At what point does a business school become international?

The claim is more plausible in cases where the teaching teams are also international rather than monocultural, so that students are exposed not only to an international experience through interaction with their peers, but also through the cultural diversity introduced via the colleagues who are teaching them.  However this cultural diversity itself is a source of challenges for the “immigrant” professor who finds that mastery both of the host country language and especially of English are also required.  The challenge of teaching in the medium of English when one is a non-native speaker can be a major one.  Many colleagues I have encountered, often with excellent English competence as non-native speakers, will start to feel they have suddenly lost their ability when faced with a barrage of student questions in a variety of accents, forms of expression and other idiosyncracies.  In these circumstances the native speakers may find themselves in demand and benefit from high ratings in terms of student evaluation of their courses largely (or at minimum  partly) due to their good fortune in having a linguistic competitive advantage.  Despite this reality, there are always colleagues who buck the trend and who are hailed as very successful and popular teachers, even though their English is scarcely up to the level of some of the students in front of them.  I have a strong admiration for such successes.

So we have international students and we have added international faculty…what else? Yes of course: international research agendas. Ultimately business education accreditation bodies point to the need for research publications in international journals, not just in one’s local language. For ‘international’ read ‘in English’, bringing us back to the need for business faculty to be translators as well as specialists in their respective business fields. As with those students and their tricky accents, so the challenge of rendering one’s original and stimulating article into acceptable and stimulating English may spell the difference between publishing success and failure.

There is a fourth international dimension: the development of program delivery on an international scale. On one level this can take the form of a multisite MBA program when the students have the chance to complete the program while studying in two or three different countries, thereby earning a degree or degrees signed by two or three different institutions.

On another level we have the delivery of programs with an international partner, a joint-venture which is not simply a franchising deal, but an attempt to provide the same program with the same teaching team in a number of different geographical locations, operating with local partners. When this covers a network of countries at different stages of economic maturity, faculty are in a position to also learn a significant amount as they compare the responses of students in different contexts and see just how varied international business environments are. To any teacher of International Business such as myself, this feeds directly into the program as we regularly witness the tangible differences in national policy, and acquire a closer understanding of the striking economic and educational diversity that persists from one country to another, at a global level. The world may have flattened but it remains multidomestic especially in the educational sector. For example the environment in non-EU member transition economies cannot be understood without direct experience on the ground; reference to what is happening in other zones is of little real value.

So finally where do these varied factors leave our definition of the “international” school? As the international, open-access tool Wikipedia lets us know “The term ‘international education’ can mean many different things and its definition is debated”. It is clear, there are various dimensions, those schools that accept the challenge and overcome the barriers will find that many student applicants will respond positively to the offers made by schools that are international through and through.

About the author:

Phil Eyre is MBA Program Director at Grenoble Graduate School of Business