Blanca Torres-Olave

In this article we examine the ways in which institutional stratification and academic labor segmentation contribute to shaping faculty collaborative activities. We draw on interviews from science and engineering faculty at two institutions in the United States to highlight how collaboration, as an essential form of academic labor, is shaped by institutional factors like resource stress and isomorphic pressures to fit the ideal of the “world-class” research-intensive university. The findings suggest that a university’s relative position in the institutional status hierarchy has a significant impact on the types of resources faculty seeking to establish collaborations can access and mobilize, thus reinforcing existing patterns of institutional stratification where “striving” institutions can never catch up to their more prestigious peers. At the same time, the
pressure to maximize institutional prestige can create paradoxical interinstitutional dynamics where seemingly successful “Mode 2” units that rely almost exclusively on external resources and partnerships with industry are expected to mold themselves more closely to the activity streams of traditional academic units.

Despite a robust body of scholarship on positionality, the practice of international Higher Education research often neglects engagement with the varied, fluid and complex positionalities of researchers across national boundaries. Through a series of vignettes, the authors argue for reflexivity that extends beyond rigid social identities and towards embodied knowledge, or self‐understanding that is mutable and context responsive. For international mobile researchers especially, new affinities can evolve through propinquity and social custom, and gradually become incorporated into self‐knowledge with the passing of time. Beyond mere cultural competency, this article raises the importance of symbolic competency that simultaneously negotiates the
multiple dimensions of language, various forms of capital, as well as evolving social identities in conducting research in different contexts.

Gender inequality in science and technology fields takes various and complex shapes, from recruitment and retention across educational levels, to job entry and advancement barriers, to pay and compensation. Although the salary gap for women in these fields is well documented, much of the relevant research has relied exclusively on mean earned wages to estimate compensation differentials by gender. This approach may underestimate the actual extent of the gender gap more than if more comprehensive measures of compensation (e.g., wages along with health insurance and retirement benefits) were used. Through a two-step cluster analysis of the 2008–2010 US Census Survey of Income and Program Participation, in this study I considered wages along with access to employer-provided health and pension benefits, as well as job characteristics such as union membership, part-time employment, and access to employer-provided training, to explore labor segmentation in the science and technology workforce. The findings reveal a pattern consistent with labor segmentation, including the presence of clusters with secondary employment characteristics (i.e., low wages, part-time employment, and lack of health insurance and pension benefits). Significantly, women were overrepresented in such clusters, as well as in part-time and contingent work arrangements more generally. The findings both support and complicate the evidence from prior research on the gender gap by illustrating the cumulative impact that measures of total compensation can have in assessing the true extent of compensation disparities between men and women and by highlighting the stratification of highly skilled labor in the new economy.

In this essay, we consider the " petty " managerial technologies of audit and surveillance that shape the lives of Mexican faculty and introduce the term bioaccountability to refer to the growing use of biometric control mechanisms implemented around the world to monitor faculty activities and performance. We draw on personal experience at three Mexican public universities to illustrate the chilling impact of encroaching (bio)accountability policies on academic culture, including the gradual erosion of academic freedom.