Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Vol. 31, No. 5, December 2010, 577
591

Transnational academic mobility, knowledge, and identity capital

Terri Kim*

SSE, Halsbury Building, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK

This article begins with the contemporary context of transnational academic

mobility, and sketches a typology of mobile academics according to their self-
identification. UK examples are offered as the main case study here. The article
will then explore the relations of mobile academics and their embodied and
encultured knowledge. It employs a concept of transnational identity capital to
discuss the position of transnational mobile academic intellectuals as a stranger
as inspired by Simmels sociology of space.
Keywords: transnational academic mobility; encultured knowledge; identity
capital; academic intellectuals; Simmel; position of a stranger

Introduction
The purpose of this article is to sketch a typology of mobile academics and knowledge
and their relations in the contemporary period. This article tries to extend the
analyses of shifting patterns of transnational academic mobility that I examined in
two other articles published in The World Yearbook of Education 2008 (Kim, 2008)
and in a Special Issue of Comparative Education (Kim, 2009a). They were the initial
attempt to sketch possibilities for a historical sociology of transnational academic
mobility. International, or even transnational academic mobility has always occurred,
but the patterns of academic mobility in history are discontinuous. Barriers of
ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, religions and culture and the boundaries of
inclusion and exclusion alter. Overall, transnational academic mobility has been
structured by political and economic forces determining the boundaries and direction
of flows, and also involves personal choices and professional networks (Kim, 2008,
2009a). In an effort to grasp the patterns of flow of academic mobility, my analysis
focused on the historical forces and politics which, in a sense, interrupt the global
and also affect how the global is perceived by academics (Kim, 2009a, pp. 398
400).
This article extends these analyses in three main ways. First, attention is given to
the conditions of academic mobility in the contemporary globalisation of neoliberal
market imperatives. Second, it discusses relations of knowledge and academic
mobility. Third, by doing so, it conceptualises a particular type of embodied and
encultured knowledge that is possessed by transnational academic intellectuals.
It will try to make sense of the transformation of knowledge by examining the
lived experiences of mobile academic intellectuals as-a-stranger, invoking Simmels
sociology of space. This will lead to a conceptualisation of transnational identity
capital.

*Email: terri.kim@brunel.ac.uk
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2010.516939
http://www.informaworld.com
578 T. Kim

The conditions of academic mobility

The contemporary period is characterised by a grand narrative of neoliberal
globalisation. In this article I try, following C. Wright Mills sociological imagination,
to delineate the intricate connection between the patterns of individual lives and
social structures and movements and the course of world history in an attempt to
understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the
external career of a variety of individuals (1959/2000, p. 5).
Neoliberal discourse has changed policy and policy borrowing globally (Kim,
2004). One effect of this has been to change academic mobility in two ways. First,
previously sporadic, thin, limited and inter-national academic links and mobility
have become systematic, dense, multiple and trans-national (Kim, 2008, 2009a). This
is very visible in Europe. Second, policies similar to those of the Bologna Process and
Lisbon Strategies which are creating a European Higher Education Area (EHEA)
are being globalised. One example of this globalising is the Tuning project which is
affecting South-East and Eastern Europe, Russia, USA and Latin America.1
Eleven years after it began in 1999, the Bologna Process has brought together 47
countries. The key drivers behind the Bologna policy of transparency, coordination
and quality assurance among Europes higher education systems are employability,
mobility and competitiveness (House of Commons, 2007). The recent Budapest

Vienna Declaration (12 March 2010) marked the end of the first phase of the
Bologna reform process and the official launch of the European Higher Education
Area:

The Bologna Process and the resulting European Higher Education Area, being
unprecedented examples of regional, cross-border cooperation in higher education, have
made European higher education more visible on the global map.2

