Eric Cornuel

Challenges facing business schools in the future

Purpose – Forward‐looking schools around the world are beginning to implement changes to their curricula, their marketing strategies, their alliances and partnerships to face the challenges of the increasingly competitive business education market of the future. This paper seeks to identify success factors for business schools in their competitive environment, and to provide some recommendations for higher education in the future.Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines the current challenges faced by business schools and those posing a threat for their success in the future. Furthermore, the paper proposes tools and strategies for facing these challenges.Findings – The successful business school of the future will offer innovative programmes, backed by the appropriate resources to guarantee an excellent faculty body, an international experience and a multi‐cultural environment to its students. At the same time, successful business schools will seek accreditation and quality improvement programmes...

The role of business schools in society

Purpose – In the future, the legitimacy of business schools will no longer be in question, nor will their vocation to participate in training the elite (especially of companies) alongside institutes which, in various countries, train top Civil Servants. But this context, which dominant positions always provoke, should not encourage complacency. On the contrary, it should invite reflection on the weaknesses of the institutions in question. Aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approach – Some major new trends in management education are questioned (the use of new information technologies, an initiation to management starting at a much earlier stage of the education track, a different way to grasp the use of case studies).Findings – This paper is an analysis of the functions of business schools and management faculties in universities. It leads one to observe that they appear above all as places busy “reproducing” or “miming” reality. Where science faculties describe, management teaching establishme...

Business schools in transition? Issues of impact, legitimacy, capabilities and re-invention

Purpose – The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the set of papers which comprise this issue of the journal, and to provide an interpretation of the current strategic debates about the future evolution of business school paradigms and, hence, identify possible strategic options.Design/methodology/approach – The papers can be categorized into three broad themes: first, the impacts and environmental influences on management education including issues of globalization, global sustainability and advances in digital and social media. Second, challenges and criticisms of management education covering issues of legitimacy, business model sustainability and the need for change in business models. Third, the re‐invention of business schools and the creation of alternative models of management education and approaches for effective implementation and delivery of those models.Findings – Globalization is an important environmental influence. Arnoud de Meyer, the President of SMU, offers his reflections. The pa...

The practical wisdom of the Catholic social teachings

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on business education, which should not exclude strains of religious ethical traditions, e.g. Catholic social thought, and the practical wisdom embodied in them.Design/methodology/approach – Recent traditions of social Catholicism starting from the Papal Social Message Rerum Novarum (1891) are summarized. Consequences for management development are drawn.Findings – The recent tradition of social Catholicism developed as a result of a broad cultural process of adaptation of Christians to the emerging social context of a modern society. New types of ethical orientation have been developed, sometimes in strong opposition to contemporary ideological concepts such as socialism, materialism, or elitist capitalism. Even in the globalized environment of the twenty‐first century these orientations are of continuing relevance, e.g. in organizational behavior, in business and society relations, and in basic concepts of corporate responsibility.Practical implications – Religious eth...

Moving beyond the rhetoric of responsible management education

Purpose – Business schools appear to be slow adopters of responsible management education (RME), though the rhetoric of RME is visible throughout the sector. The purpose of this paper and the accompanying ones in this Special Issue is to address this apparent gap between substance and image by analysing the barriers to RME adoption and potential ways of overcoming them. The contributions offer insights from a range of different perspectives that will help encourage an informed debate on how to make RME more of a reality in management education. Design/methodology/approach – This paper analyses the problem within the dominant institutional logic of the business school sector, which is shaped by entrepreneurialism, operational for-profit orientation and externally validated reputation creation. It sets the stage for the other contributions to this Special Issue, which use alternative approaches to analyse the limited progress of RME adoption. Findings – This paper identifies five potential barriers to RME a...

Viewpoint: Global responsibility and total freedom

The notion of global responsibility is coming to light as it appears that the control of the economies by nation‐states has proved inefficient. Therefore, solutions are often sought by appealing to responsibility (for enterprises, individuals, interest groups …). In particular, global responsibility calls for firms to limit their own activities when it opposes the general interest. But it is generally admitted in the firms that a condition to maximize their profits is all about allowing the laws of economy to express themselves, without any restraint, in order to give their whole potential. In this sense, it refers to “total freedom”. This article tries to re‐examine the very concept of global responsibility versus total freedom. For that it addresses the question through two major issues: (1) responsibility as an external constraint, a source of improvement; (2) the responsibility of corporate governance for financial transparency.

Evaluating managers’ performance in companies in transition

Perlmutter’s typology distinguishing between ethnocentric, polycentric, and geocentric management is considered classic. It recommends that multinational firms practise a form of globally conceived administration, regardless of the country of origin of its managers. However, an analysis of the phase of economic transition that Central and Eastern European countries have known since the end of the 1980s, demonstrates that the work market is a dual structure (dividing expatriate and local managers). This is largely due to the difficulty companies have in evaluating the capacity of their managers to work alongside the company objectives. Thus, even the structuring of the work market weakens the relevance of an approach of voluntary human resources. It also softens differences between ethnocentric, polycentric, and geocentric management.

An empirical analysis of priority sectors for managers’ training

Whereas the foreign direct investment role in privatised enterprises is a new phenomenon, our purpose here is to discuss the changing strategies of foreign manufacturing firms in view of the new conditions that they are facing and the consequences on labour market and economic sectors. With regard to this, the main issue to shed light on is to what extent foreign owned firms operating in the manufacturing sector of Lithuania have been contributing to increasing the competitiveness of the country, through efficiency seeking and eventually through resource enhancing investments. And to what extent might such investments lead to a deeper integration into the international production networks.