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1 Introduction

While the international dimension has been a constitutive element of the academic environment since the Middle-Ages (Charle and Verger 1994), it has become more of a focus since the 1990s, both on the policy level—in Europe particularly, enhanced through the Bologna process and the aim of building the European Research Area —and as a research subject (Knight and de Wit 1995 ; Teichler 2004). In their review of research on internationalisation in higher education over the last decade, Kehm and Teichler (2007 ) identify the following sub-themes as dominating the research landscape (Kehm and Teichler 2007, p. 264):

  • Mobility of students and academic staff.

  • Mutual influences of higher education systems on each other.

  • Internationalisation of the substance of teaching, learning, and research.

  • Institutional strategies of internationalisation.

  • Knowledge transfer.

  • Cooperation and competition.

  • National and supranational policies as regarding the international dimension of higher education.

Internationalisation thus concerns several dimensions of academic life at different levels. In the context of higher education, internationalisation—not to be confounded with globalisation Footnote 1—can be defined as follows:

Internationalisation of higher education is the process of integrating an international/intercultural dimension into the teaching, research and service functions of the institution. (Knight 1999, p. 16)

Vabø (2007, referring to Trondal et al. 2001), distinguishes between old and new internationalisation, where old internationalisation is “typically initiated and managed by academic staff on the individual basis” (Vabø 2007, p. 99) while new internationalisation occurs at the collective, institutional level and is more formal—and recently also more competitive—in its character.

New internationalisation is a transversal dimension of higher education institutions, which develop specific approaches to enhance their internationality, as underlined by Knight (1999 ): the activity approach in which internationalisation is addressed through specific activities or programmes, as for example, student/faculty exchange or curriculum; the competency approach in which emphasis is put on the individual and his/her skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values, where the aim of implementing measures is the development of competencies; the ethos approach aiming at the promotion of a campus culture supportive for international and intercultural processes; and the process approach in which the international dimension is integrated in policies, procedures and programmes, with a strong emphasis on sustainability of the international dimension. Meek (2007, p. 65 ) proposes to add two more approaches: the business approach emphasizing “the maximisation of profit from international student fees” and the market approach focusing on “competition , market domination and deregulation”. There is no dominant approach, and the different approaches are considered “complementary and certainly not mutually exclusive” (Knight 1999, p. 16).

This text focuses on one particular aspect, namely the internationalisation of the academic labour market, a topic which does not seem to be at the core of most studies on internationalisation of higher education (Kim and Locke 2009 ), although higher education institutions tend to rank it as the most important dimension of the overall process of internationalisation (Knight 2003 ).

In fact, as underlined by Marginson and van der Wende (2009 ), most of the government and higher education actors’ discourses assume the positive dimension of academic mobility, to the point that they are “largely diffused and taken for granted in many higher education and research public policies, so that specific measures and devices are developed by many countries in order to promote academic mobility” (Musselin 2004a, p. 56 ). They question the generally admitted perception that mobility is increasing, showing that although effectively short-term mobility has largely augmented, it does not seem to be that much the case of an internationalisation of long-term academic positions, except in a few country such as the United States, or Switzerland (Felli et al. 2007b).

While topics such as the internationalisation of curriculum or of the student body or institutional strategies for internationalisation for sure have an influence on the academic labour market, they are not detailed in the following. As well, conceptual or summarizing papers discussing the implications of internationalisation in the general higher education context (see for example, de Wit 1995; Teichler 1999, 2004; Qiang 2003; Enders 2004; Altbach and Knight 2006 ; Kehm and Teichler 2007 ; OECD 2009a) will not be included.

When trying to identify the literature on the academic labour market integration regarding the topic of internationalisation, different types of approaches come to light. Figure 7.1 provides an overview of approaches that will be discussed in the following sections.

Fig. 7.1
figure 1

Overview on internationalisation topics

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This figure is centred on two topics that represent two sides of the same coin: internationalisation of the academic workforce and researchers’ mobility. While the former one addresses the topic of academic labour market internationalisation from the point of view of the higher education institutions, systems or societies; the latter addresses the incidence of internationalisation on individual academics. Within these two main research domains, several issues are questioned.

Focusing on the macro or meso level, one can distinguish at least three types of approaches that integrate, to different extents, the internationalisation dimension.

  1. 1.

    A descriptive approach interested in the international composition of academic staff, most often represented in official statistics both at the national and international level.

  2. 2.

