Giulio Marini

• PhD
• Senior Assistant Professor at University of Catania

In recent years, increased rivalry between China and the EU has been seen as a threat to cooperation, including in the field of higher education and scientific research. We explore how cooperation in research between China and the EU has developed over time via a bibliometric analysis of international co-authorships within four different funding ag...

Brexit raised the question of whether the UK will continue to attract internationals. Here the focus is on academic staff – a critical component of the “War for Talents” discourse and current geopolitics in the field. Despite a clear trend of loss of EU internationals, at least among western EU countries, the UK more than compensates for this fall...

Some individual funding schemes aim at recognizing excellence of early and/or mid-career researchers, allowing them to boost their potential via munificent endowments, autonomy, and employment security. In Italy, this is the case of "Futuro in Ricerca" (FIRB), which is in many regards similar to the European Research Council (ERC) scheme. Both sche...

This paper examines the potential earnings premium associated with a doctoral degree (PhDs, ISCED9) over postgraduate degrees (PGs, or Masters, ISCED7) in the UK. We assess this premium using a decade-worth of UK Labour Force Survey data (2011–2020). To explore the possible endogenous choice of post-graduate tracks, this paper deploys linear regres...

The purpose of the paper is to understand why academics' main association and trade union in England (University and College Union-UCU) is not stronger in its representation capacity, deepening knowledge regarding its role in the wider higher education sector. UCU operates in an adversarial context, claiming itself to be academics' main voice. Howe...

This article investigates the research influence (as indicated by citations and the SCImago quartile classification of target journal of publication) as per Global Western standards of foreign and Chinese academics in mainland China. The focus on research influence echoes the policy shifts in Chinese research from quantity to quality. This study an...

The paper investigates the increasing number of international co-authored publications, comparing countries that accessed the European Union (EU) in 2004 (EU04) against other Central-Eastern European Countries (othEast-ERA), adopting a scientometric approach. This comparison looks at whether to be part of the EU is different from being part of the...

Purpose This paper aims to study vertical gender segregation, which persists even in the fields where women are represented at junior levels. Academia is an example. Individual performance and lack of a critical mass do not fully explain the problem. Thus, this paper adopted an intergroup perspective (i.e. social identity and competition theories)...

This article examines the experience of international academics in mainland China. The emerging trend of foreign academics moving into long-term, full-time positions in Chinese universities is an underreported phenomenon in research. This article discusses the following questions: Who are the foreign academics in China? What motivates them to go an...

This editorial presents the special issue on challenges of academic freedom in Europe, predominantly in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The volume provides a novel empirical stream of research, urging scholars to face the emerging discourse and problems of academic freedom in the contemporary higher education systems that were largely overlooked...

This paper aims at shedding light on the grant acquisition as a predictor of academic careers – a topic well known in international literature. The main hypothesis is that those becoming grant recipients at a relatively early stage in one’s career can progress in a more steeped way in comparison to those who don’t, keeping other indicators of perfo...

This chapter investigates the role and practice of Workload Allocation Models (WAM), as managerial devices used at system and institutional level to coordinate academic work. Our data is drawn from a survey in five British institutions with 581 respondents overall. WAM appear to be widely known, understood and used, however, in the perception of ac...

This article examines the trend of academic migration to mainland China. Notably, the most recent literature identified a new cohort of international academics in China, who are non-Chinese academics with long-term and full-time positions. Despite growing research interests, there is a lack of critical and synthesised reviews about the extant studi...

International mobility is an increasingly important aspect of academic careers. However, although there is a considerable body of literature that examines international mobility motivations, much less is known about the working lives of academics who move abroad. This paper analyses the academic career experiences of migrant academics in the UK, dr...

International academic staff in higher education are considered per se a signal of attractiveness and success. In this article, we discuss the findings of a recent study on international staff working in the United Kingdom. International staff are now fully immersed in all academic functions in their institutions and involved in wider organizationa...

Final report of the SRHE-funded project on international faculty in mainland Chinese universities, available at: https://srhe.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/SRHE-Research-Report_Marini_Xu_Oct-2021_Final.pdf

The paper develops the metaphorical concept of the “concertina” career to describe ways in which academic staff, across a diversifying workforce, modulate their interactions with institutional career frameworks, which tend to be unilinear and to be characterised by detailed progression criteria and milestones. In doing this, they are guided by Inte...

