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In the Malaysia National Higher Education Strategic Plan 2007–2020 and Malaysia Education Blueprint (Higher Education) 2015–2025, the country plans to become one of the international education hubs across the globe. One of the critical strategies is to increase the diverse number of international academics in Malaysian tertiary institutions. As an outcome of strategic initiatives derived from the blueprint, Malaysia has continuous recruitment of international academics in the country's universities. Against this background, this chapter will discuss my experiences as an international academic from Nigeria in a research institute in a Malaysian university. I will relate a few personal and professional issues and challenges that encountered in the course of my service in the country. I will then propose some practical suggestions to overcome these challenges.

The ivory tower of academia is intriguing yet an interesting place to enter, survive and thrive. As an international academic who has worked in four different countries, I ground my reflections in three spheres, namely my positionality, my institutional culture and global academic culture. In this chapter, I describe how these three dimensions may sometimes collide to induce conflict yet converge at some point to create a thriving space for international academics. I share my stories and lived experiences to elaborate on my experiences of challenges and opportunities in academia and share insights for those who seek to be a part of academia.

Numerous studies have explored international students' and graduates' experiences around the globe but with less emphasis on exploring international academics' experiences. Internationalisation of higher education is not only about international students, it also includes mobility of academic staff members. Therefore, this chapter reflects on my ups and downs as well as many other opportunities that I gained in a privileged journey as an international early-career academic from Malaysia. The chapter starts with my personal experiences of how I identify myself as an international academic, the motivations to migrate, professional challenges that I face not only as an international academic but also as an early-career academic, the strategies that I adopted to overcome the challenges and how I self-created opportunities not only for myself but also for other colleagues – international academics and early-career academics. I will end the chapter with significant successes that came my way.

Short-term international mobility has become popular among academics who are seeking new scholarly experiences abroad for a limited period. Short-term international mobility refers to staying abroad for a few days, weeks or months for scholarly work, although there is no specific definition of ‘short’. In this chapter, I describe my experience of a five-month international stay on my first sabbatical. After positioning myself as a researcher on academic mobility and a mobile academic, I describe the international mobile experience from preparing to travel to returning home. Based on personal reflections, the chapter shares the challenges that early-career academics might confront and offers strategies to enjoy meaningful experiences in short-term mobility.

In response to a dearth of research on the experience of non-UK nationals in UK universities, this chapter reports on a qualitative study involving 40 international academics, including lecturers, senior lecturers and professors, who, within the past five years, had moved to the United Kingdom, specifically Scotland, to join a research-intensive university there, offering a rich account of what it means to be an international academic and live in Scotland. The aim of the project was to identify the challenges and opportunities these international academics perceived, as well as the contributions they saw themselves as making to the host institution and society, and to derive from these findings some recommendations to inform internationalisation policies and practices. The authors observe that international staff encounter a variety of challenges and conclude that the economic benefits expected to accrue from recruiting greater numbers of international academics are unlikely to materialize if star researchers become unhappy with the situation they enter into and consider leaving. Moreover, if internationalisation is to include at least an element of interculturality, then it is essential to capitalise more heavily on international academics’ prior cultural and work-related knowledge and intentionally promote intercultural exchanges of practices, values and ideals.

Editorial boards of academic journals represent a key institutional mechanism in the governance and functioning of the academic community. Board members play an important role in knowledge production and development of the discipline. The purpose of this paper is to enquire into the diversity characteristics of boards of accounting journals.

Drawing on a diversity framework that distinguishes between societal diversity and value of diversity, the paper examines two board characteristics: gender diversity and internationalisation. Moreover, it examines the influence of three journal and two editor characteristics on board diversity and analyses trends over time.

On gender, overall board trends are consistent with societal diversity and value of diversity: boards reflect the gender profile of senior academics. Further, female representation on boards is broadly consistent across the different journal nationalities; has improved over time; has experienced a convergence in “gender sensitive” sub-disciplines; and is influenced by female editorship. However, inequities appear to be present at the highest level: women appear to be less well represented than men as editors and women also have a lower representation on boards of higher ranked journals than on those of lower ranked journals. On internationalisation, once again, overall trends broadly reflect societal diversity and value at diversity. However, international scholars are less well represented on 4* boards than on 2* and 3* boards and on US boards than on Australian and UK boards. Further, there are signs of weakening US dominance in non-US journals.

Drawing on the diversity framework, this is the first study to comprehensively examine gender diversity and internationalisation of accounting boards.

Scholars have emphasized intellectual capital’s importance for universities in obtaining competitive advantages and creating value. The purpose of this paper is to identify the influences of two components of intellectual capital, relational and human capital at the international level, and psychological capital on international orientation of academic entrepreneurs, and the mediating effects of international relational and human capital.

On the basis of a literature review, a theoretical model is proposed to explain the relationship between the studied variables. Our hypotheses are tested on a sample of 173 academic spin-offs of Spanish universities using bootstrapping methodology.

The results show that the international market relational capital and international human capital of academic entrepreneurs influence their international orientation, and that their psychological capital is directly, and indirectly, related to international orientation through international human capital and international market relational capital.

This study provides a better understanding of the antecedents of the international orientation of academic entrepreneurs, which would provide an important contribution to the literature on intellectual capital, academic entrepreneurship and internationalization. The achieved results highlight important implications for training of academic entrepreneurs and for managers and management teams of companies willing to enter, or even those already operating in, international markets.

In this study, the international orientation of academic entrepreneurs is explained through the psychological capital that is studied jointly with two components of intellectual capital, relational and human capital at the international level. Although some recent work has focused on the study of the internationalization of academic spin-off, this line of research is still incipient.

This study aims to investigate international students’ cultural adjustment, academic satisfaction and turnover intentions using ecological systems perspective and explores factors that affect academic success and turnover by exploring three stages: arrival, adjustment and adaptation.

The sample consists of 208 international students enrolled at a mid-Western university in the USA. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and mediational analyses were used to test hypotheses.

Findings indicate that self-efficacy, as a pre-sojourn characteristic, affects adjustment variables inclusive of cultural adjustment, affecting academic satisfaction and turnover intentions. Adjustment variables (coping, cultural adjustment and organizational support) mediated relationships between self-efficacy and turnover intentions.

The proposed model moves the research forward by examining an ecological systems framework describing how individual, social, academic, cultural and institutional factors function in supporting international students’ transitions. Results may be generalizable to other large US universities with varying dynamics and resources available (or not) for international students.

Given the challenges international students face in the USA in adapting to both new culture and academic setting, it is imperative to identify what elements of their transition and academic environment predict academic success. This is one of the first studies testing the propositions derived from Schartner and Young’s (2016) model.

This study aims to examine the perceived role of libraries and contributions to the internationalization of higher education and identify the available library services for international students and faculty.

This descriptive research used a survey method to study the different activities and practices of the internationalization of academic libraries.

The results of this study reveal that academic libraries support the teaching, learning and research needs of international students and faculty members, provide library instruction for international students to acquire information literacy skills and promote the rationale and goals of the institution's internationalization activities. Many respondents are engaged in staff development with internationalization dimensions and international library benchmarking and research paper presentation at international conferences with institutional support.

The results of this study could benefit the profession and library managers by deepening the managers' understanding of the role of libraries in the internationalization of Philippine higher education.

This study will be of interest and value to library and school administrators interested in developing or expanding internationalization activities that positively respond to the redefinition of the role of libraries and librarians in globalization.