economics Department at SOE: seven male participants and one female participant. Two were locally trained, and six earned their doctoral degrees in the USA. The Dean and Associate Dean of the School were also members of this department and were included in the interview sample. Table 1 provides more basic background information of these eight participants. To be eligible to participate in the study, candidates had to meet either of the following criteria: (1) senior administrator candidates had to be actively involved in SOE’s strategic planning and decision makings since 2004 and (2) faculty member candidates had to be from the Department of Western Economics and actively teaching and/or advising and/or doing research in the past six years. Since some of the participants were fluent in both Mandarin and English, they were given the choice of conducting the interview in either language to ensure they felt comfortable during the interview. However, all of them chose Mandarin, their native language, which is also the first language of the co-author who conducted the interviews. This coauthor has dual-language expertise in Mandarin and English, which enabled her to both transcribe and translate the interviews. The questions for the faculty members were clustered as follows: (1) participants’ perceptions of academic environment change before and after 2004 when the Table 1 Description of interview participants Administrative role
Academic degree
Years of work experience at SOE when interviewed
Gender
Interviewee 1
Dean and a faculty member
Ph.D. from USA
6
Male
Interviewee 2
Associate dean and a faculty member
Ph.D. from USA
6
Male
Interviewee 3
Faculty member
Ph.D. from China
29
Male
Interviewee 4
Faculty member
Ph.D. from China
10
Male
Interviewee 5
Faculty member
Ph.D. from USA
6
Male
Interviewee 6
Faculty member
Ph.D. from USA
5
Male
Interviewee 7
Faculty member
Ph.D. from USA
6
Male
Interviewee 8
Faculty member
Ph.D. from USA
3
Female
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internationalization reform started; (2) participants’ academic activities both at SOE, nationally and internationally; (3) participants’ socialization within the department; and (4) participants’ understanding of internationalization. A different protocol was used to interview the senior administrators. The questions included these areas: (1) participants’ understanding of internationalization and rationale of SOE’s internationalization; (2) SOE’s negotiation with the government(s) about funding and support; (3) challenges of SOE’s internationalization process; and (4) efforts in bridging varying academic cultures between Western and locally trained scholars. After each interview, we took field notes to see whether there were any key concepts or ideas that were worth keeping in mind as we went through the interview process. All the interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed for analysis. The transcripts of each interview were sent to the interviewees, respectively. We confirmed approval and received feedback. The feedback we received from each participant was taken into consideration for the transcription and coding processes, and it was later stored in a secured file. The email correspondence was deleted to preserve the anonymity of the participants, to the best of our ability. The data collection also involved a number of institutional documents. The documents provide historical information that was unavailable or not complete from other sources (Glesne 2010). For example, the history of SOE and previous curricula of its various programs were available from some of the archives instead from the interviews. Also, collecting documents gave us new sources of information that we did not expect. For example, SOE had put together a series of policy recommendations to the Ministry of Education in order to inform higher education policy making based on its own experiences of trying to integrate Western and Chinese higher educational practices. These policy recommendations provided a useful data source for triangulation with our own findings.
Findings Teaching and research at SOE had been dominated by Marxist political economics since it was resuscitated from the Culture Revolution of 1966–1976, which most severely disrupted the Chinese higher education system. However, as China implemented its Reform and Open Policy in the 1980s, Western economics, favoring market ideologies, became popular in China. Following this trend, SOE started the Western Economics program in the late 1990s. Changes have been constant since then, including starting new academic programs, enlarging student recruitment, and the like. Explicit internationalization efforts began in 2004. The primary focus of our inquiry was how the faculty members and administrators at the case study institution understood internationalization and their perception of the impact of internationalization in their working lives. SOE developed very concrete plans during its internationalization process, which entailed curricular reform, teaching, research, and academic exchange. While a specific strategy was in place with evidence of deep implementation, individual perceptions of the nature and value of internationalization varied among the interview participants. In the next sections, we organize our findings relative to the two local concepts that we interpret as the ‘‘layers and conditions’’ of the glonacal agency heuristic. First, we discuss the historical layer of the local academic culture, known as the Xue Shu Feng Qi. Second, we discuss the contemporary condition of Jie Gui as a metaphor for internationalization in the local research context.
