The hidden curriculum of journal rejection: A Bourdieusian study in Southeast Asian higher education

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Journal rejection constitutes a consequential feature of metric-driven academic publishing, particularly in systems where indexed publications govern promotion, institutional prestige, and scholarly legitimacy. Moving beyond an editorial outcome or personal setback, the study locates rejection in a hidden curriculum through which scholars learn tacit norms, hierarchies, and evaluative expectations in global publishing. Guided by qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology and Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, habitus, and symbolic power, the inquiry involved 15 experienced social sciences and humanities scholars from Indonesia and Malaysia. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured phenomenological interviews guided by ten open-ended questions and analyzed through transcript immersion, reflexive bracketing, meaning-unit coding, thematic development, cross-case comparison, and Bourdieusian interpretation. Findings identify rejection as a boundary-making mechanism regulating scholarly legitimacy, an informal apprenticeship through which authors infer publishing conventions, and an evaluative encounter affecting confidence, identity, and academic positioning. Its developmental potential depended on access to linguistic, social, institutional, and experiential capital. Well-resourced scholars converted rejection into learning, whereas scholars with limited support faced prolonged uncertainty and exclusion. Participants employed regulated persistence, strategic journal repositioning, selective disengagement, and critical distancing. Clearer review criteria, post-rejection mentoring, sustained writing support, and developmental peer review are needed to reduce structural inequality in international scholarly publishing.