    Research questioning flows of academics: the brain drain /brain gain /brain circulation issue between higher education institutions, systems and more widely, societies.

  3. 3.

    An in-depth approach looking at the rules and practices higher education institutions apply when attracting and employing new collaborators (often inspired by sociology of science).

Focusing on the individual level, again at least three approaches to internationalisation can be identified:

  1. 4.

    Quantitative studies looking at the behaviour of individual academics, thus at mobility patterns within academics’ careers.

  2. 5.

    Research, often combining qualitative and quantitative instruments, interested in analysing the effects of mobility on individual academics’ careers and on individuals’ perception of the benefits (and rarely also negative outcomes) of their mobility.

  3. 6.

    A qualitative approach interested in individual academics’ strategies regarding mobility, thus their reasons for being mobile.

2 The Macro/Meso Approaches

On the policy level, evidence of the relevance of the topic of international composition of academic staff is easily found: The “adequate flow of competent researchers with high levels of mobility between institutions, disciplines, sectors and countries” is seen as an important element of the European Research Area (Commission of the European communities 2007, p. 1); the “ultimate political goal” of The European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers is “to contribute to the development of an attractive, open and sustainable European labour market for researchers” (European Commission 2005, p. 4). Instruments for enhancing mobility are provided at the European level, within countries, not only through the funding of international, collaborative research projects or scholarships, but also through the implementation of mobility portals and other information services for academics willing to go abroad.

But does this internationalisation of the mobility sustain an international—or at least European—labour market? The answer to this question is manifold; the characteristics of national labour markets and the way in which internationalisation is perceived at the national and local level differ, and so does the degree of internationalisation of the academic population. In the following, we look at the availability of data on the degree of internationalisation in different countries.

2.1 Describing the International Composition of Academic Staff

It is quite informative that the available OECD data characterising the internationalisation of the academic profession provides information mainly on Ph.D. students (OECD 2004). This denomination of academic staff is probably the sole that all higher education academic markets share; this makes the collection and comparison of quantitative data immediately possible, while it is not the case for the other categories.

Figure 7.2 shows the share of foreign Ph.D. students among different OECD countries in 2006; this share can be taken as an indicator for the internationalisation of both higher education and research (OECD 2004). It comes clear that this share varies a lot among OECD countries; it is high in Switzerland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, while countries such as Turkey, Greece, Mexico, Chile, and Slovak Republic show rather low shares of foreign Ph.D. students.

Fig. 7.2
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Share of foreign Ph.D. students, 1998 and 2006. (Source: OECD 2009b)

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A comparison of the data for 1998 and 2006 shows that these numbers evolve rapidly: changes range from − 79 % (Slovak Republic) up to + 444 % of foreign students (New Zealand). This is also confirmed by country studies: In Norway for example, the share of international doctoral students has increased from 7 to 22 % between 1991 and 2005 (Vabø 2007).

However, the note to the OECD data already reveals a challenge when measuring the internationality of the academic personnel: “International students are defined as non-resident students of reporting countries for all countries except Finland and Switzerland which define them as students with prior education outside the reporting country” (OECD 2009b). When talking about foreign academics, a clear definition of who is to be considered a foreigner is important, in particular, due to national specificities in the length of naturalisation processes which sometimes can take several generations. Similar limitations regarding mobility data were pointed out by the EURODATA study regarding student mobility (Kelo et al. 2006): often, the only available data is information on the nationality of students, but it is not known whether students were living in the “host” country already before taking up their studies or whether they are really genuine mobile students.

As underlined previously, data on the share of foreigners that go beyond the level of the doctorate seem to be more difficult to retrieve. In the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard, only information about foreign scholars in the United States is available; the Eurostat database on Science and Technology contains many missing values in the dataset on researchers by citizenship. Data from the first Carnegie survey study on the academic profession (The International Survey of Academic Staff) reveal considerable differences when looking at whether academics received their highest degree in the country in which they are employed or elsewhere, reflecting differences in national policies and recruitment behaviour (Welch 1997 ).

More data is available at the level of individual countries. Here, trends towards higher degrees of internationalisation are visible. In Switzerland for example, the overall share of foreign staff at universities has increased from 30.7 % in 1999 to 40 % in 2008 (see Fig. 7.3).