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Strengthening Xue Shu Feng Qi Interviews and SOE’s official documents suggest that internationalization at SOE took very specific forms. It was primarily reflected in four dimensions of SOE’s activities: (1) overseas recruiting and strengthening Xue Shu Feng Qi, a Mandarin term meaning something similar to academic ethos, culture, or atmosphere, (2) curriculum reform and improving teaching quality, (3) emphasis on research, and (4) intensifying academic exchange. Yang and other researchers (Liu et al. 2002) have showed that many Chinese diaspora scholars with good intentions to return and serve China shrink back at the sight of bad Xue Shu Feng Qi. This concept has not been well defined in the literature, although it has been frequently used in public discourse concerning corruption in China’s higher education sector. As Yang’s study on ‘‘Corruption in China’s Higher Education System’’ showed, ‘‘The term academic corruption in mainland China usually refers to such violations as misrepresenting one’s educational background or work experience, plagiarism, distortion of research data, affixing one’s name to someone else’s publications, and making false commercial advertisements, as well as other acts.’’ (Yang 2005a, p. 18). Chinese higher education reform often attempts to change a corrupt Xue Shu Feng Qi in order to attract and retain foreign-trained researchers. This was the story at the case study institution. We noted three practices related to strengthening the Xue Shu Feng Qi of the case study department: overseas recruiting, intensifying academic exchange, and changing patterns of academic communication.
Overseas recruiting The Dean of SOE explicitly indicated his dissatisfaction with the local Xue Shu Feng Qi, and it became the underlying rationale to change the institution by infusing new blood into the old system. Among the activities intended to foster greater internationalization at SOE, overseas recruiting was the first major step and the most aggressive one since the inception of the reform process in 2004. By 2011, SOE had hired over 40 overseas-trained PhDs, exclusively from prestigious graduate schools in North America, including Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of California at Berkeley. When asked why overseas recruitment was the most important step at SOE, the Dean said, ‘‘Initially the strategy was to recruit 10 people each year. We realized that it would not work if there were very few people coming back, because a few people would be easily assimilated by the local Xue Shu Feng Qi. They wouldn’t focus on teaching and research, rather they would go out for profitable projects or engage in some other activities. Only when there are a large number of returnees, they will bring back the advanced knowledge, but more importantly they will help revive the Xue Shu Feng Qi.’’ (Interviewee 1) The Associate Dean noted the poor Xue Shu Feng Qi at SOE was due in part to lower quality teaching when compared with Western practices. He stated, ‘‘There are over 40 local faculty members who do not have any overseas educational experiences. They are not familiar with practices at Western higher education
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institutions. They have no idea that frequent quizzes, homework, midterm, final exam, office hours, and syllabus, etcetera are essentials for student learning. A good instructor will let students know ahead of time what the course is going to offer through a detailed syllabus. But locally trained faculty members have no idea about this, and students just get used to this teaching style.’’ (Interviewee 2) Given their understandings of the local Xue Shu Feng Qi, both the Dean and the Associate Dean believed that aggressively attracting overseas-trained talent was an important step toward institutional improvement. They hoped that through participating in teaching, research and some managerial work, and interacting with locally trained faculty members and administrators, returnees would help re-build the institute’s Xue Shu Feng Qi. They further believed that a strong Xue Shu Feng Qi would eventually attract the best and brightest overseas faculty as well as to keep the current ones in the long run.
