Reframing Motivational Typologies of Long-Term International Academic Mobility

Contemporary higher education is increasingly shaped by internationalisation and long-term academic mobility. This study re-examines motivational typologies of long-term mobility, typically involving sustained employment, relocation and institutional integration, building on Richardson and McKenna's metaphorical framework. Through interviews with 31 academics from 14 countries across 16 Chinese universities, it confirms four established types (explorer, refugee, mercenary and architect) and identifies three additional types (pioneer, follower and embedder), capturing motivations related to institution-building, relationship-based mobility and gradual embeddedness. The findings show that motivations are shaped through interaction of structural conditions, relational ties and individual meaning-making over time. By linking these patterns to underlying mechanisms, the study reframes metaphor-based typologies as context-dependent and processual rather than fixed categories. It thus offers a process-oriented basis for analysing how mobility motivations are formed and evolve across contexts, and provides a context-sensitive understanding of long-term academic mobility in rapidly internationalising systems as China.