Overall, the Bologna Process is about competing in the global higher education
market. Bologna has galvanised the member countries, given the construction of a
new European space, and helped them to compete as a coherent group in the wider
global market. In the 2008 Times Higher Education
QS World University Rankings,
58 of the top 200 universities were in the USA and 83 were in countries signed up to
the Bologna Process (Times Higher Education, 2008b). In 2010, the EHEA consists
of at least 6000 institutions and more than 30 million students. Its scale and scope
gives Europe a major competitive advantage in the global higher education market
and academic mobility.
The impact of the Bologna Process and EHEA has gone beyond Europe to affect
other regional movements towards the creation of transnational higher education
systems in North America, Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific (Clark, 2007).
The implication of these policy borrowings and Bologna-inspired higher education
reforms at the supranational, regional levels is that the EHEA is emerging as a global
model viable not only for regional bloc competition for the global higher education
market but also for transnational academic collaboration and knowledge transfer.
Thus, we are seeing two new and major processes: first, very rapid changes in
political space, particularly the creation of regional spaces, within which transnational
academic mobility occurs; and
almost everywhere
policies have been written and
implemented by international and supranational agencies for neoliberal market-
framed internationalisation (Kim, 2008, 2009a).
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 579

Typology of mobile academics and university structures

In this context, what this article will discuss is the various forms of knowledge
carried by what is suggested here are three different kinds of mobile academics:

Academic intellectuals, whose creative role is to engage as legislator and

interpreter contributing to a creative destruction and reconstruction of the
paradigms of academic work;
Academic experts, many of whom increasingly define their roles as researchers
with transferable methodological research skills; and
Manager-academics, many of whom have assumed their role as general
managers with transferable management skills rather than traditional
academic leadership.

These types of academics are suggested partly because these are ways in which
academics who were interviewed in the last three years have tended to self-identify; but
also because these types of academics are emerging within the new flurry of
transnational academic mobility being framed by economic globalisation and
conditioned by the imperatives of neoliberal market-framed higher education systems
(Cowen, 2007; Kim, 2008). In other words, although academics have always been
mobile as they moved among universities in various historical periods, what we may
be seeing here are new patterns of mobility which overlap with, and are constructed by,
the characteristics of contemporary entrepreneurial research universities: (1) a new
division of academic labour
research versus teaching versus management; (2) severe
competition for external research funding and international recruitment of research
staff (and students); (3) casualisation of academic labour in short-term, fixed-term
contract-based staffing; (4) implementation of immigration policies favourable to
international students and highly skilled foreign knowledge workers; and (5) changing
styles of university leadership in governance and management.
These characteristics are visible in many neoliberal market-led economies around
the world, but especially strong among the English-speaking higher education export
countries such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. Given the
complexity of the analysis, which begins by exploring each of these characteristics
and relating it to academic mobility, this article will deal only with an analysis of
the patterns of academic mobility into the UK, with occasional comparative
counterpoint.

1. Division of academic labour

Cowen (1996, 2007) portrays this change succinctly as a shift from polis-framed to
market-framed patterns in educational systems. Taking the contemporary English
university as an example, we can see clearly:

the massive growth of a managerial cadre; the fracturing of the class of professors into
specialist cohorts (of researchers, contract-researchers, consultants and so on); the
Marxian motif of the extraction of surplus value from the class of professors to support
the expanded managerial cohorts; the class fractions of contract researchers, visiting
fellows, post-doctoral fellows and of course the changed status of students who may
think of themselves as customers but who may increasingly be thought of (by their
580 T. Kim

teachers who are busy researching) as Lumpenproletariat. New forms of power are also
visible in terms of the displacement in the status of teaching, at precisely the time when
there is a powerful rhetoric about teaching and learning and much discussion of what
counts as teaching. (Cowen, 2007, p. 96)

Within this division of academic labour, contract researchers with generic

transferable skills are becoming mobile experts and being encouraged to move.
Probably for this reason, the existing research analyses of transnational academic
mobility have been focusing on the mobility of researchers (e.g. Martin-Rovet, 2003;
Morano-Foadi, 2005). However, as noted in the Trends 2010 report by the European
University Association (Sursock & Smidt, 2010), which reviews implementation of
the Bologna Process of the last 10 years and its impact on higher education across
47 countries in Europe, despite its efforts to promote mobility, there is still little data
available on mobility flows and how this has progressed during the first phase of the
Bologna Process (1999
2010). Accordingly, there is a new emphasis on mobility as
expressed in the Communique of the Conference of European Ministers Responsible
for Higher Education in Leuven, 28
29 April 2009, The Bologna Process 2020:

mobility shall be the hallmark of the European Higher Education Area. We call upon
each country to increase mobility, to ensure its high quality and to diversify its types and
scope. In 2020, at least 20% of those graduating in the European Higher Education Area
should have had a study or training period abroad.3