Currently, in the UK we have knowledge about doctoral holders’ employability and destinations (“doctoral leavers”) from official HESA data. This source assures to know where PhDs bred in the UK work, provided they remain in the UK or go to work in the EU. There is still a dearth of knowledge about those who end to work outside the EU/UK. Among thes...

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This webinar will ask the question of whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies – the “Young Thousand Talen...

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This paper examines whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies—the ‘Young Thousand Talents’ policy (Y1000T)—...

In all developed countries in recent years, the non-academic labour market destination of PhD-holders (segmentation) has emerged as an issue. Universities and other research-intensive institutions can no longer absorb the major share of PhD-holders. Their employment has become a matter of segmentation both in horizontal (economic sector) and in ver...

To fight for Academic Freedom appears as virtuous, nowadays, as recurrently necessary whenever certain possibilities by academics and/or students are denied. Academic Freedom is also invoked to claim the possibility by universities to nurture societies at large. Whilst all these records are certainly realistic and do occur, Academic Freedom is fore...

The paper investigates the issue of increasing international co-authored publications, comparing countries that accessed the Europe-an Union (EU) in 2004 (EU04) against other Central-Eastern European Countries (othEast-ERA), adopting a scientometrical approach. This comparison is interesting to check whether to be part of the EU is dif-ferent from...

In the decade or so before the 2016 Referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), there had been a rapid increase in foreign faculty in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), particularly those from other EU countries. Many institutions had come to rely on academics from other EU countries, and those from outside the EU, for a sig...

Some individual funding schemes aim at recognize excellence of early and/or mid-career researchers in order to allow them boost their potential. Some schemes are munificent endowments, assuring autonomy and security. This is the case of one of the European flagship schemes – the European Research Council (ERC). In Italy, a very similar scheme calle...

This paper compares the research productivity between two groups of Chinese early-and mid-career researchers, who both got their PhDs in research leading institutions outside Mainland China. One group was recruited back to mainland China under a specific scheme, called "Young Thousand Talents" ("Y1000T")-a clear attempt by the Chinese Government to...

Reforms in higher education have been passed in many European countries in the last decades, mostly trying to adapt national systems to new European and global challenges. This study examines some consequences of such major reforms in France and Spain. Specifically, these reforms introduced new agencies whose remit was inter alia to provide evaluat...

How do staff see their opportunities and shape their work in a difficult UK academic labour market? What kind of career do they imagine for themselves and can it be achieved? How do staff see their opportunities and shape their work in a difficult UK academic labour market? What kind of career do they imagine for themselves and can it be achieved?...

While it is commonly agreed that globally bred talent returning to China greatly contributes to the enhancement of research capacity, whether returnees perform better than those who stay overseas remains to be examined. We compared the research productivity of Chinese “Young Thousand Talents” (Y1000Ts) and Chinese researchers remaining in the Unite...

This working paper offers an analysis of the interviews undertaken as the first stage of CGHE Project 3.2, with senior managers and academic staff, in eight universities. It explores the approaches taken by both groups in addressing institutional and individual aspirations, the relationships between individuals and their institutions, and ways in w...

This Working Paper reviews the literature on the topic of ‘the academic workforce’ published in the three years preceding the start of CGHE research project 3.2 in 2016. An earlier publication (Locke, 2014) reviewed the literature and policy developments up to 2013. We undertook an in-depth review of journals dedicated to higher education studies a...

In the original publication of the article, the second sentence of the Abstract and one of the references were incorrectly published. The correct version is given in this Correction.

The topic of gender differences and career progression is high not only on the scholarly agenda, it is often discussed in the media as well – sometimes in quite controversial terms. We investigate this theme in Italy, a country that in recent years introduced a level of institutional autonomy in determining the career paths of academics. We provide...

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, and the formal act of triggering article 50 by Theresa May’s cabinet in 2017, the UK has entered a period of negotiations, the outcome of which, and also the terms of the post-exiting phase, are still uncertain. In this period of uncertainty, the mobility of people is one of the main issues at stake. The topic i...

