Jisun Jung

Research productivity by career stage among Korean academics

This study explores Korean academics’ changes in research productivity by career stage. Career stage in this study is defined as a specific cohort based on one’s length of job experience, with those in the same stage sharing similar interests, values, needs, and tasks; it is categorized into fledglings, maturing academics, established academics, and patriarchs. Academics’ research productivity in each career stage is analysed, and these characteristics are compared across academic disciplines. In addition, the factors influencing research productivity in different career stages are examined. The results indicate that research productivity among academics changes according to their career stage, and its pattern differs across academic disciplines. Thus, there is a need to provide proper reward systems or career development programs in consideration of such differences.

Higher Education Research in Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Malaysia: Exploring Research Community Cohesion and the Integration of Thematic Approaches.

This article analyzes higher education research published in international higher education journals by researchers from China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia from 1980 to 2013. It does so based on publication counts, and co-authorship and cross-citation mapping, examining these countries’ publication patterns in terms of thematic approach and community cohesion. The results show that each country has experienced distinct evolutions of higher education research, both in terms of the number of publications and thematic diversity. The research organization analyzed by co-authorship networks shows that higher education researchers in Hong Kong tend more to integrate two higher education research approaches – teaching and learning, and policy studies – into their research work. It is also in Hong Kong where most higher education researchers focus their research on both teaching and learning, and policy topics. Higher education researchers in China, Japan, and Malaysia are more thematically specialized in terms of both their positioning and their co-authorship preference. These findings suggest that a broader integration of different thematic areas may be linked more to path-dependent and contextual characteristics than to differences related to the development stage of higher education systems. This is confirmed by the cross-citation analysis, which shows that higher education researchers based in Hong Kong tend to cite each other more frequently than do those based in Japan, China, and Malaysia, suggesting a much greater community cohesion in Hong Kong than in these other countries. The findings highlight that while the maturity of a higher education system influences community cohesion, other factors influence thematic leaning and integration.

Internationalization and the New Generation of Academics

This chapter begins by distinguishing between biographical generations which are defined by year of birth/age and status generations which divide academics along the lines of seniority or career stage, e.g., “senior academics” or “professors” vs. “junior staff.” It then examines the extent to which views about, and actual involvement in, international teaching and research activities vary across generations of academics from advanced and emerging countries, employing one of two typologies of academic mobility that have been developed and applied analytically in the CAP project. The chapter concludes by arguing that generations shape, at least in part, patterns of international mobility and activity.

Frameworks for Creating Research Universities: The Hong Kong Case

China’s Hong Kong has the highest concentration of world-class universities, which makes it an interesting case place for examining the main issue in this volume. While the Hong Kong government has no specific policy aimed at establishing world-class universities, all universities are public with the lone exception of one recently established private university. University funding allocations are based on recommendations to government by the University Grants Committee, a group composed of independent academics, university leaders, and other professionals from both inside and outside of Hong Kong. All universities are also self-accrediting and enjoy a high degree of internal autonomy. Many would argue that a framework in which government stands back from university business, especially in matters of academic freedom, has produced three of the top ten universities in Asia.

International Research Collaboration among Academics in China and South Korea

Abstract This study examines international research collaboration among Chinese and Korean academics. International research collaboration among academics, which is generally measured by co-authored publications, is an important part of the internationalization of higher education, not only at an individual level but also at institutional and national levels. This study uses the online Science Citation Index database from Web of Knowledge for the analysis and demonstrates descriptive results of international co-authored publication patterns. International research collaboration is defined as the share of articles published together with at least one author from another country anywhere in the world. The study examines how international research collaboration patterns have changed from 1975 to 2010 in China and South Korea. In particular, it focuses on the growth of international research collaboration, the main collaborative countries among Chinese and Korean academics, and the differences in international research collaboration patterns by academic discipline.

Influence of university prestige on graduate wage and job satisfaction: the case of South Korea

ABSTRACT Obtaining a tertiary degree no longer guarantees entry to the best occupational positions in today’s labour market. Success is no longer about ‘more’ education, but about ‘better’ education for university graduates. This study aims to understand whether university prestige in Korea accounts for occupational outcomes in both monetary and non-monetary aspects, such as salaries and job satisfaction. The study particularly focuses on the way different levels of university prestige are affected by gender. The fourth wave data from the Korean Education and Employment Panel were used, providing information from the results of a panel survey of university graduates in terms of their social and academic background and job employment status. Results show that university prestige continues to matters in occupational outcomes in particular, for wage, but it is not significant for job satisfaction. The effect is more significant among male graduates than among female graduates.

Administrative Staff Members' Job Competency and Their Job Satisfaction in a Korean Research University.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of administrative staffs job competency on their job satisfaction in a Korean research university. We conceptualized job satisfaction into three subcomponents: satisfaction in the job field, in the workplace, and with the actual task. In the regression analysis, we included demographics, inner motivation, work environments, and nature of work (e.g. clarity of task) factors as the predictors of job satisfaction. We included job competency as a main research variable in the model. This study found that the administrative staffs interpersonal skills affect their overall job satisfaction, and that each dimension of job competency (organizational understanding, problem solving, interpersonal skills, ICT skills, and global competency) has a different impact on the different dimensions of job satisfaction (job field, workplace, and job task).

Gender Differences in Research Scholarship Among Academics: An International Comparative Perspective

Gender issues in the academy vary from their previous backgrounds and experiences to current teaching and research activities, as well as policy agendas. The purpose of this study is to examine the differences of research scholarship between male and female academics, and to analyze these differences in terms of academic rank and academic discipline. The issues addressed regarding gender in the subsequent analysis are largely determined by themes covered in the CAP questionnaire survey. More specifically, this research investigates: (1) What are the individual and institutional profiles of male and female academics? (2) How much do male/female academics differ with respect to their research scholarship? (3) Are these gender differences common in terms of academics’ rank? (4) Does the academic discipline have an impact on the male and female academics’ research scholarship?

Internationalization of the academy: rhetoric, recent trends, and prospects

To what extent has globalization of knowledge and the world’s economy over the past decade reshaped the academic profession into a more internationalized one? This chapter compares the responses of faculty in ten nations to similar items on an international survey in 1992 and 2007 as well analyzing differences in the 2007 responses of faculty at different career stages. The results suggest that, with a few exceptions, national faculties are no more likely to recruit foreign-born academics than in the past, while the proportion of foreign-educated academics has grown slightly. Moreover, there is little evidence of a sharp upswing in international research collaboration or co-publication or in the internationalization of teaching. While the percentage of national faculties engaged internationally has not changed substantially between 1992 and 2007, the tremendous growth in the size of national academic professions means that much larger numbers of academics across the world are not engaged internationally in their professional work.

Teaching and Research of Korean Academics Across Career Stages

This chapter discusses how teaching and research activities differ across academics’ career stages. Specifically, we focus on differences in their preference for teaching and research, budgeting time, teaching methods used, research approach, and research productivity. For this chapter, we analyzed a sample of 900 academics in the Korean Changing Academic Profession data. We found that senior academics lean more toward teaching but allocate more time on research; junior academics on the other hand have a stronger preference for research but spend more time on teaching and administration. In their teaching, Korean academics use lecturing as their main instructional method. In the classroom, interestingly, senior academics tend to emphasize practical and more socially oriented knowledge than do their junior colleagues. In terms of academic productivity, junior academics have a high rate of publication in international journals, while senior academics are high performers in relation to domestic journals and book publications.