Voice, Silence, and Diversity: A Case of Transnational Academics

Introduction

Since the 1990s, the scale and speed of cross-border academic mobility has been notably increased by policy strategies and the liberalisation of trade policies by many national governments. The academic talent pool is becoming increasingly transnational under the influence of economic globalization in the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany and France (Kim, 2009, pp. 395–405). Universities around the world are recruiting across national boundaries in line with their internationalisation agendas, and high-skilled mobile academics are much in demand and constitute a ‘knowledge diaspora’ (Yang & Welch, 2012). Any visitor to an Australian university will be struck by the diversity of its population – not only in student numbers, which attract the attention of the media and are often seen as key to sustaining the viability of universities and their research, but the diversity of the academic teaching and research staff without whom essential teaching and research tasks could not occur. What does all this diversity mean? Does it affect outputs and outcomes – or education quality? Is it a non-problem because universities, by their nature, are held to be places of learning and tolerance, of openness and welcome to all? If this last is so, it misses an important, established concern around diversity, what it means and implies, who benefits from it, and who does not, or benefits less.

Feminist researchers have raised the issue of how ‘voices’ are distributed and materialized in academia (Cielemęcka, 2017; Rogowska-Stangret, 2019). They contend that the politics of voice and silence are not only gendered, but whose voice is heard and listened to is also influenced by race and class. In universities, a potentially ‘wicked problem’ concerns how highly-skilled knowledge workers from other nations not only adjust to academic life in Australia but also have the capacity to exercise voice so they can be involved and communicate their ideas, concerns and suggestions in their universities – to overcome what is often cited in business as ‘the liability of foreignness (Zaheer, 1995). Previous research on voice in academia has mostly taken a gender perspective of voice and concluded that academia is not usually a place where heterogeneous voices are recognised, heard, or listened to.

This chapter uses the lenses of voice and silence to explore this issue: how transnational academics in higher education institutions, who have dual (or multiple) identities, integrate into the Anglophone Australian system through what is often seen as a litmus test of this process, employee voice channels. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has not been a study that has focussed on the concepts of voice and silence for transnational academics in academia. The study draws on 17 semi-structured interviews with transnational academics from 11 countries, employed by eight different universities across Australia, to explore the workplace experiences of diversity and inclusion in terms of their voice and/or silence. The main research questions emerging from this research are:

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  Do transnational university academics perceive they have opportunities to communicate their concerns and suggestions (i.e., to have voice)?

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  Does voice create inclusion and thus a sense of belonging in Australian higher education institutions?

Background

Australian universities are diverse workplaces, and they employ over 130,000 people in academic and professional roles (Department of Education, Skills and Employment or DESE, 2020). Of these, 30,850 are classified as Teaching and Research academics, 19,232 Research only, 6,712 Teaching only, and 73,620 administrative or other positions (DESE, 2020). Furthermore, the massification of higher education and funding policy changes by the successive governments has seen significant growth in student numbers in Higher Education institutions.