Business schools and globalisation

Business and management

Schumpeter

Promising the world

by B.R.

HOW good are business schools at teaching globalisation? One answer to this question is that it depends on who you ask. If you read the glossy brochures of the business schools themselves, the answer is clear: very. Globalisation can be found in the marrow of our bones, they say, the helix of our DNA. Witness our diverse cohort, the partnerships we have with foreign institutions and how many students we send to China for a week, learning about how they do business over there.

According to Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor at IESE business school, these schools should be charged with false advertising. Mr Ghemawat is the author of "World 3.0" (which our Schumpeter columnist raved about here) and the co-author of a recent report looking at globalisation within business schools.

While business schools are very good at claiming that they are globalised, he says, the figures suggest otherwise. In 2009, less than 5% of business undergraduates were foreign and less than 6% of the 12,000 institutions which offer business degrees had international accreditation. And what of those self-appointed apostles of globalisation, the business faculty? Just 6% of the research they published in the top 20 management journals dealt with any kind of cross-border issues, he says.

And that is before one considers the case studies. Those taught at business schools are notoriously America-centred. Only around a third of those published deal with an issue outside of America. Just 14% percent deal with a cross-border issue in any way. And in only 6% of case studies is the cross-border issue central to what is being taught.

Yet Mr Ghemawat’s biggest criticism is that, outside of international economics, very few schools have any required courses on globalisation. Instead, schools tend to push a single—usually American—view of what globalisation means.

“The notion that business schools in different parts of the world teach exactly the same things is a standardising impulse,” he says. “So when the University of Chicago proudly points out that it runs programmes in three places [Chicago, London and Singapore] and has exactly the same content in each of them, I ask... if there is some impulse to get them to pay attention to local realities? Wouldn’t you want some differentiation on that basis?”

But the impulse to hunt a standard model is ingrained in academia. The “physicist’s notion of ideas that apply across time and space,” says Mr Ghemawat, suits business professors because it allows them to advance over-arching ideas that get them noticed in the wider world. The trouble is, of course, that in the real world any business trying to operate across borders in such a visceral way wouldn’t last long. As our earlier article on Mr Ghemawat pointed out:

The increasing uniformity of cities’ skylines worldwide masks growing choice within them, to which even the most global of companies must adjust. McDonald’s serves vegetarian burgers in India and spicy ones in Mexico, where Coca-Cola uses cane sugar rather than the corn syrup it uses in America. MTV, which went global on the assumption that “A-lop-bop-a-doo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom” meant the same in every language, now includes five calls to prayer a day in its Indonesian schedules.

This tendency towards a uniform global model is as acute at the top schools as anywhere. And it is not alleviated by the international field trip. “Business schools say that we do ‘context-free teaching’ in the classroom, and then send [students] on an exchange programme in order to learn context,” explains the professor. Even if these students were somehow able to learn the local ideas on globalisation “by osmosis”, research has shown that lessons learnt on trips which last only two or three weeks simply do not stick.

The sad truth is that there is little competitive incentive for schools to change. When Mr Ghemawat persuaded the dean of IESE to add a required globalisation course, it meant that other professors had to cede some of their own class time. Academia is inherently conservative and many deans could probably do without the headache. Western schools still have a ready supply of students from emerging markets queuing up for admission, even if what they are being taught can be of little relevance when they return home. This situation will continue until there is real competition from emerging-market schools, which can teach globalisation from their own viewpoints.

There is also little pressure coming from either the accreditation agencies or the media ranking organisations, says Mr Ghemawat. Publications such as the Financial Times and The Economist are part of the problem, he says, precisely because they only measure the superficial aspects of how globalisation is taught*. Until such time as they are forced to change, business schools will be very happy with the status quo.

*The measures of internationalism in The Economist ranking are: the international diversity of the student body, a student rating of the international content of the programme, the number of languages taught, the number of overseas exchange programmes on offer, and the number of registered overseas alumni chapters.