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This paper draws on two studies from a wider research program exploring the long-term graduate outcomes of Australia’s international development scholarships, the Australia Awards. The paper’s focus is on exploring how soft power can be identified through international scholarships and outlines conditions for success in achieving such outcomes.

This article discusses a mixed-methods sequential design that uses a quantitative online survey to identify themes to explore in a case study using a quantitative social networks approach.

The research identified two outcomes linked to the soft power of international scholarships, these are: (1) The value of existing connections – exposure and opportunity for scholarship recipients to build professional networks while in-country, influences the likelihood of alumni actioning these positive experiences by developing partnerships with host-country organisations after returning home; and (2) The value of alumni interconnectivity – the critical mass of peer-to-peer alumni relationships is a soft power asset that donors can harness to influence their international development and diplomacy objectives. Together, these findings also provide evidence that soft power attraction engendered in international scholarship participants can have longevity.

This article builds on early literature examining the effectiveness of international scholarships for developing countries in achieving soft power for scholarship donors. It provides a new view of these outcomes by looking at alumni networks individually and as a critical mass, to demonstrate how these contribute to achieving the diplomacy objectives of this type of state-sponsored student mobility program.

The Australian Government has long used its international scholarship programs as an instrument of soft power in international diplomacy. The paper examines an international scholarship program and its role in Australia’s soft power efforts during a period in recent history.

The Australia in the Asian Century White Paper of 2012 is used as a lens to reveal how the Australian Government viewed the role of international scholarship programs in international diplomacy at a specific point in the recent past, and compares it with research revealing what was contemporaneously happening with one key government-funded scholarship program.

This paper is based on a comprehensive case study of the Australian Government’s Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships program (2004–2019). Endeavour was an ambitious and expensive merit-based program with 6,600 recipients in numerous and diffuse sub-categories. The program was complex and cumbersome and lacked clear priorities, particularly in its lack of geographic focus. It missed opportunities to connect with the political zeitgeist, largely due to opaque priorities and inadequate evaluation regimes which focused entirely on outcomes for individual recipients rather than on relationships for Australia.

This research draws on the first academic study of the Endeavour program. Other scholarship programs (for example Australia Awards and the New Colombo Plan) have attracted considerable scholarly interest. The Endeavour research provides an additional counterpoint for studies of Australian scholarship programs and their contribution to international diplomacy. It is timely to consider this in 2024 when Australia is putting a new focus on its investment in international scholarships.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 4.b calls to “substantially expand globally the number of scholarships” for enrollment in overseas higher education between 2015 and 2020. To advance knowledge on international scholarships and sustainability, this chapter examines notions of sustainability in literature related to international scholarships for students in the Global South. Based on an exploratory review of literature, ways that sponsored international student mobility – programs, students, graduates, and networks – maintain and sustain systems and outcomes are explored. Findings are presented through four frames: (a) programmatic sustainability, (b) organizational development, (c) national sustainable development, and (d) international and global actions. Challenges to sustainability, such as poor coordination between degrees earned and local market conditions, are also discussed. In addition, the findings point to several prominent ways that scholarships could contribute to sustainability that are mostly absent from the literature: transformative education for sustainable development, and international education for environmental sustainability. The chapter closes with a vision of alumni networks – both within and among programs – to work together to transform societies and tackle the most pernicious international challenges of our time.

Because of online digital resources, academic libraries no longer need to spend as much time and energy organizing their own collections as they used to. They now have an opportunity to pivot their expertise in organizing information outward. “Inside-out” library services can include support for special collections, digital scholarship, scholarly communication, and data management. A key characteristic of such services is that an academic library takes on broader information management challenges at their college or university. This chapter will examine what it takes to build successful inside-out library services by looking at their cost, how well they complement existing library expertise and culture, and their impact on teaching, research, and the wider community.

The library and information science (LIS) profession experienced drastic changes in its job requirements due to emerging digital scholarship trends, especially the growth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). As a result, there is a discrepancy between the job market and the LIS curriculum. This study addresses this gap by looking into incorporating digital scholarship into the LIS school curricula in South Africa. This may have implications for other contexts as well, because digital scholarship is becoming pervasive.

The study adopted a constructivist paradigm using a qualitative approach and a multiple case study design. Primary data using semi-structured interviews were collected from 10 academics at LIS schools and 10 librarians from both academic and special research council libraries in South Africa.

The study revealed that LIS schools did not have content on digital scholarship such as research data management (RDM), digitisation, metadata standards, open access, institutional repositories and other related content. Stakeholders who needed to be consulted included librarians, information technology (IT) and information and communication technology (ICT) specialists, computer scientists, humanists, the South Africa Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and LIS professional bodies. There were gaps and redundancies in the curriculum as far as digital scholarship was concerned. Digital scholarship presented opportunities for librarians and academics to acquire emerging jobs and to collaborate more in the digital space.

The article advances knowledge on the importance of incorporating digital scholarship in the LIS curriculum in South Africa. Furthermore, it provides guidance regarding stakeholders to be consulted when incorporating content into the LIS curriculum with the intention of closing the gaps and curbing or removing discrepancies between job requirements and graduates’ skills and competencies.