Fig. 7.3
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Share of non-national academic personnel at Swiss universities, headcount. (Source: Swiss Statistics, Swiss Federal Statistical Office)

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In Switzerland’s neighbouring country Germany, the share of non-national academic personnel is considerably lower. Here, in 2008, overall 9.5 % of academics were of foreign nationality. Differences between fields of sciences are visible: While this share is as low as 1.7 % for Sports, it reaches 13.1 % for Mathematics and Sciences (Statistisches Bundesamt 2009). In France, foreigner account for less than 10 % of all the French academics, with differences not only between fields but also between institutional types: universities hire 7 % of foreign academics, compared with 12 % in the Grandes Ecoles (Bonaccorsi et al. 2004). The degree of internationalisation is thus linked to the level of prestige of one institution (Goastellec and Paradeise 2008).

2.2 Analysing and Questioning the International Flows of Academics

On the basis of the quantitative data produced by international bodies and further analysis of academics’ flows between higher education systems of faculties, some researchers analyse one of the most sensitive dimension of the internationalisation of the academic market: the brain drain /brain gain issue . This issue is plural: it questions the attractiveness of the various higher education systems and their societies, and the organisation of the competition for the “best brains”, the geographical map of leading research centres in the different disciplines, the knowledge transfer function of mobility, the public authorities’ policies implemented in reaction to an identified weakness in the brain drain/brain gain game, etc.

For example, the European Union has several times pointed out the important European outward mobility towards English-speaking countries. As Marginson and van der Wende (1994 ) recall, many doctoral graduates from Germany, for example, pursue their career in the United States or the United Kingdom, while the attractiveness of the German academic market place for foreigners has decreased. The creation of the excellence initiative in 2005 is aimed at reversing this trend by helping universities to improve their international visibility and competitiveness. The creation of the PRESFootnote 2 in France follows the same rationale: bringing together higher education institutions to improve their visibility. It has also been an incentive for the development of European policies to improve the attractiveness of the academic market and the opportunities for academic mobility (for example, the programme ERASMUS Mundus, which is not without similarities with the American Fulbright Program).

However, it has also been acknowledged that mobility of researchers and their knowledge is not a purely linear flow, but a more complex issue. Hence, in the late 1990s the concept of “brain circulation” has been introduced (Fontes 2007).

Based on the United Kingdom Changing Academic Profession Survey, Kim and Locke (2009 ) identify a typology of flows of academics between and within countries:

  • Study-abroad countries which graduates tend to leave for the doctorate, but to which they then turn back for their post-doctorate or employment;

  • Magnetic countries which attract people for work, for study or both; and

  • Self-contained countries where mobility of academics occurs within the same country or even within the same institution.

Obviously, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Japan for example, is both a study-abroad and a magnetic country: Many doctoral degree holders go abroad for a post-doctoral period, but a large share of them returns to Japan (a study covering all Japanese doctoral degree holders from the years 2002–2006 shows that 50 % have returned to Japan after 5 years (Misu and Horoiwa 2010)). The knowledge transfer function of mobility becomes evident: Through mobility of post-doctorates, the Japanese system imports knowledge, “catching up with advanced overseas countries” (Huang 2007, p. 97). On the other hand, a raise in the number of courses in English language, adapted to the need of students from North America, Europe and English-speaking countries in general has led to the need to employ more faculty members able to provide courses in English language. This has led to an increase in the number of foreign faculty members in Japan, especially in the private university sector (Huang 2007), and hence probably also has an influence on the internationalisation of curricula, of contents in teaching and in research.

Norway (but also Sweden and Western European and Scandinavian countries in general, Melin 2004) is another example of a study-abroad country: Here, academics, particularly doctoral students and post-doctorates, are to some extent expected to go abroad for shorter or longer stays; however, different systemic, academic, social, and practical barriers exist (Vabø 2007).

Examples of self-contained countries are China and Italy (Kim and Locke 2009 ). Also, Spain and France could be added to this list: As Cruz-Castro and Sanz-Menéndez (2010) have shown, when looking at the access to permanent positions within 3 years after the doctorate, the Spanish labour market does not favour mobility after the doctorate, but rather institutional fidelity. Gaughan and Robin (2004) show similar results for France.

A fourth category, which has not been identified by Kim and Locke, would be countries whose young academics tend to leave and not to come back, thus brain drain countries. Some researchers question the consequences for developing countries (UNESCO-CEPES 2004; Nunn 2005 ). But, this brain drain does not only occur in economically less developed countries outside the Western world. An example from Europe is again Italy, where, according to Coccia and Rolfo (2010), many academics tend to look for positions abroad because of a lack of good career prospects in research within Italian institutions. This brain drain issue is particularly accurate in disciplines in which professional opportunities and working resources strongly differ between countries, such as for example, in life sciences (Musselin 2004b ).