More recently, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) also stressed
the need for improving the social security of internationally mobile researchers:

mobility-related disadvantages should be eliminated for all workers. This is particularly

important for the research world as it allows more mobility, more cooperation and more
competition throughout Europe. As such, it could lay the very foundations of a truly
dynamic European Research Area. (LERU, 2010)

2. Competition for external research funding and international recruitment of research

staff and students
In the UK, competition for research funding has intensified in the last decade, and
competition in the international recruitment of the best and brightest students and
scholars is also nowadays strongly linked to the global marketisation of higher
education and research industry. For instance, the UK economy benefits by almost
11 billion directly and by about a further 12 billion indirectly, per annum, from
educational related exports. These figures place education in the same league as
financial services in the UK (British Council, 2007). In the USA, too, higher
education is the countrys fifth-largest export in the service sector. According to
Fareed Zakaria (2008), higher education is the United States best industry.
Increasing transnational academic mobility into the UK is facilitated by the
increasing corporatist norms and practices in university research and knowledge
production. In the current UK higher education market, foreign academics
are considered as good value for money (Times Higher Education, 2007), and the
majority of academics with non-UK nationality were employed in research-only jobs
(Universities UK, 2006). In the University of Oxford, almost 50% of recent academic
appointments went to non-UK nationals (Kim, 2009b, p. 398). According to the
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 581

Human Resources at LSE reports in February 2007, 46% of the academic staff were
international. Overall, the role of a gatekeeper seems less significant in many UK
institutions compared to other European countries (European University Institute,
2007).

3. Casualisation of academic labour in short-term, fixed-term contract-based staffing

In the UK, reshuffles in university governance and management to adopt corporatist
norms and practices have created both market opportunity and greater job insecurity,
including significant numbers of short-term employment contracts among research-
only academic staff. According to the University College Union report (UCU, 2007),
96% of research-only academics starting continuous employment were employed on
fixed-term contracts. Despite new regulations designed to reduce the use of fixed-term
contracts, the report reveals that the majority of UK universities are continuing to use
temporary contracts as the default position for most vacancies and new posts (UCU,
2007).
In other words, the casualisation of academic labour has been noticeable in the
UK, where academic tenure was abolished in the late 1980s. Throughout the 1990s,
the position of academic staff in the UK became progressively less secure. The Higher
Education Statistics Agency (HESA) employment data show the percentage of
permanent staff gradually falling through the mid-1990s, matched by an increase in
the proportion of fixed-term staff (Times Higher Education, 2001).
Increasing transnational academic mobility into and out of the UK is facilitated
by this propensity for short-term contracts in UK universities that are linked
with specific funded research projects. Terms such as the proletarianisation of the
academic profession (Halsey, 1992) and the proletarianisation of academic labour
(Wilson, 2007) have been suggested. Subsequently, the UCU in the UK set up a Anti-
casualisation Committee in June 2007.4
The situation in many other countries with neoliberal visions is similar. For
instance, in the USA, professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now
a distinct minority on US campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and
professors hired on a contract have swelled. A new class of full-time contract teachers
has grown in recent years as a way for universities to ensure flexibility in staffing. In
the USA, the so-called adjuncts
both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure
track
account for nearly 70% of professors at colleges and universities, both public
and private (New York Times, 2007). In South Korea, also, the part-time, contract-
based academics now outnumber the full-time tenure-track academics in universities
(Hankyoreh Shinmun, 2009). Similarly, in Australia, between 40 and 50% of teaching
in Australian higher education is currently done by sessional staff (Percy et al., 2008,
p. 3). In Latin America, the tradition of part-time university academics (loosely
known as taxi-professors) continues. In almost all Latin American countries except
for Brazil, up to 80% of the professoriate is employed part-time (University World
News, 2009a).
On the whole, the increase of short-term, fixed-term contract-based academic
employment is quite common among junior academic researchers, and the emergence
of new transnational space for research concentration such as the European Research
Area have adapted the conditions and patterns of transnational academic mobility.
Young European researchers now consider the UK as the best country in which to
582 T. Kim

develop their academic careers and establish academic reputations (European

University Institute, 2007).

