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The forces that have limited the internationalization of higher education generally and business school globalization in particular, especially in the United States, are numerous and complex. At the broadest level, they include the same factors that
have traditionally limited the globalization of U.S.business: a large, prosperous, and somewhat isolated domestic market for goods and services.They also include the relatively recent advent of technologies to allow for the full globalization of
services as described above. But given that many U.S. companies are now fully globalized—“transnational” in the Bartlett and Ghoshal sense—it seems time, indeed overdue, for U.S. business schools to follow suit.
Business schools and their leaders themselves recognize this shortfall. Indeed, at an AACSB meeting in early 2009, Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at IESE Business School, suggested that most of the cross-border collaborations among
business schools offered little genuine integration of courses and curricula, remarking, “If that’s all we do, we risk becoming a specialized segment of the travel and hospitality industry (Mangan, 2009: pa.9). Edward A. Snyder, then dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said,
”It’s time to stop pretending that we’re doing more than we really are“ (Mangan, 2009: A29).
Blair H. Sheppard,dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, has probably offered the boldest response to these critiques, pushing forward with an
expanded version if its ”cross-continent MBA,” under which students spend significant periods working and studying at campuses in Britain, China, India, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Duke’s main campus in North
Carolina (Mangan, 2009). But on balance, business schools in the United States and around the world have not progressed very far in terms of their globalization,
even as other private, public, and nonprofit organizations have. AMLE has provided a platform for research, debate, and discussion of the challenges of globalizing
U.S. (and non-U.S.) business schools and of the related phenomenon of the internationalization of management curriculum.
In the very first issue of Academy of Management (Learning and Education aka AMLE), Henry Mintzberg and Jonathan Gosling (2002) reflected on a “new” approach to management education as exemplified in the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPPM), which included collaboration among business schools in India, France, the U.K., Canada, Japan, and Korea.
They argued that living and working in different contexts allow managers to “live cross-cultural experiences as authentically as possible” (Mintzberg& Gosling, 2002: 66). Yet, since this article was published, AMLE has featured relatively few
papers that have addressed this important topic. While some potential contributions may have been “left on the floor” as a result of the review process, we need much more innovative thinking around this topic. I see great potential for exploring
questions such as
• What is a global business school? How should it be defined? How can “globalness” (in the business school context) be measured?
• What mechanisms exist for advancing global business education? How can success and failure of these efforts be measured?
Just a thought :)
