Entrepreneurship and Small Island Economies

Over the past two decades, the study of entrepreneurship and its importance to the economy has increased in appeal to academics, practitioners and governments. This study explores entrepreneurship in small island economies within regions based on Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) and Established Business Ownership (EBO) as observed in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) dataset. This research uses the pooled regression model to study the impact of TEA and EBO on economic growth. The findings highlight that new venture creation is a driver that improves gross domestic product (GDP); however, there are significant differences across SIDS in the orientation of TEA and EBO that suggest that other contextual issues like culture, education system, and entrepreneurial support elements influence entrepreneurial behaviour across regions as well. The more advanced of these nations like Singapore and Puerto Rico benefit from knowledge networks and scientific mobility, while the smaller economies in the Caribbean and Pacific Region show less openness to pursuing entrepreneurial endeavours. These findings provide a foundation for further research on varying types of combinations of both economic factors and contextual differences that lend to the transitioning process towards an emerging economy.

Unsupervised Embedding of Trajectories Captures the Latent Structure of Mobility

Human mobility drives major societal phenomena including epidemics, economies, and innovation. Historically, mobility was constrained by geographic distance, however, in the globalizing world, language, culture, and history are increasingly important. Here, we show a mathematical equivalence between word2vec model and the gravity model of mobility and demonstrate that, by using three human trajectory datasets, word2vec encodes nuanced relationships between locations into a systematic and meaningful vector-space, providing a functional distance between locations, as well as a representation for studying the many dimensions of mobility. Focusing on the case of scientific mobility, we show that embeddings implicitly learn cultural, linguistic, and hierarchical relationships at multiple levels of granularity. Connecting neural embeddings to the gravity model opens up new avenues for the study of mobility.

Investigating scientific mobility in co-authorship networks using multilayer temporal motifs

This paper introduces a framework for understanding complex temporal interaction patterns in large-scale scientific collaboration networks. In particular, we investigate how two key concepts in science studies, scientific collaboration and scientific mobility, are related and possibly differ between fields. We do so by analyzing multilayer temporal motifs: small recurring configurations of nodes and edges.Driven by the problem that many papers share the same publication year, we first provide a methodological contribution: an efficient counting algorithm for multilayer temporal motifs with concurrent edges. Next, we introduce a systematic categorization of the multilayer temporal motifs, such that each category reflects a pattern of behavior relevant to scientific collaboration and mobility. Here, a key question concerns the causal direction: does mobility lead to collaboration or vice versa? Applying this framework to scientific collaboration networks extracted from Web of Science (WoS) consisting of up to 7.7 million nodes (authors) and 94 million edges (collaborations), we find that international collaboration and international mobility reciprocally influence one another. Additionally, we find that Social sciences & Humanities (SSH) scholars co-author to a greater extent with authors at a distance, while Mathematics & Computer science (M&C) scholars tend to continue to collaborate within the established knowledge network and organization.

Analyzing scientific mobility and collaboration in the Middle East and North Africa

This study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata available in scientific publications, we analyze international scientific mobility flows and collaboration linkages. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization of scientific mobility. First, we uncover the main destinations and origins of mobile scholars for each country. Results reveal geographical, cultural and historical proximities. Cooperation programs also contribute to explain some of the observed flows. Second, we use the academic age. The average academic age of migrant scholars in MENA was about 12.4 years. The academic age group 6–10 years is the most common for both emigrant and immigrant scholars. Immigrants are relatively younger than emigrants, except for Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Scholars who migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Jordan, and Morocco were on average younger than emigrants by 1.5 years from the same countries. Third, we analyze gender differences. We observe a clear gender gap: Male scholars represent the largest group of migrants in MENA. We conclude by discussing the policy relevance of the scientific mobility and collaboration aspects.

Move or perish? Sticky mobilities in the Swiss academic context

This article uses a context of increasing institutional demand to be geographically mobile to examine how early-career researchers move across borders. I explore the case of Swiss academia, a particularly competitive and attractive environment with the highest levels of inbound and outbound mobility in Europe. In line with the aims of the European Research Area, an EU programme created in 2000 to foster a pan-European academic labour market, Switzerland funds scientific mobility and promotes extended research trips abroad as tools to boost collaboration and research excellence. Therefore, Swiss institutions have valued mobility for professional and personal development. In the meantime, they have raised concerns about female academics not being mobile and the potential consequences of their local family ties on career inequalities. In this study, I explore how early-career researchers experience mobility and how their personal accounts challenge institutional definitions of being mobile or immobile. I draw on a qualitative analysis of 65 semi-structured interviews conducted for two EU research projects on early-career academics from various backgrounds. I show how empirical data question the traditional—and often gendered—mobile/immobile dichotomy. I also highlight how mobility practices are normalised by the interviewees. Moreover, using the concept of stickiness, I describe a subtle range of sticky-to-stretchy mobility experiences influenced by both structural and individual factors. Finally, through the figure of the geoccasional worker, I question romanticised visions of mobility and stress the need to reconsider mobility as a (gendered) precarity issue rather than as a female problem.