Intensifying academic exchange SOE’s internationalization strategy entailed frequent academic exchanges, both nationally and internationally. However, the two academic groups (locally trained and Westerntrained) at SOE did not benefit from these activities equally. One local faculty member explained that familiarity with the English language was becoming central to academic exchange, whereas previously it had not been essential: ‘‘Honestly, the Xue Shu Feng Qi has changed. For example, it is more convenient to communicate with researchers from overseas, through seminars and conferences held at the institute. However, not everyone benefits from this, mainly because of the language barrier. Most locally trained faculty members won’t go to seminars organized by returnees, because first, the topics are irrelevant to their own research, and second, their English is not good enough to participate. Locally trained people do not belong to the same academic circle as the returnees do.’’ (Interviewee 4) Another locally trained scholar pointed out that different knowledge structures between the returnee group and the locally trained faculty group was another obstacle preventing them from participating in academic exchange initiatives. ‘‘I have to admit that a major difference between the two groups is that we do not have the same knowledge structure as they do since we were never trained in their way. For locally trained faculty, most of us are doing empirical research, which involves very little theoretical models. It is difficult for us to learn the tools and models that are popular in modern Western economics.’’ (Interviewee 3) The lack of familiarity with theoretical economics limited the potential of international collaboration for locally trained scholars, both with their departmental colleagues who were trained overseas and with international researchers.
Academic communication All the participants had quite similar views regarding the status of academic communication at SOE. As one returnee scholar noted, ‘‘To be honest, there is no academic communication with them [locally trained faculty] so far, at least no co-authoring so far.’’ (Interviewee 8)
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The Associate Dean seemed to be quite aware of the segregation of the two groups. When asked about his efforts to bring them together, he said these actions have not been fruitful and he owed it to the lack of senior faculty members who have the research capacity to bridge both groups. He described the fiscal and logistic challenges to faculty integration in the following manner: ‘‘We pay for at least one local faculty member to get re-training in the U.S. every year. However, there is a huge fixed cost for these faculty members to change their research focus or methodology. What also makes the integration difficult is the fact that 90 percent of our newly recruited faculty members are junior. Junior faculty members usually lack the capacity to involve others in their research.’’ (Interviewee 2) One locally trained faculty member expressed his dissatisfaction with SOE’s strategies and activities, yet he also believed that internationalization was a must for China’s universities. He stated, ‘‘Sooner or later, it comes. It is better to come early so that our locally trained faculty members would be more prepared earlier than later. It will only become more competitive for individuals staying in academia. Moreover, economics is different from other disciplines like mathematics or physics, which are more internationalized. With regard to economics, the gap between here and the West is huge. Therefore, internationalization is inevitable. Of course, this puts a lot of pressure on locally trained faculty members, who do not have the same knowledge structure as those trained in the West.’’ (Interviewee 3) However, another locally trained scholar believed that the returnee group dominated the academic culture at SOE. He stated that the local faculty group was marginalized and they were valued less than before.
