Abstract:
This study explores the publishing experiences and strategies of Chinese academics
with two research aims. The first aim is to explore the factors that influence the
participants’ language choice for publishing with the analytic framework based on
Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) human development theory and Bourdieu’s (1986)
methodological framework. The second research aim is to explore the strategies that
the participants developed to manage the challenges for successful publications with
the theoretical support of de Certeau’s (1984) conceptual notions of strategy and tactic
theory, and Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) human agency theory.
The study employs an ethnographic approach that includes academics in five regions
in China. The data were collected from 53 Chinese academics of Korean, Russian, or
Japanese with different data instruments. The data were analysed via a hybrid
approach of thematic analysis and content analysis with Nvivo 12.
The present study identified a system comprising four-level factors that have an
influence on the participants’ language choice for publishing. The factors included
those at the micro level related to individual experiences and roles (e.g., educational
experiences), the factors at the meso-level related to institutional policies and
situations (e.g., hierarchical journal ranking system for research performance
appraisals), those at the exo-level related to the publishing market and the government
agencies, and also those at the macro-level related to the social-economic and
social-cultural aspects (e.g., geographic location). This study identified the
corresponding strategies to respond to the challenges at the four levels (i.e., micro-,
meso-, exo-, and macro-level) for successful publications (e.g., networking). The
strategies that have to do with tactical quality (e.g., dual publication) were identified
for successful publishing.
