The main purpose of this paper is to describe the specificity of Polish academic institutions that employ foreign-born scholars. The empirical material comes from a two-year research project, involving 100 qualitative in-depth interviews with “international” employees and additional 20 with their Polish colleagues, mainly supervisors. The study demonstrated that the organizational units of universities and research institutes employing foreign-born scholars could be divided into four basic types: language departments, “special units” (focused on international cooperation or advanced studies), laboratories, and the “islands.” An additional category is composed of the centers where the academic staff shortage is a serious problem, but this category, unlike the others, is likely to be seriously affected by the ongoing higher education reform. The article adopts a neo-institutional perspective, which enables to analyze these types of units in terms of institutional work (including construction of normative networks, defining, vesting), done by the foreign-born employees.
The following writing is dedicated to the Institute of Estonian Language and Literature against the world level. Ülo Tedre and Rein Veidemann try to find an answer to why folklorists write monographs and not articles required by the academic system.
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