According to Boyer (1990, p. 15), “the term ‘scholarship’ was first used in England in the 1870s by reformers who wished to make Cambridge and Oxford ‘not only a place of teaching, but a place of learning,’.…[it] referred to a variety of creative work carried on in a variety of places, and its integrity was measured by the ability to think, communicate, and learn.” Today, the word “scholarship” evokes thoughts of academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals, most frequently written by individuals holding academic ranks in colleges or universities. It is assumed that these articles are an outcome of dedicated and disciplined pursuit of knowledge aimed to enlighten man's thought processes, generate understanding, and enhance the ability to think and make good decisions. Clearly, in the last 150 years, the meaning of the word “scholarship” has changed significantly in higher education.

This chapter narratively examines the value of scholarship grants to seven underrepresented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students who attended the same research comprehensive university. The scholarships that the students in our convenience sample received were awarded by six National Science Foundation grant programs in the United States. A literature review tracing the effects of scholarships, instrumentalism, and the core purpose of education sets the context for this narrative investigation. The four pillars comprising the theoretical framework are value, experience, story, and identity. The seven stories of impact that emerged from the narrative inquiry reveal multiperspectival insights into the value of scholarships to students' lives, careers, and selves. Moreover, we also explore how scholarship recipients established their sense of value in autonomous and committed ways while promoting their personal welfare and seeking the common good of others. All of these important considerations contribute to the national and international literature relating to diversity, higher education, STEM careers, and the power of scholarship grants to transcend instrumentalism privileging workforce demands.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ending of fee-free higher education in Australia for overseas students in the 1980s, and the ways in which the government managed the diplomatic relationships that were affected by this policy shift. The introduction of fee-free higher education in Australia in 1974 was incredibly popular, and the end of the program in the late 1980s created difficulties for individuals, families and diplomatic relationships.

Using a mix of secondary sources and archival documents, this paper has a historiographical element, and an element of analysis.

This research finds that the ending of fee-free education created significant diplomatic issues with a number of Australia’s regional neighbours. It also created issues for individual students and families. The solution to these problems was, in large part, a scholarship scheme called the Equity and Merit Scholarship Scheme (EMSS). The EMSS was designed, in part, to address the issues created by the end of the fee-free program. However, the design of the scholarship scheme also created its own diplomatic issues with a different cohort of nation states.

There is limited scholarly research into the history of international education policy in Australia. This research draws on the work of some scholars of international scholarships, as well as historians of universities and education more broadly. This research adds to a growing body of work in the field of Australian international education history.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake an inquiry into the way academic entrepreneurialism manifests itself in the changing discourses of the notion of “scholarship”. It particularly examines the contexts, rationales, definitions and implications of the discursive field of the “scholarship of application”. The global trend of academic entrepreneurialism profoundly affects the organisation of higher education institutions and academic life. Particularly, the form of scholarship has been undergoing subtle but constant transformation. The emergence of knowledge economies worldwide influences the practices and goals of traditional academy and illustrates commitment for fundamental knowledge and the new economies emphasise the results and impacts brought by applied knowledge. Alongside the “scholarship of discovery”, the “scholarship of application” is given attention.

By reviewing the related literature, this paper articulates the definitions and dimensions of the “scholarship of application”. In addition, the impacts brought about by the concerned academic and policy discourses will be discussed.

This paper finds that the emergence of the discursive field of the “scholarship of application” – as well as the discussions and actions in response to it – coincide with the intense neoliberal changes that affected traditional academia in the 1990s. It is argued that the emergence of and subsequent responses to the discursive field of the “scholarship of application” resulted in transforming purposes and practices of academic life. The discursive field of the “scholarship of application” also impacts on the concerned academic and policy discourses.

To sustain the advancement of the scholarship of application, this paper implies the need to develop practices, cultivate culture as well as formulate prestige and reward mechanisms inherent to the existing higher education systems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of academic scholarship on the development and practice of experienced managers.

Semi-structured interviews with experienced managers, modelled on the critical incident technique. “Intertextuality” and framework analysis technique are used to examine whether the use of academic scholarship is a sub-conscious phenomenon.

Experienced managers make little direct use of academic scholarship, using it only occasionally to provide retrospective confirmation of decisions or a technique they can apply. However, academic scholarship informs their practice in an indirect way, their understanding of the “gist” of scholarship comprising one of many sources which they synthesise and evaluate as part of their development process.

Managers and management development practitioners should focus upon developing skills of synthesising the “gist” of academic scholarship with other sources of data, rather than upon the detailed remembering, understanding and application of specific scholarship, and upon finding/providing the time and space for that “gisting” and synthesis to take place.

The paper addresses contemporary concerns about the appropriateness of the material delivered on management education programmes for management development. It is original in doing this from the perspective of experienced managers, and in using intertextual analysis to reveal not only the direct but also the indirect uses of they make of such scholarship. The finding of the importance of understanding the “gist” rather than the detail of academic scholarship represents a key conceptual innovation.