Scientific Mobility, Training and Entrepreneurial Skills in Health Sciences: The Spanish Case

The activity of scientists promotes medical research in health services. However, on many occasions, these professionals do not know how to transfer their research results to the market. Therefore, it is worth providing data on aspects such as training in entrepreneurship and scientific mobility to foster knowledge transfer. This paper discusses data on the Spanish case in Health Sciences to devise effective policies in these areas. To this end, following the methodology of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report and the existing scientific literature, 291 researchers involved in scientific mobility in Spain have been interviewed. Of these, 90 belonged to health areas: Spanish scientists abroad (37), Scientists returned to Spain (16), and Young researchers in Spain (37). The results show that the mobile scientists in this area have more entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial intentions, have acquired more entrepreneurial skills, and have received more training in these subjects. Furthermore, there are few permanent positions for all these groups whose mobility decisions fundamentally depend on job opportunities, so the health authorities can intensify these measures to promote knowledge transfer.

Opportunities for an Academic Career of Women Scientists at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (mid. 1940s-1980’s)

The object of the paper is the development of Bulgarian science during the totalitari-an period (1945-1989), but its subject is the scientific career of the habilitated women, working in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) – the largest scientific organiza-tion in the country at that time. The aim is to explore the opportunities for vertical social (scientific) mobility and the existence of a “glass ceiling” for women’s scientific careers at the BAS. The research uses the social history approach, creating a collec-tive portrait and identifying major trends in the study period, using historical analysis of archival and published documents and content analysis of a prosopographic data-base containing biographies of habilitated women from the institutes and the labora-tories of the BAS.

MIGRATION INTENTIONS OF SCIENTISTS OF UKRAINE

The article presents analytical materials of the survey, which was aimed at identifying the migration sentiments of Ukrainian scientists, as well as recommendations for mitigating the impact of migration processes on the economy of Ukraine. The purpose of the study is to identify various factors influencing the migration intentions of Ukrainian scientists and to develop practical recommendations for leveling their negative effects. The article contains information on gender, age and professional characteristics of those scientists who intend to leave Ukraine. The key issue of the study is the expectations of Ukrainian scientists about the reality of employment in a foreign research institution or university. The attitude of respondents to migration in terms of their intentions to carry out scientific or educational activities is considered. The study found that some scientists are ready to leave Ukraine even if they carry out activities not related to science or education. In addition, the results of the research showed the scientists' plans to return to Ukraine after the visit for 1) scientific and educational purposes, 2) the purpose of employment in another field, 3) the purpose of permanent residence. The survey found that a significant proportion of respondents found it difficult to answer questions related to migration, indicating their intention to stay in the country. The study also contains information on the impact of mobility for educational or scientific purposes. Thus, the results of the survey indicate the presence of the impact of scientific mobility on the effectiveness of scientists. The analysis of the data allowed to formulate evidence based recommendations for the development of state migration policy, which would be aimed more at attracting talent from abroad. Therefore, research institutions, universities, R&D centers should work intensively in this direction. Moreover, local businesses may also be in demand for such staff. In this regard, it is recommended that universities and research institutions focus on finding such needs and formulate their staffing proposals. In order to increase the efficiency of mobility, free economic zones and research institutions should develop incentives and create conditions for the implementation of foreign experience in their organizations. In addition, the purpose of scientific mobility should be consistent with the development strategy of the institution that sends the scientist abroad for scientific or educational mobility.

Atmospheres of science: Experiencing scientific mobility

This article uses notions of the atmospheric to engage with empirical material concerned with international mobility in science. It draws on recent conceptual work on atmospheres that frames them as allowing access to the affective qualities of everyday life and as ‘productively nebulous’: atmospheres exist between the local and the globally diffuse, the emergent and the staged, the intangible and the brutally present. Using atmospheric thinking, I devise ‘apparatuses of attunement’ to capture elusive aspects of life in science, as discussed in interviews with natural scientists about their experiences of international mobility. In particular I use ideas of the situation, atmospheric threads, and the staging of atmospheres to argue that scientists represent themselves as existing in between the particular and the general: they are never wholly at the mercy of the structures and expectations of globalized science, but are also never not in the grip of them. In closing I reflect on what this analysis reveals about the affective qualities of contemporary science, the forms of life being nurtured by the norms and expectations of research (policy), and the kinds of agency available to (these) scientists. The aim of the article is thus twofold: to demonstrate how concepts of atmospheres can be put to work in STS, and to contribute to research on international mobility in science and contemporary scientific careers.