Two non-U.S. sites were fitting locations recently for the start of a new era of internationalized management education. In the Netherlands and Mexico, representatives of AACSB member schools, along with staff, began planning cooperative efforts with a European organization and potentially two Mexican institutions to design and test peer review processes.

In January, AACSB representatives William K. Laidlaw, Jr., executive vice president; Milton R. Blood, managing director and director of accreditation; and Kenneth R. Smith, past president of AACSB now on the faculty at The University of Arizona, met in the Netherlands with members and staff of the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) and developed an agreement for a joint approach to peer review. A working group, consisting of six educators, three from AACSB member schools and three from EFMD, plus staff, was charged with designing procedures and criteria for self-evaluation and peer review that will be piloted in a small number of EFMD/AACSB member institutions.

Bernadette Conraths, director general for EFMD, based in Brussels, said the three EFMD members on the working group were selected to reflect European diversity.

"Unlike AACSB, which by tradition is made up of more university-based schools, EFMD is a network of providers and users of management education and development. It is companies, business schools, training centers, public service organizations, consultants. It is a very mixed bunch," she said.

Besides the three on the joint team, Conraths has a diverse subgroup of educators to give background input and to help in preparing for the joint group meetings. She and another staff member, Nicola Hijlkema, will support the EFMD group.

Blood, an AACSB staff representative on the project, said the group will begin meeting in March or soon after. The goal is to have a report ready for approval at EFMD's June board meeting and AACSB's June board retreat.

"I think we can choose pilot schools by the end of summer and begin working with them in the fall," Blood said. After the schools are selected, there may be a longer-than-usual period before the peer review team visits, he said, because the schools first will have to familiarize themselves with the self-evaluation processes and the questions to be studied.

"We don't want to rush a school and have it unprepared," Blood said. "We would rather go more cautiously."

A Partnership Team meeting in Monterrey agreed to create a review process to be piloted at one or two Mexican schools. A main difference in the Mexican arrangement is that AACSB's work in that country will be done directly with individual educational institutions.

Those involved in this effort say there is the likelihood that these cooperative steps taken in Monterrey and the Netherlands eventually could lead to an international accreditation process. The idea of international recognition has been floating around for several years, but there seems to be a convergence of factors now that makes it more appealing to institutions and organizations.

One of those factors is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Another is the continuous quality movement. A third is the greater degree of mobility among higher education students and faculty.

"European schools have seen this mobility more than we have," said Blood. "But now it is a phenomenon we're all starting to respond to. As students and faculty do more moving around, understanding schools in other countries becomes more important. This is especially true for U.S. schools because they tend to be less familiar with school systems or institutions outside the U.S."

Karen Martinez, director of business accreditation, said that Mexican interest in AACSB accreditation stems from concerns relating to quality assurance of the business degree programs offered, global competition and the opportunities opened up by NAFTA.

"The quality movement has been ongoing for a number of years and that has been global, but it seems to be getting more intense in certain areas," Martinez said. "Because of NAFTA, the Mexican Education Ministry is very concerned about this. The recommendation at the November meeting was 'Let's try a pilot study.'"

EFMD's Conraths said that while individual European countries or regions offer recognition, there has been no continent-wide process for that to date. EFMD has long offered a confidential strategic audit to members upon request, she said, but the issue of accreditation has not been tackled. Now, EFMD has a project under way to develop a common approach to continuous quality assessment in European management education.

The initiative, called EQUAL, includes various national or regional accrediting agencies that will eventually create common processes and procedures, help disseminate best practices, train peers for assessments, and, sooner or later, Conraths said, come up with some form of a common recognition process.

"Part of this process is cooperation with other bodies outside of Europe. AACSB is certainly one of the prime partners with which we could coordinate joint reviews in the future, upon the request of European schools," Conraths said. "I think there is a growing concern that says we need to create a viable European recognition scheme and then have AACSB be a part of that. But this is a process that, like almost everything in Europe, will take a certain amount of time because we have to combine great diversity in educational systems and cultural approaches to management."

James W. Schmotter, Lehigh business dean who chairs AACSB's International Partnership Teams for Continuous Improvement, agrees, citing the fact that even the collaboration achieved so far couldn't have been rushed.

"I think there was a natural evolution that had to take place in terms of our building relationships with potential partners overseas," Schmotter said. "Establishing a level of personal trust is important. Everyone has to come to a mutual understanding that we are not going to do 'American accreditation' everywhere. That is a fear that people have." Smith, who is on the new AACSB/EFMD task force, said he thinks the fear of a lock-step approach to peer review and recognition has been alleviated by AACSB's shift in its approach to accreditation.

"I think Europeans were thinking of accreditation in a traditional way-that we had this prescriptive model that said, 'This is what quality in business education is in the U.S.,'" Smith said.

"But the new philosophy we developed focuses on the individual mission of a school and makes the accreditation activity itself a positive contributor to the development of quality within each individual situation. I think Europeans have gained a greater understanding of this philosophy and how it can be applied across diverse circumstances in a way that responds to the individual needs of the schools and produces value in terms of improved quality," Smith said.