Enders and Musselin propose another classification, based on the results from a survey of the academic profession carried out in the early 1990s (Enders and Musselin 2008, referring to Boyer et al. 1994 ):

  • Countries whose scholars wish to be considered as partners at the international level but are often not seen as equal partners. These are often economically less developed countries.

  • Countries where the international dimension in communication, cooperation and recognition is seen as of central importance. These are often rather small, but economically developed countries.

  • Countries in which both the national and the international orientation are seen as important: not only international visibility is considered of high value, but also the contribution to the local environment is stressed. These are usually larger countries.

  • Countries in which internationalisation is mostly visible through the presence of foreign students and researchers, and where international orientation stops at the boarders of the linguistic and cultural region. The United Kingdom and the United States of America are the most striking examples, even though the situation might be changing now.

Overall, there seems to be tension between cooperative internationalisation and competitive globalisation (Enders and de Weert 2004; Enders and Musselin 2008), between two heterogeneous objectives of mobility policies (Marginson and van der Wende 2009 ): on the one hand, there is the organisation of free academic movement between national higher education systems, where internationalisation is connoted with a positive bias, and a need for international orientation and collaboration is underlined (Musselin 2004a, 2005a ; Kehm 2006 ). On the other hand, there is the reinforcement of national higher education systems academic capacity, thus a focus on national markets can still be observed (Enders and Musselin 2008): As underlined by Enders and de Weert, the higher education institutions “regulatory and funding context was (and still is) national, their contribution to national cultures was (and still is) significant, students tended to be (and still are) trained to become national functionaries and universities played (and still play) a considerable role in the national innovation system” (Enders and de Weert 2004, p. 145).

Such classifications are interesting examples of what can be done when analysing large-scale data on mobility; they become even more relevant when combining the data with an in-depth analysis of the local labour markets, its rules, regulations and practices.

2.3 Analysing National Market Structures and Organisations

Academic systems have been the purpose of various research enterprises, including projects focusing on national market structures and organisations. Differences between national higher education systems and between disciplinary fields have been elaborated thoroughly by different scholars in the field of higher education studies (see for example, Clark 1983 ; Whitley 1984; Ben-David 1992; Kivinen et al. 1999 ; Abbott 2001 ; Becher and Trowler 2001 ). These differences are visible in many aspects, among them also the structure of academic careers. In Italy, for example, the doctorate is a quite new degree which emerged only in the 1980s (Moscati 2004); before the existence of the doctoral degree, however, Italian graduates had demonstrated their research ability in a Master thesis which had to answer rather high requirements (with a corresponding high drop-out rate).

Nowadays, however, the doctorate seems to bequite a common element in academic careers in most higher education systems—the entry ticket to the academic career, but career structures after the doctorate differ. While the general career structure could be described as composed of the three elements training—consolidation—settlement, these phases are of different duration in different career systems. As there is no unique structure of the academic career which is common to all systems, mobility is challenged: for potentially mobile academics it is difficult to understand whether they fulfil the formal conditions for a position in a foreign system, and for commissions evaluating applications it is difficult to interpret the previous career of foreign applicants.

Musselin (2003, 2004a, 2005a, b ) has elaborated such differences in her extensive work on the characteristics of the academic labour market by confronting the US, French, and German situations when it comes to the recruitment of professors. For example, while in Germany, access to a permanent position occurs at the average age of 42 years, after several non-permanent contracts; in France, tenure is accessible rather soon after the doctorate, at the average age of 33 years (Musselin 2004a). These differences are clearly reflected in national academic labour markets: the conditions for admission to permanent positions differ. This strongly enhances on the accessibility of the national labour markets for foreigners: they do not fit the classical career within the country, and therefore committees evaluating candidatures of foreign scholars might not be able to identify the elements corresponding to the local requirements.

Musselin’s studies also reveal considerable differences between the ways in which scholars are recruited, from the decision on available posts and their promotion through the recruitment process up to the assignment of the positions. These procedures not only vary between national higher education systems, but also between disciplinary fields. Implicit rules play an important role, and conditions for access are strongly related to the national career systems; for example, in some fields in France, access to professorship is only possible with a specific French diploma. Implicit practices play an important role in the recruitment procedure, which limits chances of foreign applicants: as these practices are not explicitly stated, they are usually unknown to outsiders.