Jie Gui as a metaphor for internationalization During the interviews, the participants used the term Jie Gui consistently instead of the literal translation of internationalization in Mandarin. Jie Gui literally means two parallel railway tracks. It has been widely used in public discourse related to higher education reform in China. According to Yang (2002), Jie Gui’s basic meaning is to link up China’s educational practice with international trends. It indicates a very strong conformity to Western norms and practices, but not assimilation per se. The central aim of Jie Gui is to ‘‘regulate China’s education according to the criteria and mainstream of international practice’’ (Yang 2002, p. 75). However, the Chinese words used to contextualize Jie Gui are vague and contested, portraying internationalization as both a ‘‘trend’’ and the ‘‘mainstream,’’ as well as signaling both ‘‘quality’’ and ‘‘efficiency.’’ At SOE, we noted that Jie Gui described the current conditions of internationalization in the local context: strategic efforts to move the department toward an international standard while recognizing the historical constraints of the local Xue Shu Feng Qi. Internationalization at SOE emphasized a recalibration of teaching and research in light of a Western, not just an international, standard. The Associate Dean, who is a returnee scholar, discussed the Western model this way:
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‘‘I think internationalization is to change our teaching, research, especially the management model, with reference to Western practices, because modern universities originated from the West, and have been practiced for centuries. More importantly, the curricula of various disciplines, and evaluation system of teachers at Western higher education institutions are more scientific and widely accepted. Higher education reform in China needs to look up to the Western standard.’’ (Interviewee 2) The Dean also deferred to the Western model, commenting ‘‘internationalization should engage Chinese faculty members or administrators who have worked years in Western institutions and only those who are familiar with both systems will help internationalize Chinese universities’’ (Interviewee 1). Senior administrators were aware of the resistance from faculty members who did not have much Western educational experience. The Dean noted, ‘‘Of course there has been a lot of resistance. Some are just outdated ideas; some people do not really know what is going on; others are over cautious. ‘What you are doing won’t fit into the Chinese context.’ ‘Is it just to Westernize SOE? ‘It would turn into a disaster.’ ‘Is it really necessary since we are already so good?’ ‘Do we really need so many mathematical models in economics?’ I think they are too short sighted.’’ (Interviewee 1) By considering internationalization as a parallel track connected to existing domestic policies and practices as described by the metaphor Jie Gui, the SOE’s senior administrators provided their faculty with a compromise in that it offered the opportunity for co-existence between Western and Chinese Marxist economics, between those with the English-language skills to publish in international journals and those who published solely in Chinese journals, and between locally trained and foreign-trained professors. However, Jie Gui could also been understood to imply that the train tracks of internationalization follow the lead of the Western model of higher education, and thus, the domestic academic culture is being moved and influenced by the creation of a Western standard. As such, Jie Gui was a fraught concept that permitted a middle ground by disavowing (or forestalling) complete integration to the international model, but at the same time, it did not adequately describe the strategic direction of the department during the period of rapid internationalization. In terms of the mechanisms of Jie Gui, we noted the specific mention of Westernization in the discussion of curriculum reform and research practices, as described by participants in the next sections.
Curriculum reform The need to update ‘‘old’’ academic programs became one of the driving forces of the internationalization at the case study institution. Curriculum reform therefore constitutes another important element of SOE’s internationalization strategy. For scholars trained in the West, like the Associate Dean, a main part of the curricular reform was to re-design the academic programs and copy successful practices at top academic programs in the West. The Associate Dean described this reform thusly, ‘‘The curriculum reform mainly looks up to the Western standards. This is particularly true for the economics discipline. There is even no qualified economics textbook written by a Chinese economist. We have to adopt others, from curriculum design to textbooks.’’ (Interviewee 2)
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According to him, economics as a discipline originated and developed in the West, primarily in the USA, and American economists mostly dominate the research in this field. Overall, the new curriculum has a strong mathematical component. The fact that the core curricula of economics programs in top Western institutions are relatively standardized made it easy to adopt educational practices from prestigious graduate programs. Yet the SOE leadership recognized that it was important to offer field courses with a focus on China’s economic issues. However, these courses required instructors to have extensive research experiences in empirical domains and the local context, and the SOE leadership conceded that the returnee scholars might not have the required expertise in this area. Not surprisingly, the researchers who were trained overseas all agreed with the Westernized curricula changes, whereas locally trained faculty members generally held opposite views. For example, one locally trained faculty member thought the reformed curriculum was rather destructive to the consistency of educational practices. He contended, ‘‘Ever since the overseas trained people came back, the previous curriculum was interrupted. They [returnee scholars] are not clear about what the students’ orientations are, especially Masters students. Advanced macroeconomics, advanced microeconomics, and econometrics became required. But previous core courses that I think are important are all gone. For example, the labor economics course was taken away from the curriculum of the Labor Economics program. Today I was told that they also wanted to cancel the social security course, labor law, and organizational theory course. My impression is that each of them is only familiar with their particular research area, but they don’t have an integral approach to curriculum design.’’ (Interviewee 3) The same scholar continued by saying, ‘‘Previously there would be multiple rounds of preparation before one could go teach. And teachers had to be familiar with educational psychology and pedagogy. Now all of these requirements are gone. They start to teach as soon as they are hired. I do not think they are good at teaching.’’ (Interviewee 3) As one consequence of this curricular reform, tensions arose between those who thought SOE should primarily be a teaching institute and those who agreed with the internationalization efforts, whereupon SOE would be transformed into a research-intensive institute.
