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The skill-attracting policies encouraging the internationalisation of higher education are compatible with a modernisation discourse, at the heart of which lies a belief that international researchers are highly embedded super-achievers allured by targeted policies. By focusing on the life stories of foreign-born scholars working in Poland (100 in-depth interviews), and Polish department heads (20 interviews) this article revealed three paradoxes that should never have come to be according to the Western modernisation paradigm. The first paradox is related to the expectation that policies targeted at incoming scholars should be the first and foremost enticement for international scholars. The second paradox stems from the fact that some internationally mobile academics representing the humanities and social sciences—in their biographical narratives—highly criticise current academic policies focused on internationalisation. The third paradox is related to the fact that, counterintuitively, less embedded academic migrants perform better. This is an outcome of the life strategy of top-performing scholars, who decide to work in Poland only upon receiving a prestigious and temporary, often EU-funded, scholarship (e.g., Marie Curie). Building on the empirical material from Poland, this article introduces a new notion—the 'internationalisation against the grain' to embrace the paradoxes of internationalisation from many peripheral countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analyzing the reality that surrounds us in the field of the common good, we often ask ourselves why we are primarily concerned with the effects and not the causes. Public management is an obvious example of this, especially in the area of it that is referred to as public administration. This area will constitute a point of reference in our considerations. The aims of the article focus on an evolutionary and retrospective look at the reality of contemporary public management in Poland in the second decade of the 21st century and considering the reality of public management in the convention of paradoxes and dilemmas. We are aware of the fact that in this article we are not able to thoroughly analyze all the paradoxes that exist in the reality of contemporary public management and the dilemmas that arise in it. Therefore, we limited the field of analysiwws to a few selected ones related to the functioning of public administration. As a result of the analysis, recommendations were formulated to increase the efficiency of modern public management in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]