Between the Global and the Local: The Study of the Academic Profession from a Latin American Perspective

Abstract

The academic profession represents a subject within the realm of higher education that has experienced an outstanding development throughout the world. In Latin America, the interest in studying this field arises in a context of widespread reforms of the higher education system during the 1990s. The presence of research groups from this region, working within a global framework and in close collaboration with research centres from developed countries, can attest to this interest. This work attempts to establish a balance after three decades of unrelenting study of the academic profession to discover local specificities within global trends. It can be asserted that the tension between the global and the local is manifest both in the conceptualization of the subject matter and in the way this fledgling field has been developing in the region. There is a pending challenge, however, in ultimately establishing the case for the Latin American academic profession within the study of this activity at a global scale: not as a previous stage of a predefined global process, but rather as the outcome of the interaction between the global and the local. This is crucial for the construction of a type of knowledge that encompasses the diversity of the academic profession in the world as a constitutive property of its very conceptualization.