Emphasis on research As part of the movement toward world-class status, research was considered crucial in SOE’s internationalization process. SOE was clearly moving from a higher education institution that rewarded teaching toward one that heavily invested in and rewarded research, as well as high-quality international publications. The majority of the overseastrained interviewees were in agreement with this strategy. They recognized that the SOE’s emphasis on research intersected with the national policy agenda of building up worldclass research universities. For some returnee scholars, conducting high-quality research was seen as the only way to raise the visibility of a research institution nationally and internationally. As one returnee scholar argued, ‘‘Since the only way or the best way to raise SOE’s reputation is to have faculty members publish in top international economics journals, this is also the only
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evaluation criterion for many Western research institutes. It will be unrealistic to ignore this fact.’’ (Interviewee 6) However, one returnee faculty member saw the emphasis on publication in Western journals very differently, ‘‘Why does the SOE need to hire scholars from overseas, since the aim is not only to publish in top Western Economics journals, but more importantly to serve China’s economy? I think our orientation should be that through us, the Western-trained economists, [the students can] learn the modern economics theories and tools. The fundamental aim of this education reform should be serving China’s economy, and to deal with the problems that China has encountered in its economic reforms. However, SOE now emphasizes publishing in Western journals too much. Some of the publications might be irrelevant to China.’’ (Interviewee 7) As this participant indicates, some faculty showed an awareness of the dangers of extreme Westernization. They suggested that reform should intentionally integrate Western disciplinary tools in order to conduct empirical work on China’s specific issues. However, the Associate Dean commented that in reality, it was difficult to achieve such integration. According to him, ‘‘it takes time for a junior researcher to accumulate the skills and experiences to conduct empirical research. Moreover, the majority of the faculty members at SOE are junior and there is a shortage of senior researchers who have the capacity to involve other people in doing empirical research.’’ Therefore, the institution faced a number of challenges owing to the lack of senior faculty members and an academic environment that discouraged locally relevant research in favor of more globally oriented studies that could be published in world-class journals.
Discussion The glonacal agency heuristic that Marginson and Rhoades (2002) proposed provides a useful conceptual framing to analyze the global–national–local dynamics we noted during SOE’s internationalization. While we focused on the ‘‘layers and conditions’’ we noticed that the dimensions of ‘‘reciprocity,’’ ‘‘strength’’ and ‘‘sphere’’ from Marginson and Rhoades (2002) glonacal heuristic were also evident at SOE. Reciprocity was clearly evident in the two-way influences between all levels of the internationalization process. Studies of internationalization are remiss if they do not recognize the national forces that interact between the local and global layers of analysis. For example, the SOE had taken a leadership role in modeling internationalization for Chinese higher education policymakers, potentially influencing national strategy, although the policy effect was unseen during our study. Another somewhat opaque exchange between the local and national level was through the role that academic economics departments played in the country’s economic policy environment. It may be that the national influences of China’s emerging capitalist economy were so enveloped by the disciplinary drive to ‘‘modernize’’ the SOE that the local manifestations of these influences, such as curricular reform efforts, appeared to be faculty-directed but were in accordance with larger sociopolitical-economic forces. Further study of these linkages may show evidence of this connection. In this way, a glonacal perspective, while complex, demonstrates that higher education policy implementation in China is interconnected and interdependent, challenging previous understandings about the directive nature of national policy in the sector (Tsang 2000).
