Fostering International Exchanges: Globalization or Internationalization of Business Schools?

Abstract

Thus far, the internationalization of management education has been mainly defined as the institutional answer (Knight, 2003) to the growing pressure on business schools to become more “global.” The purpose of this paper is to describe the two processes of globalization and internationalization, to analyze the extent to which they are converging and to study the strategies used by business schools to address this tension. We address three questions: How does the tension between globalization and internationalization materialize? And on what indicators can we rely on to measure the globalization or internationalization level of a business school? Does the growing use of technology in teaching (e,g., Massive Open Online Courses or MOOC) foster globalization or internationalization?The focus of our discussion is centered on 1) the implications of these changes to the structure of business schools; 2) the use of technologies. Our contributions aim to provide management education leaders with a better understanding on how to navigate globalization and internationalization. We seek to close the knowledge gap that is based on the confusion between internationalization and globalization. We also advance that MOOCs could help guarantee quality through globalized processes and would foster globalization, especially the globalization of knowledge dissemination. Furthermore, our findings may be relevant and applicable to not-for-profit global knowledge networks and learning communities that share characteristics with universities (Jarzabkowski, 2008) including loosely coupled corporations (Mintzberg and Rose, 2003, op. cit. 289).