Symposium Introduction: Human Migration and Technology Transfer

Globalization, Human Migration, and Technology Transfer

Four years ago, the editors of Comparative Technology Transfer and Society solicited contributions for a symposium on “Human Migration and Technology Transfer.” We suggested manuscripts related to the following topics, among others:

• • The causes and characteristics of global human migration.

• • The relationship of global human migration to globalization.

• • The relationship of global human migration to social, economic, and political factors such as economic development, environmental protection, and social instability.

• • The relationship of global human migration to innovation diffusion and adoption.

Globalization is not a new phenomenon. However, it has intensified in recent centuries by remarkable advances in transportation, communication, and capital flows. “Globalization” describes a world that is smaller and more interconnected because of a number of intersecting trends and conditions: communication and transportation; economic interdependence through the movement of products and capital; war, terrorism, violence, and ethnic conflict; environmental pollution, natural disasters, epidemics, and climate change; and global migrations in search of economic and political security (Keohane & Nye, 2000; Klingner, 2004).

With the erosion of geographic barriers and national boundaries, human migration has become a focus for research in many different disciplines because it has cultural consequences. The term “migration” covers many types of human mobility: displacement and exile due to war and ethnic violence; economic diasporas; and expatriation and repatriation as deliberate national-development strategies. Human mobility differs from other globalization- induced movements of capital, goods, and services because human beings are subjects, not objects. Migration includes not only movements of people, but also the diffusion of cultural artifacts, crops, tools, ideas, art, music, ideologies, religions, and the human genome from one place to another. Because human mobility occurs within a cultural context, its meaning is not only economic, but also social, racial, and ethnic, political, economic, environmental, and linguistic (Rodrik, 2000). It thus raises issues of “homeland” as a cultural construct, of social security as a culturally contested goal, and alternative national policies toward diversity and immigration as the battleground. Immigration has become a sharply contested issue that pits the aspirations of undocumented workers against concerns about border security and domestic social, political, and economic consequences.

Introduction to the Symposium

This issue and the next (April 2009) of Comparative Technology Transfer and Society present articles on human migration and technology transfer. The two symposium articles presented here are case studies. The first is Mobility Matters: Research Training and Network Building in Science by Richard Woolley, Tim Turpin, Jane Marceau, and Stephen Hill. These four Australian scholars focus on the role of human-capital mobility in six large economies in the Asia-Pacific region. They contend that international research training (PhD) and early career research positions (postdocs) are mobility mechanisms that enable the acquisition of globally competitive science and innovation capabilities and the building and integrating of distributed knowledge networks. Although results differ among countries, data from a survey of publishing scientists from the Asia-Pacific region evidence an international movement of scientists from six major knowledge-producing locations in the region, primarily to the United States. Their analysis indicates that mobility of scientific and technical human capital for research training and early career research positions are particularly important, as other forms of knowledge-sharing do not substitute for geographic mobility when it comes to distribution of the embodied innovative capabilities central to many forms of scientific knowledge-making. Results from this exploratory survey of scientists publishing in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) show that these early career moves strongly correlate with the distributive knowledge networks through which innovative capabilities are both distributed and connected up to global knowledge hubs. At the same time, data on mobility for research degrees and postdoctoral research suggest that destinations for postdoc positions are more important than destinations for research degrees in the formation of durable social-capital networks. In particular, there appears to a relatively strong relationship between host destinations for postdoctoral research training and the organization of transnational research collaborations. This finding could have implications for the capacity of developing Asia-Pacific countries to link and integrate into the emerging knowledge hubs in the...