Publishing in pursuit of an academic career: The role of embedded and encultured knowledge in national job-market entry strategies of elite early career European scholars.

This paper contributes to a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of academic publishing by linking work on publishing with recent studies on international migration. It also contributes to the empirical literature on access to national academic job markets by revealing how transnationally-mobile early-career scholars in the European context make publishing decisions on the basis of perceptions about how explicit criteria and uncodified practices mediate access to entry-level academic positions. In the first part of the article I elaborate a dual framework for the analysis of academic publishing in a life-course perspective by drawing on Williams and Baláž’s (2008) analysis of skilled migration as part of the global knowledge economy. It is commonly recognized that publications can be viewed as “trail of artifacts” (McAlpine et al. , 2010: 139) of a scholar’s intellectual activity and hence as a form of explicit (encoded) knowledge that accrues to scholars as individuals. I argue that they also act as an “evidential warrant” for various types of tacit professional knowledge by (i) displaying a scholar’s knowledge of a field or subfield, hence what expertise he or she will bring to the new institution (embrained knowledge); (ii) indicating a scholar’s probable future productivity, by signalling ̶ on the basis of previous publications ̶ what type of scholarly work he/she can be expected to produce if hired (embrained/embodied ‘utility value’); (iii) positioning a scholar in national and international academia thanks to patterns of co-authorship, citation and choice of publication outlets (embedded knowledge). Using this theoretical lens and drawing on the notion of ‘positional participation’ developed in some of my previous work (see Anderson 2013, 2014), in the second part of the article I present the results of a comparative case study of four multilingual, transnationally mobile scholars. The informants for the study were selected in order to control for three factors known to affect academic publishing: time (same academic year), academic discipline (political science), and academic job market or markets targeted (all interviewees were actively targetting the French academic job market). All four informants were postdoc fellowship recipients at the Max Weber Programme (European University Institute, Florence), and hence also comparable in terms of their post-doc trajectories. Indepth semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to probe the respondents’ personal language background, publishing strategies and career-related decisions, reading and bibliographical research habits, experiences in writing in their various languages of publication, and attitudes toward language issues in academic publishing. The publication history of specific texts and how these texts came to be published in a particular language were also investigated (cfr. Lillis & Curry [2010] for the notions of ‘text history’ and ‘talk about texts’). The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed, and a qualitative content analysis was carried out. The interviewees’ degree of participation in different national contexts was found to affect their publication strategies, including their perceptions of the value of language choice in publishing (in the present case, French vs. English). On the basis of these results, I argue that the affirmation of English as a lingua franca in international academia is a more complex phenomenon than is generally recognized and hence that claims that disciplinary networking across borders is inevitably leading to convergence (or indeed, ‘homogenization’, cfr. Marginson, 2009) in academic knowledge-making are overstated. The study also highlights the contradictory forces affecting early-career scholars in today’s increasingly globalized academia and underlines the need for further indepth qualitative studies of publishing in specific national contexts.