4. Implementation of new immigration policies favourable to international students and

highly skilled foreign knowledge workers
To attract highly skilled workers and retain highly qualified international graduates
in the labour market, the UK government introduced the Australian-style point-
based immigration system. International students completing a UK degree
qualification are now entitled to apply for a visa to stay on and look for work in
the UK without needing to have a sponsor.
The category (Tier 1 Post-study work) provides a bridge to highly skilled or
skilled work to retain the most able international graduates who have studied in the
UK.5 Accordingly, the pathways of international students in the global knowledge
markets in many respects match the pathways of international academic staff. Status
switching from a research student to a research academic staff member has become
more common.
Similarly, in the USA, the Association of International Educators and NAFSA
have called on Congress to change existing laws to increase opportunities for foreign
graduates to obtain permanent residency. Ursula Oaks, a spokeswoman for NAFSA,
said:

As America and the world fell deeper into recession, it was important to break free of
the rhetoric of the political debate and refocus on the fundamentals. One fundamental
is talent. Talent is also, in todays world, highly mobile. Our economy is part of a global
economy, and our job market is part of a global job market. In such a market,
employers look for the talent they need wherever they can find it, and students and
skilled workers look for the places to study and work that offer them the most
opportunity. (University World News, 2009b)

5. Changing university leadership in governance and management

University leadership styles have also changed. Among research-intensive universities,
there is an emerging emphasis on entrepreneurial management skills that are accepted
as transnational and transferable. Accordingly, some of the most prestigious
universities in the UK have recruited Vice-Chancellors from abroad and from among
corporate senior managers (Kim, 2006).
For instance, Sir Richard Sykes, former Rector of Imperial College (2001
2008),
had been the chief executive of Glaxo. Sir Howard Davies, Director of LSE, was
formerly Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Director General of the
Confederation of British Industry. Mr Martin Bean, originally from Australia and
currently a general manager of Microsofts education products management and
marketing in the USA, has been appointed to be the Vice Chancellor of the Open
University as the successor to the South African Vice Chancellor, Professor Brenda
Gourley. The University of Oxford has been led by two foreign Vice Chancellors
consecutively, from New Zealand and the USA. The Vice Chancellors of Cambridge
and St Andrews Universities are also from the USA
Yale and Harvard,
respectively, and the Vice Chancellor of Manchester University (up until 30 June
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 583

2010) is from Melbourne, whereas the Vice Chancellors of UCL and the University
of London are both originally from New Zealand.
In short, manager-academics are emerging as a new type of mobile academics in
the entrepreneurial universities. This is especially visible in the English-speaking,
neoliberal market-driven economies (Kim, 2006, pp. 211
217). Interestingly, however,
the direction of transnational academic mobility in the case of manager-academics
has been mainly from the USA, Australia and New Zealand into the UK
as
illustrated above. This trend can be attributed to the openness and eagerness of the
UK higher education sector to adapt to corporatist management principles and to
reform universities by bringing in new managers from outside.
Overall, the profile of the academic profession in the UK has become increasingly
diversified and internationalised. About 45% of highly cited researchers based in the
UK have spent some time working abroad (Bekhradnia & Sastry, 2005). However,
these shifting patterns and the impact and consequences of transnational academic
mobility have not been fully examined empirically. Furthermore, the existing theories
and collected evidence have not engaged sufficiently with the specific context of
different types of knowledge transfer and transformation, which might be occurring
along with academic mobility, apart from the type of codified knowledge explicitly
required by any funded research contract, or corporate management skills.

