The overall topic of this book is internationalization. It is hard to deny that organizations are increasingly internationalizing in order to remain competitive, to access growth markets and resources and to reduce operating costs. Understanding international business has become imperative for academic researchers, business managers and policy makers but also for students as they prepare themselves to enter an increasingly complex business environment. The subject of International Business can be viewed from many angles and general interest in the subject, as educators, researchers and business professionals, has grown exponentially. A simple Google Scholar search on the keywords “international business” delivers nearly 1 million articles and, as a teacher, I can choose from 258 “international business” textbooks. It is, therefore, necessary in this introductory chapter to provide some background on the subject and to adequately describe the scope and context of the international business that we focused on in the series of studies that follows.
The concept of internationalization has been seen as a buzz word and container concept. The meaning of internationalization includes everything that relates to international, meanwhile internationalization is losing its meaning. This study takes a practical approach to searching for some clarification of this concept. During the period 2009-2011, 73 key actors in the field of internationalization at 16 Dutch higher education institutions (HEIs) were interviewed. Among the 14 elements identified by this study as constituting the concept of internationalization, many may be commonly know. However, the value of this study is that it ranks their significance and provides a sound base for further comparative studies in other countries. Moreover, this study compares and contrasts the differing interpretations of what the pursuit of internationalization means in research universities and universities of applied sciences and concludes that internationalization is pursued differently in the two sectors and clarifies the cause of these differences. These sectoral differences are important but have so far been rarely acknowledged in the internationalization literature. Finally, knowledge about practitioners’ perceptions of internationalization is not widely available in the education literature on internationalization. This study provides this knowledge based on the Dutch situation and argues that the current trend of theoretical development and general conceptualization in this field needs to recognize the actual practices, if our aim is to produce meaningful and feasible models/guidelines/frameworks that are recognizable by the practitioners.
“How can we make sure that students receive the right learning outcomes that make them ready for a world that is more and more interculturally and internationally connected? What does that mean for faculty development? What are the implications for the assessment of students? How can instruments such as study abroad, international classrooms, teaching in another language, recruitment of international students and cross-border delivery, contribute to that process? In other words: how can we make sure that all students and not only the small elite of already internationally oriented students and faculty receive the basic intercultural and international skills and knowledge they need in current society?” By Uwe Brandenburg, project manager and partner at the Centre for Higher Education Development Consult, Germany and Hans de Wit, professor of internationalization, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands, and director of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalization at the Università Cattolica Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. This article in the Guardian Professional (Higher Education Network): ‘Higher education is losing sight of what internationalisation is all about’
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