The explosion of business education in Central and Eastern Europe also has created a greater demand for a way both to respect diversity and still provide some discipline, Smith said. The new approach to accreditation allows for individual circumstances, yet still calls for a school to have processes that develop quality and resources that contribute to quality.

Another key to the timing of these agreements is the AACSB board's recent approval of the objective to extend peer review activities and accreditation recognition outside North America.

"This is important," Schmotter said, "because it really changes the nature of the conversations that we have with institutions in Mexico and Europe that are interested in possibly being considered for accreditation."

Translating a process that has been primarily North American into something that will be acceptable to the many diverse cultures of Europe or Mexico is probably the biggest challenge confronting the international working group.

"First of all, you really have to sit together and develop a common procedure," said Conraths. "You will have to adapt whatever is an AACSB scheme to the very different systems and contexts European schools operate in. The real fun and challenge on both sides will be to sit together and develop that."

In the pilot efforts, the working groups are going to confront numerous cultural differences that affect decisions about faculty, curriculum and admissions criteria.

"We won't try to Americanize them-especially in their curriculum and faculty," Blood said. "They choose faculty on different grounds than we do, and they consider different qualifications. They build their curricula on a different kind of academic preparation than our students have. We don't want to review a school in Italy as if it were in Indiana. We have to recognize the differences. Some standards used in the U.S. may only make sense in the U.S."

Schmotter said the differences are another reason for moving slowly with the pilot projects. He mentioned the large number of practitioner faculty and the large number of part-time faculty in Mexican schools as examples of where policy determinations would have to be made by AACSB's Accreditation Council.

"There are some factual aspects to the accreditation process," Schmotter said, "like faculty composition and student enrollment. And there also will be a demand for an understanding of the cultural and economic context these schools are working in. We are going to have to wrestle with those kinds of things. That is why it is important that these will not be all-American teams."

Schmotter believes a desirable way to work through the cultural differences and see how they can be accommodated without compromising quality standards would be to focus on different issues at different institutions. At one pilot institution the team might look at admissions policies more closely, curriculum at another, and faculty at another. One of the first issues that will come up is a common definition of what recognition of quality means.

"We will learn different things because there is so much variety. The real challenge of this process," Schmotter said, "is, how will we tailor our good, time-tested process? How can we adapt what we hope is a very flexible process to a much greater variety of institutional characteristics than exists in the United States?"

Part of the plan is to provide training for those who would serve on the review teams. Blood expects that some European and Mexican educators will attend the training session on April 21, 1996, immediately prior to AACSB's Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. Eventually, he sees offering joint EFMD/AACSB training meetings in Europe so that a pool of educators can be prepared to serve on review teams both in Europe and in America. Further down the line, opportunities for training sessions in other regions also may be made available.

Working with EFMD will be an advantage because it already has had to deal with the varied landscape of European management education.

"One of the things that Europeans are certainly doing better is managing diversity because of the big cultural and institutional differences within a fairly small geographic area. EFMD is a good example of an organization that has done that. We can learn from that expertise," Schmotter said.

Of all the benefits that proponents of this peer review effort mention, the overarching one is the many opportunities it will provide for new learning.

"What is most exciting about this is how much learning is going to come out of this for both our domestic and international members as they start participating in the cross-national peer reviews. The opportunity for this as a learning tool for the participants is something that's really exciting," Blood said. "We'll understand our own accreditation better after we take it into other contexts," he said. "It will make us question some of the things we don't question now about our own process."

On a short-term basis, Smith said, b-schools will benefit from the potential inclusion of global management educators serving on a U.S. peer review team and from having opportunities to serve on a peer review team in another country. The b-schools with strong international missions will be saying, "We need to have people from outside the U.S. look at how we're operating globally."

For the longer term, Blood envisions that the hundreds of American students and faculty who today travel across national boundaries for degrees and courses will, in a few more years, become many thousands. At that point, international understanding and international assurances of educational quality will be invaluable.

Smith agrees. "It will be helpful for our schools to know that their students could go off to one of 50 or 60 schools in various parts of the world that were essentially accredited in some way."

From a self-interest standpoint, Schmotter sees the opportunity to work on a cooperative basis with a detailed and specific issue like peer review as a way to increase AACSB's organizational capacity to operate in a global setting.

"The development of expertise, by individuals on teams and the staff, and the facilitation of relationships between foreign institutions and American institutions will help us. Our constituents are urging more international relationships and programs," Schmotter said.

"Right now there is no repository of information about business schools overseas that we can relate to in any meaningful way. This is something that is very important for AACSB to develop," he said. "This process of working with institutions, organizations and educational ministries will help us expand that knowledge and serve our American members better."

How will AACSB member schools in the U.S. respond to this action?

"I think even people who might question whether it is the best use of resources will be able to see that it's a good use of resources," Blood said. "I don't think people will think it's a bad thing. But there will be differing opinions about whether we should do it now or wait five years to do it."

There is no guarantee that this particular approach to greater internationalization will work, Schmotter acknowledged. He said some things may arise in the pilots that "really cause the Accreditation Council to flinch.

"We then would have to rethink whether this is a venture that we would want to pursue, or see if there are other ways to provide this global perspective," Schmotter said. "I certainly hope this is not the case because AACSB is really all about this activity."