Knowledge and identity capital and academic mobility

This article attempts to explore particular types of tacit knowledge formed and
carried by transnational academics
which can be identified as embodied and
encultured knowledge as termed by Collins (1993). Embodied knowledge consists of
contextual practices, and is more of a social acquisition, as how individuals interact
in and interpret their environment creates this non-explicit type of knowledge, and
encultured knowledge is the process of achieving shared understandings through
socialisation and acculturation (Collins, 1993).
Among the three types of mobile academics that I sketched earlier, it may be
possible to attribute a certain kind of embodied and encultured knowledge to
transnational academic intellectuals
as defined in this article
who have crossed
the boundaries and whose epistemic paradigms and positional identities have
become transnational. Positional identity here is specified as how individuals see
their position: their personal or reflexive identity (Kim, 2005, p. 90). With this
proposition, I will examine the particular relations of academic intellectuals, mobility
and knowledge, by employing the concept of transnational identity capital.
Identity capital as a concept is not context-specific or class-specific. According to
James Cote and Charles Levine (2008), identity capital includes cultural capital
as well as many other elements that are specific to membership in any type of social
culture. Identity capital operates to gain a group membership validation or preserve a
self-definition (Cote & Levine, 2008, pp. 158
159). Identity capital is differentiated
from social capital which, in general, refers to bonding and network power.
Moreover, I would argue that transnational identity capital involves generic
competences (corresponding roughly to what can be called personal skills) to engage
with otherness. The concept of otherness here is taken as the quality that someone
or something has, which is different from himself/herself or from the things that he/
she has experienced. It is a mode of cosmopolitan positioning to forge and sustain
584 T. Kim

multi-stranded social relations, which can facilitate free movement among diverse
groups and contexts, including ethno-national sub-cultures. I use the term
cosmopolitan here simply as a perspective, a state of mind, or a mode of managing
meaning (Hannerz, 1996, p. 102) opposed to the parochial and localised boundaries.
As examined by Hannerz (1990), there are identifiable transnational occupational
cultures: e.g. of international organisations, government diplomats, global corpora-
tions and various other international professions including the university academic
profession. These mobile international professionals routinely shift countries. The
socio-professional networks of these mobile individuals evolve in the course of
movements across borders. Their embodied and encultured knowledge is also likely
to evolve to transcend particular national and sub-national social fields, which can
help to develop a new identity capital that is not embedded in any particular limited
space-bound contexts.
The types of knowledge carried by mobile academics are not just Wissenschaft but
also a way of thinking and the overall orientation toward life and epistemic paradigms.
This orientation is a reflexive in-between stance, concerned with meta-communication
(Gouldner, 1979, p. 28) to form embodied and encultured knowledge.
My own biographic-narrative research also suggests that for mobile academics,
such an orientation is generally expansionist in its management of meaning, and it is
not a way of becoming a local, but rather of simulating local knowledge (Hannerz,
1996, p. 109). I would refer to these attributes as a transnational identity capital which
is carried by transnational academic intellectuals. As described in my typology of
mobile academics, transnational academic intellectuals are distinguished by their
intellectual role as legislator and interpreter, contributing to a creative destruction
and reconstruction of the paradigms of academic work.
Collins (1995) suggests that most of what we once thought of as the paradigm
case of unsocial knowledge
science and mathematics
has turned out to be deeply
social; it rests on agreements to live our scientific and mathematical life a certain way.
As such, Max Born, who was a major transnational intellectual physicist in the
development of quantum mechanics after leaving Germany in 1933, expressed his
most important intellectual legacy as follows:

I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth etc. are
figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science . . .
The belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil
in the world. (Seabrook, 2009, pp. 44
45)

In his Nobel lecture of December 1954, Born stated with a characteristic sense of
humility towards his own achievement: The work for which I have had the honour
to be awarded the Nobel prize in Physics for 1954, contains no discovery of a fresh
natural phenomenon, but rather the basis for a new mode of thought in regard to
natural phenomena (Seabrook, 2009, p. 44).
The research enquiry of the relations of mobile academic intellectuals and their
transnational identity capital focuses on the individuals and movements which are
occurring in transnational space and not necessarily on official inter-action between
nations. In that sense, my analysis is differentiated from the conventional approaches
to academic mobility and skilled migration, and the conventional debates about
brain drain/brain gain based on human-capital theories.
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 585

