Internationalization and the Academic Profession: Comparative Perspectives

This book makes a major contribution to the scholarship on internationalization in higher education by focusing on the perceptions and experiences of the academic profession in a comparative perspective. Drawing from data collected by the Academic Professions in the Knowledge-based Society (APIKS) project, the contributors to this volume are uniquely positioned to explore the impact and implications of internationalization on those who play the central role in the teaching and research functions of higher education: the professoriate.

The core chapters address issues such as the roles of gender, discipline, and career stage in the international activities of academics in different countries, national differences in the perceptions and behaviors of university faculty in the internationalization of teaching, and of research within higher education systems on the perceptions and behaviors of academics. Each of these chapters draw on the existing research literature in these thematic areas as a foundation for the systematic analysis of the international APIKS dataset to illuminate and discuss key findings.

This book offers a highly original and unique contribution to the study of internationalization in higher education because its editors and contributors, as participants in the APIKS project, have been able to raise and address key research questions using comparative international empirical data on the academic profession that has never before been available. Given the tremendous importance of internationalization and the global dimension of higher education, this volume offers unique, distinctive insights on the implications of internationalization for the academic profession and the very different ways in which these transformations are understood by academics both within and between systems.