How do tenure evaluations shape transnational research collaboration? Insights from South Korea, the United States, and China

Although transnational research collaboration has rapidly increased since the pandemic, we know little about how tenure evaluation influences academic collaboration across national contexts. This collaborative autoethnographic study examines how tenure evaluations in Korea, the U.S., and China both foster and hinder transnational research collaboration among three Asian female scholars. Drawing on two theoretical frameworks of academic research collaboration [Sargent, L. D., and L. E. Waters. 2004. “Careers and Academic Research Collaborations: An Inductive Process Framework for Understanding Successful Collaborations. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 64: 308–319.] and scientific globalism [Lee, J. J., and J. P. Haupt 2021. Scientific Collaboration on COVID-19 Amidst Geopolitical Tensions between the US and China. The Journal of Higher Education 92 (2): 303–329; Sá, C., and E. Sabzalieva 2018. “Scientific Nationalism in a Globalizing World.” In Handbook on the Politics of Higher Education, edited by B. Cantwell, H. Coates, and R. King, 149–166. Edward Elgar Publishing], we analysed data (e.g., online meeting transcripts, diary entries, and email exchanges) generated over three and a half years of transnational research collaboration. Our findings demonstrate that divergent tenure systems – from East Asia’s SSCI syndrome to the U.S.’s emphasis on journal reputation – work paradoxically, creating pressure while encouraging strategic partnerships that translate national and institutional differences into mutual benefits. Our study also shows how transnational collaboration can become a site of everyday resistance (Scott, J. C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) against institutional marginalisation, and how scholars translate divergent evaluation criteria, such as differing valuations of corresponding authorship, into workable arrangements. We call on institutions that seek international research output to recognise the collaborative labour that produces it.