Referring to Musselin’s studies and prior studies on the academic career system in Switzerland, Felli et al. (2007a) compare the academic labour market in France and Switzerland. They also show strong differences, including statistical data indicating that the Swiss labour market is more accessible to French scholars than vice versa: while the French academic labour market attracts only a few Swiss academics; however, for highly prestigious positions and at late career stages, the Swiss market attracts many French scholars, starting from the first step in the academic career (the doctorate). A similar situation is found when comparing the situation of Switzerland with another neighbouring country: while in 2008, 772 academics from Switzerland were employed in various positions at German universities (source: Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany), the same number amounts to more than 7,000 for German academics in Switzerland (source: Swiss Statistics, Swiss Federal Statistical Office).

Such national differences are rather pronounced, and both researchers and policy makers conclude that, while in Europe for example, some progress has been made through policy measures as the establishment of programmes enhancing mobility (e.g. the Marie Curie programmes) or the European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers, the aim of the European academic labour market is not yet reached (Musselin 2004a; Commission of the European Communities 2007; Enders and Musselin 2008). Labour markets are still rather internal than external (Musselin 2003), and, as has been shown by mobility studies (see below), there are several higher education systems that tend to treat preferentially careers within the same country or even institution.

However, beyond the emergence of policies at the international level, also other tendencies towards a decreasing importance of the nation state as the only denominator of the shape of higher education systems and hence towards international homogenisation at the governance level are observed (Enders 2004; Kehm and Lanzendorf 2006); examples directly concerning the academic career are the German Juniorprofessuren and the Swiss SNSF Professorships inspired by the Anglo-Saxon model (Enders and Musselin 2008; Benninghoff et al. 2009).

However, access to the labour market not only occurs at the level of professorship or other (pre-)tenured or permanent positions: it is also strongly promoted at earlier stages of the academic career. Several instruments for promoting stays abroad through scholarships for doctoral students and post-doctorates exist in different countries. Post-doctoral stays are often the only or main mobility experience in an academic’s career (Musselin 2004a ), and mainly non-permanent mobility at early years in an academic’s career seems to be increasing, while long-term mobility does not, with the exception of the United States (Marginson and van der Wende 2009 ).

For these non-permanent positions, funding often comes from the home country or from a supranational level, and therefore competition for access to these positions occurs in the system where the researcher comes from. Hence, the barrier of implicit rules not known to external is less of an issue in these cases. Compared with the access of foreigners to permanent positions, access to a higher education system through mobility with clear time limits is much less regulated and often occurs within networks of research institutes, thus strengthening already-existing linkages.

3 The Internationalisation of Academic Careers

Studies interested in mobility patterns from the point of view of higher education systems have already been presented above. This section focuses on the individual dimension, the academic career. This point of view is often addressed in studies based on individual data that is available through CVs or questionnaires.

3.1 Mobility as an Element of Academic Careers

Quite some work in this direction has been done in Spain, where CV databases or CV collections with quite detailed information are used for management purposes within the higher education sector and accessible for research purposes. The use of CVs as main research device has emerged mainly in the last decade; before, CVs were usually used as additional information source to answer questions not answered by other sources (Dietz et al. 2000). However, since the 1990s, different studies using CVs have been conducted, both for evaluative or developmental purposes (e.g. Morzinski and Schubot 2000; Gaughan and Bozeman 2002) and for understanding the patterns of mobility and collaboration and their impact on academic careers (e.g. Cañibano et al. 2008; Lepori and Probst 2009; Andújar and Cañibano 2010).

Data from CV analyses are often combined with information about publications—either taken from the CVs themselves or through searches in institutional or international publication databases; with these procedures, questions of the impact of mobility on the productivity of a scientist are addressed. Another approach in this direction is the combination of publication data and surveys directed to a clearly defined population.

As these approaches require larger amounts of manual work (especially in the case of CV analyses, where manual coding is still the rule, as standardisation is not at a point to allow for automatic coding, see Dietz et al. 2000; Cañibano et al. 2008; Andújar and Cañibano 2010), the analysed samples are usually much smaller than in the above-mentioned large-scale survey studies. Therefore, and also because they most often focus on mobile academics and do not include their non-mobile colleagues, they do not allow for generalisations on mobility patterns of the whole academic community . However, as these studies are based on quite rich data, beyond describing individual career paths they also allow for analyses of effects of mobility and strategies of individuals when it comes to the question of being mobile or not.

