The globalization of research highlighted through the research networks of management education institutions: The case of French business schools

Research has become a key success factor for academic institutions in a growing and increasingly globalized market. In the past, many business schools appear to have had little involvement in research, but are now strategically positioned in international rankings. In this study, we investigate some of the mechanisms that appear to have helped these schools increase their faculty’s research productivity in order to face strong competition. We investigate in some depth the case of French business schools, and explore their research networks, focusing on the relationships between academic institutions. We use bibliometric and clustering techniques. We find that, during the last decade or so, French business schools have significantly broadened their research network—at not only the national but also the international level, meaning they have participated in the globalization of research. Exploring the structure of the research networks of these business schools, we highlight two core structuring mechanisms: status and competition. First, the schools we investigated tend to link to other institutions depending on the latter’s status—i.e., their level of prestige. Second, it appears that they tend to prefer to collaborate with foreign partners on the international scene rather than with other institutions with which they are in direct competition in their home country. The article discusses the strategies implemented by business schools to help and motivate their professors to enter some existing communities of established scientists (invisible colleges), and the consequences of these trends for the organization of business education.