Exploring Repatriate Junior Faculty’s Use of Internal  Resources in Teaching and Research

　　 Xi Liu　　Assistant Professor　　School of Economics and Management　　Tsinghua University

　　　　Abstract

　　 Repatriate junior faculty had typically been away from China for a considerable number of years before taking a job offer with some university at home. The length of their absence quite limits these individuals’ connections with the environment where they started to pursue professorship not long ago. Reflecting on the few months of my being an assistant professor in a business college, I feel that my teaching and research activities are challenged and even hampered by (1) the scarce social links I have with the Chinese business sector and (2) my limited knowledge about the social, economic and cultural evolutions in China since the late 90s. However, I have found that my students’ social network provides a valuable resource for me to tap into to shorten my current distance from the Chinese society and make my teaching and research more localized.

　　Enhancing the Localization Flavor of Students’ Learning Experiences

　　 To a profound extent, China’s MBA education is shaped by the philosophy, principles, concepts and approaches that Americans follow in training their managerial workforce. From my perspective, building on American educators’ accumulated knowledge and insights is necessary and essential for Chinese business educators to substantially contribute to the formation of a Chinese managerial culture. Because of this, the required reading materials for the course I teach in the International MBA program are totally American-based: the textbook is the original English edition of American business colleges’ most popular textbook; cases analyzed are all Harvard Business School cases. Additionally, I drew on my American professor’s syllabus in developing that of my own.

　　 The very realistic aspect about my teaching, however, is that the majority of my students will pursue a career with companies operating in the Chinese economy. If their capability of problem diagnosis and solution creation would be highly valued in the job market, this should occur only on the basis that their diagnoses and solutions are contextualized in China. I kept the students’ career goal in mind and conducted preliminary research on their needs and expectations in the classes I was then developing. My research suggested that the students would like the courses (1) help them understand the business situations in China’s various industrial sectors; (2) include Chinese companies in case analyses to showcase the business battlefield in China.

　　 The students’ needs pose serious challenge for my teaching for at least two reasons. (1) As currently practiced in both American and Chinese business schools, the courses I considered then are supposed to examine the normative knowledge and concepts underlying certain business function, for instance, marketing, in a general sense. This focus and the time frame of the class would defeat the instructor’s purpose of, if any, bringing students close to the business battlefield in China’s major industrial sectors solely through her own lectures. (2) Case studies on Chinese companies or foreign companies operating in China, which are written in Chinese and demonstrate depth comparable to that of, say, Harvard Business School cases, are currently hard to locate. One factor causing this seems to be researchers’ lack of sufficient access to substantial data regarding the featured company’s business processes and activities.

　　 At a deeper level, this challenge is not so much about addressing MBA students’ practical concerns as about a demand for a local flavor in classroom experiences and learning opportunities I provide them. Again, following the tradition in business education, I intend to cope with this challenge by incorporating guest-speaking activities into the course design. The guest-speaking sessions I consider are organized toward the end of (1) showing the nuances of business operation in the Chinese market and (2) illuminating the opportunities and risks in China’s pillar industries.

　　As said at the very beginning, my own social contacts in companies are few. However, my students, who have 4 to 5 years working experience in average, are much better networked with managerial professionals. I encouraged my students to talk to me if they know any manager who is able to and might be interested in bringing a business insider’s view to our class. Students are quite eager to explore their social connections and help make the course more “interesting.” I also set up this up-to-50-extra-point-student-guest-speaking policy to enhance the course climate of sharing practice-shaped insights among students. On a voluntary basis, students can draw on their pre-business school experiences at work in Chinese companies, take a closer look at the field of their previous job from the course’ perspective, and present their sharpened thoughts and observations to the whole class as an individual or team project.

　　My job in the whole process is to keep guest-speaking arrangement on track of achieving its goal for the class. In specific, with external guest-speakers, I spend time (1) making comparisons in terms of the candidate speakers’ background and experiences, (2) balancing in terms of the represented industrial fields, (3) fixing a shorter candidate list so that guest-speaking would occur at a reasonable frequency, (4) interacting with invited individuals before hand to ensure that their presentation adds value to my students’ learning. With students interested in guest-speaking, I helped them (1) dig deeper into, for instance, anecdotal events they once encountered, in search for more significant points and a larger picture about the industrial sector in consideration (2) develop thoughts along the line of pursuing or modifying the normative principles and concepts introduced in lectures.

　　By motivating students to take an active part in shaping the quality and opportunities of learning in American-based courses, I have identified and put to use a valuable resource internal to the class, i.e., students’ social/professional network and their own past experiences at work. For repatriate junior faculty who are new to the social, economic and cultural dynamics in today’s China, this type of resource is even more valuable – this resource, if constructively exploited, offsets the disabling effects that returned junior faculty’s long absence from the home country and their consequent isolated position produce on their initiatives of responding to the localization demands in the teaching environment. As practiced in my teaching strategies and tactics, localization is treated as a process of forming an appreciation of the local specifics about students’ career goal and examining what makes up their envisioned career from the perspective of normative management knowledge. It is important that repatriate business school faculty embrace this view on localization. Nonetheless, for localization along this line to run to be true in an average returned junior professor’s class, the use of internal class resources seems to be crucial.

　　Pursuing a Qualitative Path in Research

　　 Regarding research, the following two aspects of repatriate junior faculty’s situation are quite prominent – major funding opportunities are limited; research team for large projects seems difficult to set up. These two factors intertwine, which makes a quick solution to either or both is highly improbable. In this context and due to my theoretical position, I emphasize a qualitative approach to research. And I typically spend my time and energy on qualitative projects of a moderate scale, which one primary researcher can comfortably complete with the help of one student research assistant.

　　 Social and professional connections with companies are very useful for business school faculty to locate, for instance, site for qualitative projects. The limitation of my resource in this regard is real. My coping strategy here is to leverage my teaching-related activities – my works surrounding the guest-speaking sessions – to (1) know more about the larger environment where I spot research problems, (2) conceive new projects, and (3) build a bigger informant pool.

　　 The rapport I develop with the guest speakers and the assistance I get from them allow me to shape a contextualized portrayal and analysis of the phenomena I study. I perceive that nuanced and locally situated studies are one option repatriate researchers could consider in search for localized research.