3.2 Effects of Mobility on Academic Careers

While there is “an extensive body of research and literature focusing on the importance of international experience for management careers” (Richardson and McKenna 2003, p. 774 ), there is less knowledge available about its value in academia and about its impact on academic activities, e.g. the quality of research and teaching, or academic working styles (Richardson and McKenna 2003; Kim and Locke 2009 ).

Results from the first Carnegie study on the academic profession , conducted in the 1990s, not only show differences between the two groups of mobile and non-mobile academics (Welch 1997, uses the terms of ‘peripatetic’ and ‘indigenous’), but also reveal different degrees of internationalisation among countries and disciplines. Among mobile academics, gender disparities are stronger; also, mobile academics tend to be employed with full-time contracts more often than their non-mobile colleagues; and mobile academics favour research over teaching more strongly than their non-mobile colleagues and are more inclined to participate in international activities, including participation to international conferences and collaboration with colleagues from other countries. It seems thus that mobility is positively connected to internationalisation of academic activities, especially when it comes to research and networking.

The group around Carolina Cañibano (Cañibano et al. 2008; Andújar and Cañibano 2010) look not only at the relationship between mobility and productivity of researchers (i.e. publication output), but also between mobility and collaboration with international colleagues. Differences between fields of study emerge, and the connection between mobility and productivity is not answered unambiguously. Even if such a connection can be found, the question of “what was first” remains: does mobility enhance collaboration, or does collaboration enhance mobility? Also, mobility often occurs within an already-established network. For example, senior researchers advise post-doctorates on places to go, and provide their personal contacts (Melin 2004).

Studies based on CVs tend to lack the comparison between mobile and non-mobile researchers: the studies by Cañibano et al. are based on CVs of applicants to a funding programme which puts a prior stay abroad of at least 2 years as a condition. Hence, the analysis only covers differences between researchers that are mobile to different extents, and not between mobile and non-mobile researchers. This topic is approached differently by Cruz-Castro and Sanz-Menéndez (2010), who, based on a survey and publication data of academics receiving a permanent position at a Spanish university or the Spanish research council, thus including mobile and non-mobile researchers, show a modest, but significant positive correlation between mobility and productivity.

However, they also show a negative effect: post-doctoral international mobility does not have a positive effect when looking at those academics who get a permanent position within 3 years after their Ph.D.; strong internal job markets are at play, and institutional loyalty and non-mobility seem to be rewarded higher than publication output and international mobility, leading thus to some degree of inbreeding. Similar conclusions are drawn on the French academic market, where a rather negative impact of mobility on early tenure is found, while in other countries, as the United States or Germany, mobility (however, not necessarily at the international level) at an early stage is encouraged (Gaughan and Robin 2004).

While these studies rely on the analysis of “hard facts” for evaluating the impact of international mobility on an academic career, others analyse the academics’ point of view (Richardson and McKenna 2003 ; Melin 2004, 2005). In these studies, too, an impact on publication is identified: mobility leads to future research collaboration and co-publication, through the contacts established during the period abroad; hence, collaboration between the home and the hosting country is enhanced.

Such analyses most often address positive aspects of mobility, and the topic of negative aspects is usually not included in studies looking at academics’ experiences. An exception is the study by Melin (2004) presenting “the dark side” of post-doctoral mobility, based on questionnaire and interview data with a sample from Sweden. A similar issue to what has been shown for the Spanish and French context emerges, even though at a rather low level: 17 % of the respondents in the Swedish survey agreed with the statement that “going on a postdoc stay partly discredited me, for instance because I had not qualified myself at the department”, referring particularly to lower salary and time lost for doing publications because of the need of time to start research when going abroad and when coming back home (Melin 2004, p. 233). Generally, this study reveals that systematic negative effects—experienced by 10–20 % of the returnees—refer not to the stay itself, but to the process of coming home, where the transfer of knowledge to the home department and the mentioned feeling that the stay is not valued by the home department are the most critical issues.

The generally positive bias associated with mobility might be a challenge when assessing negative effects through methods involving directly the concerned academics. But, as Melin points out, also the assessment of quantifiable variables is difficult: how can success/failure be defined?

3.3 Reasons for Being Mobile: Mobility as Strategy

Given this general assumptions of positive effects of mobility on academic careers, besides academic interests as the possibility to collaborate with other scholars in one’s field, the decision to go abroad for a certain period of time or for the rest of one’s academic life can also be a strategic career decision.

