Shaking the Status Quo: Business Accreditation and Positional Competition

Modern business schools exist in a complex world of rankings, ratings, and credentials. Some argue that in increasingly competitive global higher education markets, signaling status and quality has actually become more important than having them (Gioia & Corley, 2002; Trank & Rynes, 2003). For many contemporary business schools, international accreditations have become key means and first steps in pursuing legitimacy and global status. In this essay, we elaborate in detail on a business school’s international accreditation process, including its motivations and outcomes. We conclude that while accreditation processes are, at best, fruitful quality improvement exercises, the inherent motivat…

The Legitimacy Paradox of Business Schools: Losing by Gaining?

In recent years, many scholars have argued that business schools have jeopardized their legitimacy and identity. However, business schools have also been praised as a success story of higher educat...

Revisiting Dubai's Business School Mania

We continue the ongoing dialogue in AMLE on business school hubs and addresses from Rogmans (2019, this issue) by evaluating the applicability of Dunning’s OLI advantages—Ownership (O), Location (L), Internalization (I)—in explaining Dubai’s emergence as a global education hub. Because business schools typically possess few transferable Ownership-advantages, Dunning’s OLI advantages theory appears simplistic and decontextualized when applied to the global business school field. This commentary contributes to existing research on business school hubs by providing some guiding points for future discussions seeking to develop a better understanding of international branch campuses. peerReviewed

At the temporary-permanent interface: Overcoming knowledge boundaries with boundary objects

Abstract There is no shortage of literature on managing complex projects. However, we lack an understanding of projects in which the complexity goes beyond technical, financial and time-related challenges. We report on two Nordic business school accreditation projects, where the major management challenge is the knowledge boundaries institutionalized deep into the ethos of the schools. We focus on the project team’s use of boundary objects – a communication device across social groups – to expose and overcome knowledge boundaries materializing at temporary-permanent interface. We identify three progressively more challenging boundary object uses: informative, interactive and integrative. Co…

Metamorphosis of Euro Metaphors: The power of mathematical models and drama in economics storytelling.

Revisiting Dubai’s Business School Mania

We continue the ongoing dialogue in AMLE on business school hubs and addresses from Rogmans (2019, this issue) by evaluating the applicability of Dunning’s OLI advantages—Ownership (O), Location (L...

Tulevaisuuden kauppakorkeakoulua visioimassa

Opiskelija on asiakasmetaforan suurin häviäjä

Emergence and early institutionalization of competition in higher education: evidence from Finnish business schools

AbstractThis paper investigates the emergence and early institutionalization of competition in higher education (HE), specifically in business schools. First, building on key contributions from economics, management studies, sociology, and HE research, we develop propositions on competition in HE and formulate our theoretical framework. Second, we apply this framework to explore competition in Finnish business schools. We argue that business schools constitute an interesting field for studying competition in HE because they are the frontrunners and champions of competition-based views in HE. Our main contribution is a novel explanation of the preconditions, emergence, and early processes of…

Institutional Logic of Business Bubbles: Lessons from the Dubai Business School Mania

In this essay, we integrate institutional and business bubble perspectives to build a theoretical explanation for the growth and subsequent decline of the business school sector in Dubai during the period 2002–2012. The motivation for our research-based essay stems from the question: “How is it possible that the world’s top business schools simultaneously judged the market so badly and collectively invested in activities that, in retrospect, were far from economically rational and more closely resembled euphoria and mania?” Furthermore, we ask: “Why did business school leaders decide to enter the overcrowded Dubai market in particular, precipitating its boom-and-bust cycle? Our novel integr…

Accelerating the Americanization of Management Education

The Journal of Management Inquiry astutely predicted in 2004 that the Americanization of business education would not just continue but increase. Ten years later, it is arguable that the acceleration of the Americanization of management education has exceeded all expectations. To theoretically build toward understanding how and why the American business education model has been adopted to different extents, this comparative study builds on the institutional logics perspective, arguing that different institutional logics can potentially explain the various forms and patterns of Americanization and how they are manifested in the world’s business schools.

The Marketisation of Higher Education: Antecedents, Processes, and Outcomes

This chapter explores the ideological antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the marketisation of higher education, with an emphasis on business schools in particular. The chapter begins with a discussion of the theory of Scandinavian New Institutionalism in the context of higher education, explaining how ideologies spread across nations and fields through adoption and adaptation. It then elaborates the ideologies of neoliberalism and managerialism, and their relation to New Public Management. The chapter continues by elucidating the processes which are related to marketisation—namely commodification, corporatisation, and de-professionalisation. It then enumerates the various outcomes of t…

Inside service-intensive projects: Analyzing inbuilt tensions

The purpose of this research is to identify typical professional and occupational groups in service-intensive projects, and illustrate the inbuilt tensions among them through the lens of institutional theory. The cases used for the study are a wind turbine business and a content management system project business. Our findings suggest that there are two professional groups (problem solvers, technology developers) and two occupational groups (lead generators, relationship developers) involved in these businesses. More importantly, their intergroup tensions are related to different institutionalized logics toward the conception of time (project temporality) and prioritization of different asp…

Business relationships during project afterlife: antecedents, processes, and outcomes

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to increase understanding of post-project business relationships in service-intensive projects, a topic unexplored to date. This research contributes to the project marketing research focusing on post-project interaction, by building a conceptual research framework capable of illustrating the path from the initiation of a relationship through the project’s afterlife. Design/methodology/approach – A comparative case study is used across four different service-intensive project contexts to highlight the conceptual research framework, derived from the IMP-related interaction research, in practice. Findings – According to the research findings, there a…

The “Dean’s Squeeze” revisited: a contextual approach

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for identifying the primary tensions that business school dean’s encounter when moving between different university contexts.Design/methodology/approach– The paper is part of a larger research project on the development of business schools. This conceptual paper builds on the studies and personal experiences of business schools and their management in a number of different countries, primarily in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.Findings– The present study argues that as a response to the increasing corporatization of higher education, the university sector has fragmented into at least three identifiable…