The paper investigates internationally co-authored publications between countries between 1995 and 2015. The paper tests if the European Union funding agency (as defined by InCites Web of Knowledge) has favoured Eastern European countries (East-E) comparing all publications against EU funded ones. This research question tentatively exposes the adva...

The purpose of this four-year research project is to investigate the implications of the diversification of the academic workforce in the UK and to indicate how higher education institutions might plan strategically for their future staffing needs, and how sector bodies could support this. Through the study, we aim to develop a deeper understanding...

In this paper we aim to understand if gender makes a difference in the path to promotion to full professor in Italian universities, drawing on data from 2013 to 2016. The new promotion system pursuant Gelmini Law (249/2010) in Italy implies to go through two steps. First, they have to obtain the national ASN system (fit-for-the-role national filter...

The paper analyses which conditions may predict a better salary for people who got a PhD in social sciences and humanities (SS&H) in 13 European countries. Among the controlling variables, predictors are also: change of country of residence; percentage of time spent respectively in research and managerial activities; and impacts achieved during one...

Individual experiences in dealing with individual evaluations are studied through a national documental analysis and qualitative interviews. The analysis considers three main individual assessments designed to measure individual credentials or performance: sexenio (research and third mission), quinquenio (teaching) and acreditación (mix of all miss...

In the context of significant changes in the employment contract for academic staff worldwide, the paper reports on a study of the developing implications of a diversifying higher education workforce for systems, institutions and individuals. It reviews official datasets in the light of interviews with a range of respondents in eight case study ins...

This chapter investigates how external evaluation affects uni- versity governance. The two research questions are: What makes evalu- ation a powerful instrument affecting the governance of universities? Do different evaluation instruments have different strengths in affect- ing governance? We assume that evaluation has several areas of potential ef...

The new habilitation (ASN), established in Italy in 2010 and launched in 2012, was introduced to filter eligible candidates in the competition of associate and full professorships. Its purpose is to cut off poor candidates on the basis of individual scientific productivity before they might be hired in competitions where patronage may favor them. T...

The literature on higher education tends to assume that changes in higher education institutions promoted a redefinition of boundaries between academic and administrative staff. Academics perceive a decrease in the control over their own work due to the increasing presence of non-academic managers. The presence of new public management and manageri...

Today’s universities are, accordingly to Clark’s entrepreneurial model, sustained by managerialism, whereas collegialism may remain in contrast or work in a different way. More recent literature suggests the clash such as the potential for coexistence between managerialism and collegialism. The study analyses data from a survey of 26 universities i...

This dataset is updated to data released by Italian Minister of Research and University until March 30th 2015 (around 5% of results must still be published and will released "in dribs and drabs"). Data are anonymous and provide: scientific sector, level of application, attainment, median of comparison by disciplines and bibliometric and non-bibliom...

This article investigates the form of European universities to determine the extent to which they resemble the characteristics of complete organizations and whether the forms are associated with modernization policy pressure, national institutional frames and organizational characteristics. An original data set of twenty-six universities from eight...

The paper investigates how research evaluation, and the use of specific quantitative tools for the assessment purposes, is likely to transform universities into more complete organizations, affecting hierarchy and rationality. The research questions are: is evaluation, by the way of research evaluation, transforming the hierarchies within the unive...

The new Habilitation, established in Italy in 2010 and launched in 2012, was introduced to filter eligible candidates in the competition for associate and full professorships. Its purpose is to limit agreements between colleagues to make academic appointments on the basis of patronage and instead set minimum conditions based on scholarly output. Th...

The paper presents the results of a comparative study on four universities in France and in Italy, which investigates how evaluation helps to strengthen the university as autonomous and professional organization, able to formulating strategies and/or tactics of adaptation in relation to regulatory changes and context, overcoming the traditional loo...

The new habilitation, established in Italy in 2010 and commenced in 2012, was designed (outcomes released commencing December 2013). Its aim is to filter who will be eligible to apply for competitions for the two permanent level professor positions in the universities. The results of the first set of data are 20 scientific sectors representing more...