For years, business schools have battled for bragging rights over which ones were the most globalized as they established partnerships and programs around the world. But new questions are being raised about whether the sweeping globalization of management education has amounted to more rhetoric than reality, and whether, faced with a worldwide economic meltdown, the schools can afford to continue expanding overseas.
“It’s time to stop pretending that we’re doing more than we really are,” Edward A. Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, told a packed audience here this month at the annual deans’ meeting of AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. “Statements of aspiration are great, but we should avoid being overly highfalutin in our rhetoric.”
Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at the IESE Business School, a leading international business school run by the University of Navarra, in Spain, offered an even more skeptical assessment. He argued that most of the international collaborations that business schools have touted on their Web sites are limited to student and faculty exchanges, with little meaningful change in curricula.
“If that’s all we do, we risk becoming a specialized segment of the travel-and-hospitality industry,” he said.
He also dismissed as “globaloney” the premise that national borders no longer matter in solving the world’s business problems. Mr. Ghemawat argued that the world is, in fact, only “semiglobalized,” and that both students and businesses are misled when regional differences are ignored.
“If you’re an M.B.A. student,” he asked, “what could be more seductive than being told, ‘The world is one, and you’re now perfectly equipped, once you get your degree, to go out and stamp out global management problems wherever they spring up? Kind of a global SWAT team.”
No Plans to Withdraw
Many participants in the deans’ meeting expect some short-term retrenchment in international business education. Given the worldwide economic meltdown, fewer M.B.A. programs will be able to recruit students from around the world, educate them on an overseas campus, and then place them in high-level jobs, some here said.
But the association’s international orientation will remain important over the long haul, said John J. Fernandes, president of AACSB International, which has 559 accredited member institutions in more than 30 countries.
“We’re not going back to the covered-wagon days,” he said. While many fear that the world’s deepening economic crisis will prompt a call for more trade restrictions, “a retreat to protectionism is a short-term reaction to fear,” he argued. “In the long run, a global outlook is key.”
Some deans, whose M.B.A. programs’ reputations are built on their strong international orientation, agree. Hildy Teegen, dean of the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business, said it has a responsibility to a state that relies heavily on overseas investment in its agriculture, manufacturing, textile, and tourism industries.
“In this kind of economic environment, we’ll have to be very strategic in our partnerships, but we have no intention of pulling back,” said Ms. Teegen, who serves, with Mr. Ghemawat and Mr. Snyder, on the AACSB’s globalization committee. “Without foreign trade and commerce, our state’s economy would be devastated.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 55, Issue 24, Page A29