It is true that the USA benefited greatly from the peculiar conditions of brain
drain, when we look at the inter-war and the Cold War periods, the major
characteristics of which affected the flows of transnational academic mobility are the
extreme politics
of Fascism, of Democracy and of Communism (Kim, 2009a).
The end of the Cold War, the rise of a New Europe based on the collapse of the
Eastern bloc and an enlarged European Union over the last 18 years, and the global
War on Terror since the beginning of the twenty-first century have altered academic
mobility and migration. Contemporaneously, the patterns of academic mobility are
still associated with the policy discourse of brain drain and brain circulation
arguments (Nunn, 2005) when mobility is seen through the geography of nation
states, especially the bipolar economic geography of South
North skilled migrations.
However, not all skilled migrants are in search of educational, economic or
intellectual opportunities. Sometimes, they are forced to leave their homes as a result of
war, or political, ethnic and religious persecution. There is still the principle of
repulsion: in some countries, academics are persecuted with violence, and occasionally
through more subtle pressures. Overall, the contemporary flows of academic move-
ments are more intricate than what is conventionally called brain drain/brain gain/
brain exchange (Kim, 2009a).
Transnational academic mobility leads to the new flows and transformation of
knowledge that could benefit both sending and receiving countries more easily than
before. As Appadurai (1996) suggests, we think beyond the nation by imagining a
form of sovereignty which replaces territoriality with translocalities. An increasing
number of migrant sending states recognise that migrants and refugees can advance
national development from abroad and are endowing emigrants with special rights
and protections toward this end (Levitt & Sorensen, 2004).
Permanent return is not necessary or at least not as crucial as before for the
mobile academics who become transnational talent, and opting for international
academic career development. That means that mobility is not a zero-sum game
(Kim, 2009b, p. 401). In other words, what is going on now is, arguably, not so much
brain drain or brain gain in the society of nation states, but it is more like brain
transfer and transformation in a globalised space (p. 401), where the remaking of
citizenship and the cosmopolitan
local discourses take place.
Individual academics embodied and encultured knowledge would go through
transformation (in the course of mobility), and some of them would develop
transnational identity capital. It can be suggested that mobile academic intellectuals
living such transnational lives cannot inhabit an immutable nation-home
once they
become cosmopolitan. Even when they are actually residing in their own home
countries, they are never quite at home again, in the way real locals can be (Hannerz,
1990, p. 248). The biographies of transnational academic intellectuals corroborate the
proposition that highly mobile academics develop a sense of multi-belongings through
the constant voluntary and involuntary displacement experiences. However, not all
mobile academics would become cosmopolitan and possess transnational identity
capital. For some academic expatriates, a surrogate home is created with the help of
compatriots in whose circle one becomes encapsulated (Hannerz, 1996, p. 106).
Thus, transnational identity capital which I am attributing to mobile academic
intellectuals, in particular, requires active engagement with otherness
as defined
earlier in this article
and involves creative abilities that convert challenges and
insights into innovation processes and into new forms of expression. Clearly this
586 T. Kim

suggested type of positioning needs to be closely interrogated with more

detailed examples of transnational academic intellectuals, whose stories reveal their
possession of transnational identity capital.

Transnational identity capital: assuming the position of a stranger

Possibly there is some intellectual advantage when one becomes a transnational
mobile academic, which in a way is a deliberate choice and inevitable consequence to
become a stranger and minority, experiencing both voluntary and involuntary
displacement. Professor Anthony Leggett, the US-based British physicist and
Nobel Laureate comments on this:

I definitely think that not just in science, but in any creative field of endeavour, it is an
advantage to have been a minority . . ., be it through religion, ethnicity, or even left-
handedness . . . how far the experience of maintaining and defending
sometimes in
public and in the face of some ridicule
beliefs and attitudes not shared by the vast
majority of my compatriots may have influenced my subsequent attitude to physics and
indeed to life in general. (Times Higher Education, 2008a)

Becoming a transnational academic intellectual is like assuming the position of a

stranger
as conceptualised by Simmel:
the man who comes today and stays tomorrow, the potential wanderer, so to speak,
although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and
going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle
or within a group whose boundaries
are analogous to spatial boundaries
but his position within it is fundamentally
affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into
it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it. (1971, p. 143)

Simmel argues:

To be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction

. . . He [the stranger] is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar
tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of
objectivity. But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a
particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.
(1971, p. 145)

