Publishing in languages other than English: Experiences and strategies of Chinese academics

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.