The effect of academic socializing strategies on intercultural collaboration

Abstract

We present an explorative analysis from qualitative and quantitative data of fourteen European economics departments for the years 2001 to 2003 and investigate how one component of a successful PhD education, which is socializing PhD students into the academic community, should be designed in order to support intercultural collaboration among PhD students.We employ Multi-Value Qualitative Comparative Analysis (MVQCA) to analyze the data. Our results reveal unique socializing strategies in economics departments that possess either high or low intercultural collaboration among PhD students. It turns out that high intercultural collaboration is characterized by two configurations of different socializing strategies. In the first configuration we find that a "high number of foreign PhD students" in a department sufficiently explains high intercultural collaboration as it is realized in American research universities. In the second configuration we find that a combination of "different backgrounds in academic disciplines" among PhD students with "active support for research visits" sufficiently explains high intercultural collaboration. Low intercultural collaboration is characterized by three single strategies: "Financing attendance at academic conferences or events about once per year", "no active support for research visits" and a "small number of foreign PhD students". Each condition is sufficient to explain the outcome.The results for high intercultural collaboration are not affected by any of five resource conditions we added as controls. Low intercultural collaboration though was partly co-explained by low amounts of extra time among faculty and low financial resources of the department. The results indicate that high intercultural collaboration is not only supported by a socializing strategy typical for American research universities but can also be achieved by different socializing strategies.

Non-tenured post-doctoral researchers’ job mobility and research output: An analysis of the role of research discipline, department size, and coauthors

“…Determinants considered include age (see Goodwin and Sauer, 1995;Rauber and Ursprung, 2008), gender (see Davis and Patterson, 2001;Fabel et al, 2008), nationality (Mamiseishvili and Rosser, 2010); field of study (see Davis and Patterson, 2001), coauthorships (see Davis and Patterson, 2001;Hollis, 2001), conference attendance (see Prpić, 2000;, participation in PhD programs (see Austin, 2002;Bowen and Ruenstine, 1992;Sadowski et al, 2010;Schneider, 2010), participation in mentoring programs (see Gardiner et al, 2007;Muschallik and Pull, 2015), affiliation with research centers (Sabharwal and Hu, 2013), reputation and quality of department or university (see Allison and Long, 1990;Bedeian et al, 2010;Crane, 1965Crane, , 1970Long, 1978;Long and McGinnis, 1981;Long et al, 1998), department size (see Fabel et al, 2008;Golden and Carstensen, 1992;Turner and Mairesse, 2003), publication output of academic advisor (see Hilmer and Hilmer, 2007;Reskin, 1979;Williamson and Cable, 2003), and teaching load and service tasks (see Taylor et al, 2006). Some papers study the effect of mobility across countries on research productivity (e.g.…”