For example, doctoral or post-doctoral mobility is often used for enhancing one’s career possibility in the home country (Musselin 2004a). The already-mentioned studies from Norway and Japan show this phenomenon; to some extent, these labour markets expect such mobility, they can be defined as study-abroad countries (see Sect. 2.2). While in these cases, mobility is often used for enhancing one’s career possibilities in the home country, there are other places where career possibilities are strongly limited and therefore mobility is often the only way to find a further position: French doctoral degree holders, for example, go for a post-doctorate programme in abroad most often because they do not find a position in France (Gaughan and Robin 2004); similarly also in Italy, the limited career possibilities lead highly skilled researchers to aim for positions abroad (Coccia and Rolfo 2010).

A study by Richardson and McKenna (2003 ) asking researchers for their motivations for being mobile underline as most important element “the desire to travel” and to change one’s life situation; to a lesser extent, and depending on the host country, also the financial attractiveness of a position abroad is seen as a reason for being mobile, and also reasons related to family topics (e.g. giving the children the chance to grow up in a different environment) are mentioned. Mobility as a factor for future career possibilities in the increasingly international academic labour market is not mentioned as a motivation for going abroad, but an important topic when evaluating the experience abroad, making them more “marketable”.

As the study by Melin (2004) has shown, mobility does have effects on further research collaboration and co-publications. This study also shows for the post-doctoral period that typically scholars go to “strong science nations”; the post-doctoral period does not seem to be the moment to explore new environments. This might also be caused by the fact that contacts to the hosting institution are often made through senior colleagues, thus already-existing ties are strengthened through mobility of young researchers.

4 Combining Points of View: Ideas for Topics to Analyse in the EuroAC Project

As it derives clearly from the presented analysis, the international dimension of the academic labour market and of academic careers can be looked at from different points of view; even though comprehensive studies are rare so far, it seems that combinations of different aspects might allow for interesting insights.

The EuroAC study, based both on the CAP questionnaire and further qualitative projects, allows including the international dimension as a transversal topic in different in-depth analyses. When looking at internationalisation in the academic labour market and career, the following topics could be worth of a closer analysis:

  • Different types of mobility along the academic career: short-term mobility usually funded through grants, and mobility for permanent positions. At which moment in the career do the different types of mobility occur? This would allow identifying where the international dimension comes into play in different models of the academic career.

  • The impact of disciplinary differences vs. national specificities when comparing the forms and times of international mobility within a career in different higher education systems.

  • Differences in the careers between different countries: the previous analyses of CAP results leading to classifications of countries could be refined, by checking also for home and hosting country and different definitions of “academic nationality”: the nationality at the moment of the first degree, place of the first degree, place of the doctorate.

  • A combination of the previous two elements: can we combine different career models with typologies of countries? But also a look at disciplinary differences would be interesting, and therefore the question: do patterns of mobility relate more to national or to disciplinary differences?

  • The correlation of internationality with various dimensions looked at in the CAP questionnaire, for example, on the inclusion of international dimensions in teaching and research, on collaboration with international colleagues, etc. A clear definition of an indicator for internationality is a necessary instrument for such analyses.

  • The openness of local academic markets to international academics. This analysis can, to some extent, be done through an analysis of the mobility data in the CAP survey. However, it would be interesting to combine it with a more in-depth analysis for some countries in the qualitative study, regarding explicit and implicit organisations of admission. To have an overview on the conditions in different countries and to combine this information with the knowledge about the flow of researchers would lead to interesting informed maps of mobility.

Such analyses would make it possible to find answers to a wide range of questions: On the basis of similar trends potentially observed in the evolution of the academic compositions in the different systems, can we infer an internationalisation of the norms at play in the regulation of academic careers? Does the increased overlapping of national markets favour the diffusion of common expectations regarding the structure of academic careers and the profile of faculties? For example, the goal of parity in access to the professoriate? The shift from internal to external markets, at least in some disciplines? The increased value given to precocity in academic careers?

In addition, the topic of internationalisation of the academic labour market can then be combined with other dimensions of internationalisation: Does mobility have an impact on work organisation and practices, on the inclusion of the international dimension in teaching and research? What about the internationalisation of research and scientific production? The internationalisation of the peer judgement on academic activities? And, as a provocative question: Is internationalisation of a career an indicator of its value?