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The glonacal agency heuristic’s layers and conditions are at the heart of the hexagons described by Marginson and Rhoades and therefore at the heart of our analysis. Two locally derived concepts emerged from the data to demonstrate the power of the contextual circumstances in the reception or resistance to flows between the global, national, and local dimensions. First, Xue Shu Feng Qi was described as the local academic atmosphere, akin to academic culture, that was perceived to be in need of reform. This historical layer permeated the SOE and was perceived by local actors as a salient contributor or inhibitor to the ability of the department to engage with outside members, particularly international colleagues and prospective returnee scholars. The Xue Shu Feng Qi of the department and wider academic climate was perceived by the study participants to be a potential threat to the SOE’s internationalization efforts due to historically lower standards of academic integrity than those permitted abroad. None of the study participants mentioned specific cases of academic fraud at the institution. Rather, it was a sense that the ‘‘old’’ culture and practices were not acceptable in an internationalizing department and that a large number of returnee scholars could shift the balance toward a more positive Xue Shu Feng Qi. The introduction of new, foreign-trained scholars into the academic environment had the potential to change the Xue Shu Feng Qi, but only if their number was great enough to tip the balance toward a new academic culture. Too few returnee scholars would mean that they would be corrupted or isolated by the historically dominant Xue Shu Feng Qi. Second, Jie Gui was utilized as a metaphor for a dual-track internationalization strategy that would permit the adoption of international standards without significantly disturbing the pre-existing academic practices of the SOE. Jie Gui had both a constraining and facilitating effect, as it placated and promoted the local way of doing things, while it also welcomed reforms in the name of internationalization. As an organizational strategy, Jie Gui did not necessitate drastic reform, but it required attention to a set of international practices and norms. Jie Gui conveyed a shift in local practices toward an international standard, in which the parallel train tracks would follow the direction set by the international academic community.
Conclusion Chinese internationalization has been described as being affected by the ‘‘longstanding knotty issues and tensions between Westernization and indigenization of internationalization in non-Western societies’’ (Yang 2014), particularly when Westernization and internationalization are conflated notions. Our study drew from local concepts to better understand the layers and conditions, the ‘‘internal crystalline structure of the hexagon’’ of the glonacal perspective (Marginson and Rhoades 2002, p. 293), of an internationalizing department in a Chinese higher education institution. The study participants’ use of the phrases Xue Shu Feng Qi (academic ethos or culture) and Jie Gui (a metaphorical set of parallel train tracks) demonstrate that understanding the local layers and conditions is essential to our understanding the motivations and capacities of the global–national–local flows with regard to the internationalization of institutions. At the SOE, internationalization efforts and strategies were undertaken with an eye to the historical layer of the department’s academic culture. Given the strong emphasis on changing what was perceived to be a ‘‘poor’’ Xue Shu Feng Qi, the SOE’s academic leaders rapidly expanded the number of faculty positions for scholars returning from the West. The consequences of this transformation, a lack of communication and collaboration between locally trained and
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foreign-trained academics, was described as ‘‘inevitable’’ even by those who raised concerns about the limits of the strategy for the department and the contributions it could make to China’s economy. Yang (2014) commented that ‘‘what has been missing in China’s present great leap forward in higher education is attention to cultural and institutional establishment’’ (p. 160). At present, we find that Jie Gui exists in contrast to integrative and multicultural concepts of internationalization prevalent in the West. The Jie Gui metaphor provides a counterpoint to many approaches to internationalization in that it emphasizes an adherence to local strengths and traditions while permitting a concomitant set of values and practices to be put in place, albeit in a parallel fashion. However, we find that Jie Gui is no less idealistic than the Western notion of internationalization, as conflicts between academic values and practices informed by the local, national, and global contexts arise. Jie Gui describes an ameliorative middle ground that will likely be challenged by further internationalization efforts.
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