False Anticipation and Misfits in a Cross-Cultural Setting: International Scholars Working in Chinese Universities

Abstract

As the rapid development of internationalization in Chinese higher education, the number and scale of international scholars working in China has significantly increased. However, few studies have focused on international scholars’ cross-cultural encounters in the Chinese academic context. Based on 21 in-depth interviews, this article investigates international scholars’ subjective experiences in a cross-cultural setting through Bourdieu’s conceptual lens. After presenting an overview of participants’ major motivations for working in China, we find their vague and idealistic expectations engendered “false anticipation” of their possible career future in China, which left some of them unprepared to experience a sense of misfit when entering the new field of Chinese academia. Moreover, we identify the dual habitus–field disjunctures emerging from participants’ perceptions of misfit in the cross-cultural scenario, namely explicit disjuncture and implicit disjuncture, which reveal the underlying reasons for mismatch between international scholars’ previously generated habitus and the new field of Chinese universities.