Abstract
ABSTRACT The internationalization of higher education has gained in theoretical and empirical importance in recent decades. In this context, this article aims to describe and analyze the internationalization of business schools from the activities of their academics and based on the propositions defended by the Social Exchange Theory (SET). To achieve our goal we conducted 39 interviews with academics from business schools in the United States and Brazil, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and University of Sao Paulo (USP). We found that: (i) there are individual rewards that are not addressed by SET; (ii) there are benefits to third parties not covered by SET; (iii) certain non-rational choices are not provided by SET; and (iv) the condition of equivalence between costs and rewards provided by SET has its weaknesses. With these findings we add theoretical and empirical contributions to our theme.
Highlights
The internationalization of academics is still little conceptualized in the literature, but because the topic is of interest to academics themselves, and to higher education institutions, it has been the subject of long discussions in the academic area, especially at conferences
We identified four categories of analysis that highlight Social Exchange Theory (SET)’s weaknesses and, at the same time, offer opportunities for developing it, namely: (i) rewards result from the internationalization of academics, which was not foreseen by the theory; (ii) the benefits academics gain from internationalization are not restricted to the individual level, as originally claimed by SET; (iii) contrary to the premises of the theory, academics who choose to internationalize their careers do not do so on an exclusively rational basis; and (iv) the costs and rewards of one international activity, when compared to another, are rarely equivalent, which is contrary to the theory
Individual rewards not handled by SET. We found that these academics expect different types of reward from their international activities
Summary
The internationalization of academics is still little conceptualized in the literature, but because the topic is of interest to academics themselves, and to higher education institutions, it has been the subject of long discussions in the academic area, especially at conferences. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, 24% of the academics are foreigners from countries such as Italy, China, and India (British Council, 2018; Hotcourses, 2019) It is in this scenario that the research programs of higher education institutions are seeking to qualify and broaden this discussion before the international academic community by way of their professors and students (Batista & Romani-Dias, 2021). There are, several facilitators of and barriers to this internationalization process that deserve investigation
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