Isolation in Globalizing Academic Fields: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Early Career Researchers

This study examines academic isolation – an involuntary perceived separation from the academic field to which one aspires to belong, associated with a perceived lack of agency in terms of one’s engagement with the field – as a key challenge for researchers in increasingly globalized academic careers. While prior research describes early career researchers’ isolation in their institutions, we theorize early career researchers’ isolation in their academic fields and reveal how they attempt to mitigate isolation to improve their career prospects. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we generate and analyze a dataset focused on the experiences of ten early career researchers in a globalizing business academic field known as Consumer Culture Theory. We identify bricolage practices, polycentric governance practices, and integration mechanisms that work to enhance early career researchers’ perceptions of agency and consequently mitigate their academic isolation. Our findings extend discussions on isolation and its role in new academic careers. Early career researchers, in particular, can benefit from a deeper understanding of practices that can enable them to mitigate isolation and reclaim agency as they engage with global academic fields

Entrepreneurship as a career choice: intentions, attitudes, and outcome expectations

© 2019, © 2019 Journal of the Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship/Conseil de la PME et de l’entrepreneuriat. This manuscript presents an empirically tested model of entrepreneurial intentions based upon social cognitive career theory (SCCT). Our study consisted of 320 undergraduate business students at a large U.S. university and emphasizes the important influences of prior exposure to entrepreneurship, as well as social support mechanisms on formation of entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial outcome expectations. We offer strong theoretical support to the entrepreneurial intentions literature through the lens of SCCT. Additionally, our manuscript highlights the important role of entrepreneurial attitude in mediating the relationship between entrepreneurial motivation and intention. SCCT offers additional explanation to the existing underspecified model and complexity of entrepreneurial intentions. In this manuscript the authors identify attitude as an important precursor to entrepreneurial intent