Accordingly, the position of transnational academic intellectuals as a stranger

corresponds to the attributes of transnational identity capital that I have discussed in
this article earlier.
A similar conceptualisation emerges also from Pierre Bourdieus book, Homo
Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988). In the book, what I suggest as the attributes of
transnational academic intellectuals can be identified with the consecrated heretics
(Bourdieu, 1988, pp. 105
111). As a corollary:

even when they are not entirely estranged from the normal career pattern
as is the
case with those of them who were not born in France, without being totally alienated
from the university order, they [transnational academic intellectuals] are often those
who have accomplished a more or less decisive detour from the normal trajectories
which lead to simple reproduction and from the psychological and social security which
these trajectories guarantee. (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 107)
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 587

In this context, it is worth remembering that many of the great names of British
scholarship were from elsewhere, whether voluntary migrants or enforced exiles.
Quite apart from the sheer numbers, and where they came from, they may well have
brought outsider perspectives that helped them cut through received wisdom.
Overall, there is a convergence in the thought of many of the great scientists and
intellectuals who were forced to become exiles and experience displacements during
the first half of the twentieth century, among them Einstein, Heisenberg, Popper and
Born. Seabrook insightfully narrates their life stories and concludes:

Impelled by a position which compelled them to exchange one society for another, they
often came to a common view on the relativity both of the laws of physics, and of the
values, beliefs and social organizations, which they considered as perishable as the
certainties of mechanics, which, it had been assumed, had been established definitively
and for all time. (2009, p. 45)

Examples of transnational academic intellectuals of the twentieth century,

whose transnational identity capital was important include Nobert Elias (1897

1990), Edward Said (1935
2003), Jacques Derrida (1930
2004), to name but a
few. In this paper, I will take the example of Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925) and
Stuart Hall (born 1932), two of the most prominent academic intellectuals of our
times.
Zygmunt Bauman was born to non-practising Polish-Jewish parents in Poznan,
Poland. He is a transnational academic intellectual who experienced the horrors of
the twentieth century
war, the persecution of Jews, and exile from his country so
as to remain loyal to himself. In the conversations with Benedetto Vecchi, Bauman
remarks:

Britain was the country of my choice and by which I was chosen through an offer of a
teaching job once I could no longer stay in Poland, the country of my birth, because my
right to teach was taken away. But there, in Britain, I was an immigrant, a newcomer

not so long ago a refugee from a foreign country, an alien. I have since become a
naturalized British citizen, but once a newcomer can you ever stop being a newcomer?
(2004, p. 9)

Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica and grew up in a middle-class family and
received privileged education at Jamaica College and Oxford:
The family was ethnically very mixed
African, East Indian, Portuguese, Jewish . . .
I was the blackest member of my family . . . So I always had the identity in my family of
being the one from the outside . . . And I performed that role throughout. (Hall, 1996,
pp. 486
487)

At Oxford, he felt divorced from the white British establishment university culture.
He was a victim of racism and snobbery. At Oxford, Halls doctoral thesis was on
Henry James, the novelist par excellence of manner, style and high society whose
work dealt with questions of power, difference, representation and emplacement. All
of these have been lifelong interests in Halls sociology and cultural studies (Rojek,
2003, pp. 57
58). The question of Halls relation to Britain is complex. Halls
interview on the formation of a diasporic intellectual reveals his transnational
identity capital:
588 T. Kim

Having been prepared by the colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But
Im not and never will be English. I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly
of either place. And thats exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to
experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an
always-postponed arrival. (Hall, 1996, p. 492)

Hall as usual distils many of the issues brilliantly. However, it is also useful to step
back and take a slightly broader perspective and try to pull some of the themes
discussed in this article together in the conclusion.

