International mobility as a strategy and result in the national competition for excellence

Prof. Dr. Guido Bünstorf (University of Kassel)

Dr. Anne Otto (Saarbrücken)

Dr. Stefan Büchele (University of Kassel)

Dr. Matthias Hügel (University of Kassel)

Dr. Johannes König (University of Kassel/IAB)

Noah Weisswange (University of Kassel)

The project investigates the connections between the competition between universities for excellence funding on the one hand and the internationalization of the labor market and third-party funding competition among academics on the other.
The starting point of the planned work is the assumption that an increased international competitive positioning of a university due to the struggle for excellence funding also leads to an internationalization of the competitive positioning of its academics. Individual data will be used to empirically analyze how the success of universities in the Excellence Initiative and strategy has affected the international mobility and international third-party funding activities (acquisition of ERC funds) of their doctoral candidates. The various phases and lines of excellence funding are considered separately, and a distinction is also made between target countries and universities and between doctoral candidates born in or outside Germany.
With regard to the recruitment of academic staff from abroad by German universities, the aim is to work out the extent to which this can be understood as an effect of excellence funding or as part of the competitive strategies of universities in the competition for excellence. Conceptually, the importance of individual competitive success for the dynamics of organizational competition, which has received little attention to date, will be examined. The inflow of resources associated with excellence funding enabled the funded universities to recruit new academic staff from abroad. At the same time, the universities were able to signal their focus on excellence by recruiting international academics, especially if they had previously worked at universities with strong reputations or had high individual visibility. In order to assess the significance of strategic recruitment from abroad, the aim is to empirically investigate how the reputation-effective characteristics of the recruited academics differ before, during and, if applicable, after the end of the respective university's promotion of excellence. A newly established International Panel of Doctoral Candidates will provide harmonized data on doctoral candidates from six countries that are important for Germany (Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA).
Finally, novelty and similarity measures based on natural language processing methods will be used to analyze the effects of international mobility of scientists on the research activities of universities. From the overall perspective of the German higher education system, these represent a central consequence of the competition for excellence.