by Robert (Robby) Cserni*

I arrived in the UK with a US-trained PhD, a CV formatted for the American academic market, and a stack of materials that no British search committee was asking for. I had a cover letter. I had a research statement. I had a teaching statement. What I did not have was what every UK job advertisement required: a structured supporting statement addressing each “essential” and “desirable” criterion of a published person specification, point by point, within strict character limits. Same scholar. Same publications. Same competencies. Different evaluation architecture. The first wave of rejections was not a verdict on my ability. It was the predictable result of a misalignment I had no way of seeing until I was already inside it.
The argument I want to advance is this: what we call academic merit is not a portable property of individuals. It is a locally accumulated form of capital, institutionally specific, assessed through evaluation criteria and tacit expectations that vary substantially across systems. What does not travel across borders is rarely the underlying competence. What does not travel is the capital that makes competence legible in a given field.
This is, in essence, the argument Pierre Bourdieu made in Homo Academicus (1988) and The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1996). Academic evaluation rewards forms of cultural capital that scholars acquire through socialization within a particular institutional field. The insider possesses this capital by default; the outsider must painstakingly reconstruct it, often without realizing it is what they lack. Jo Littler’s Against Meritocracy (2017) updates the critique for the neoliberal era, arguing that meritocracy now functions as a legitimating ideology, turning institutionally rewarded forms of capital into apparently natural indicators of worth. The PhD, in this view, certifies competence within a system. It does not equip the certified scholar to convert that competence into recognizable capital elsewhere.
US academic hiring follows what might be called a portfolio approach: a CV, a cover letter, a separate research statement, a separate teaching statement, sometimes a diversity statement. The candidate constructs a narrative; the search committee reads holistically. UK hiring follows a competency-based logic: applicants address each essential and desirable criterion of a published person specification individually, often within strict character limits, with shortlisting decisions justified solely by reference to those criteria. These are not formatting differences. They are competing institutional philosophies of how academic worth should be made legible.
The penalty for the mobile scholar shows up in outcome data. Seeber and colleagues (2023), analyzing 14,135 scientists in Flemish universities between 1990 and 2017, found that 21.9% of non-mobile national postdocs progressed to professorial appointment in their university of affiliation, compared with 1.2% of internationally mobile foreign postdocs. Foreign nationality predicted a 67% lower chance of postdoc-to-assistant-professor progression, controlling for other factors. The authors attribute this to local language requirements, locally specific criteria of research quality, and the homophily of internal hiring. These are not anomalies in an otherwise meritocratic process. They are the texture of how local capital actually works.
The publishing record is not neutral either. In a content analysis of twenty years of Men and Masculinities (Cserni and Essig, 2019), my co-author and I found that 75% of published authors were from English-native-speaking countries, with 43% from the United States alone. The channels through which scholars accumulate academic capital, publications in “international” journals, citations in dominant indices, are themselves geographically and linguistically situated. Even the apparently universal currency of academic worth is locally minted.
Two implications follow. First, the meritocratic framing of academic hiring obscures more than it reveals. What reads as competence in one system can register as incompetence in another, not because ability has changed, but because the cultural capital required for recognition is locally constituted and only locally redeemable. Second, the cost of decoding a new system falls disproportionately on the moving scholar, not the institution that recruited them. There is no formal moment in PhD training, in either country I have worked in, that prepares a researcher for the conversion problem.

The same experience that produces the conversion problem also produces something institutions rarely know how to value: knowledge of how more than one academic system actually works. International mobility is not only a deficit to be overcome. It is also a form of capital, even when the local field has no clear way of reading it. As long as institutions see only what scholars lack and miss what they bring, the language of meritocracy will continue to misrecognize structural disadvantage as personal failure.
This is the architecture that academic coaching, structured onboarding for international scholars, and formal mentoring schemes are all, in different ways, responses to. They are attempts to make explicit what the institution leaves implicit: that academic capital is locally built, locally legible, and only partially convertible. Until universities recognize this as a structural feature of mobility rather than an individual failing, the burden of conversion will remain where it is now, on the moving scholar.
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* Robert (Robby) Cserni, PhD, is an academic coach and the founder of The Global Academic Studio, a coaching practice for international graduate students and early career academics. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Stony Brook University. His research focuses on cultural globalization, technology, and cross-national comparison. He served as Managing Editor of Men and Masculinities (14 issues) and has taught and researched across academic systems in the US, the UK, Romania, and Israel.

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