Conclusion
The condition of transnational mobility and the position of mobile academics have
been structured by political and economic forces determining the boundaries and
direction of flows, and also involve personal choices and professional networks
(Kim, 2008). Unlike ordinary economic labour migration, however, the transnational
flows of academic mobility and migration are more often shaped by the intellectual
centre/periphery relationships rather than merely directed by pure economic
incentives. In other words, the geography of academic mobility is not so much
determined by the economic strength of a global metropolitan space as by the
strength of particular institutions identified as a centre of excellence for knowledge
creation. The combination of both
e.g. London
would make a strong axis mundi
for transnational mobile academics to be drawn into. In that sense, transnational
mobile academics are under the imperatives of academic capitalism, most of whom
are the extensions or transformations of that of Western Europe and North America.
But even away from these centres of excellence, universities tend to be organised to
adapt to the academic norms and paradigms of the centres, e.g. by using their
languages.
Historically, it was once possible to envisage universities as universitas (as in
early medieval Europe) informed by the universals of a lingua franca and by the
mobility of academics and ideas, which in turn gradually clustered into a few centres
of excellence. Oddly enough, the same vocabulary could be used to describe the
contemporary situation
universities have become once again universitas informed
by the universals of a (new) lingua franca and by the mobility of academics and ideas
which are clustering into a few centres of excellence within competition on a global
scale (Kim, 2009b).
However, the forces which have framed the contemporary situation and the new
discourses which inform it give a very different social shape and social meaning to the
patterns. The contemporary patterns of academic mobility and policy discourse in
relation to knowledge economy have been shaped and given social meaning by
the globalisation of the neoliberal market ideology. The emphasis in the process of
globalisation of higher education has moved from the transmission of knowledge to
the training and acquisition of transferable skills and to competences (as explicitly
aimed in the Tuning Project on a global scale6).
As argued by Ainley (1993), skills formerly understood by many as complex
social processes have become de-contextualised and de-constructed into finite,
isolable competences to be located as the property of the individual, who then
carry them, luggage-like, from job to job and also across spatial boundaries (Ainley,
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 589

1993, p. 357; re-quoted from Williams & Balaz, 2008, p. 36). The same logic is
applied to transnational mobility of academics and the types of knowledge they
carry. That is to say, transnational identity capital formation as discussed earlier in
this article can be perceived as a process of shifting from hard, scientific, explicitly
codified knowledge to organic, intrinsic, implicit, reflexive, spatial knowledge

namely embodied and encultured knowledge. As a mode of thinking and organising
meaning, transnational identity capital can be understood as what Hannerz
described as a de-contextualised cultural capital which can be quickly and shiftingly
re-contextualised in a series of different settings whilst they are on the move
(Hannerz, 1990, p. 246).
Overall, it is suggested that transnational identity capital is formed and carried
by mobile academic intellectuals who assume the position of a stranger (as
conceptualised by Simmel). Contemporaneously, however, it can drive toward
greater competences recognised as transferable in the contemporary globalised
academic and socio-economic fields. Evidently, there are contradictions, ambi-
guities, elusiveness, and ambivalence in configuring the exact nature of transna-
tional identity capital shared by mobile academics, as their intrinsic self-definitions
may be widely differential and their self-positioning and their assumed roles may
represent a condition of dissonance
e.g. mobile academics as intellectuals,
experts, and/or managers
as illustrated in my typology earlier. The new
condition and relations of academic mobility and transnational identity capital
are obscure and involve unfamiliar and challenging ways of thinking about shifting
paradigms. In thinking at the limit (borrowing Derridas phrase), I think there is
an awkward hiatus in our epistemic formation between deconstruction and
reconstruction.
According to Bauman (2004), however, it is essential to understand the
prominent features of a long transition in order to identify social trends, and it is
equally necessary to contextualise manifestations of social existence within the long
period. Discussion of the patterns of transnational academic mobility and types of
knowledge transfer and transformation, using the concept of transnational identity
capital, is necessary as an initial effort to understand some of the currently changing
roles of academics and their engagement with knowledge. More and more academics
are mobile, and more and more of them are becoming transnational. From time to
time, it is probably wise of us, as academics, to look at ourselves.

Notes
1. See http://tuning.unideusto.org/tuningeu/
2. See http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/Bologna/2010_conference/documents/Buda
pest-Vienna_Declaration.pdf
3. See http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/conference/documents/Leuven_
Louvain-la-Neuve_Communiqu%C3%A9_April_2009.pdf
4. See http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid 2973
5. See http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/workingintheuk/tier1/poststudy/
6. See http://unideusto.org/tuning/
590 T. Kim

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