Abstract:

Academic and research interest in international accreditation has risen in recent years due to the growing interest in the “Quality seal” as a vehicle for the introduction of institutional change and the evidence of an emerging global system of management education. The effects of AACSB accreditation on professional business education in the United States were already examined at the beginning of 1980w (e.g., Palmer, 1981). Business schools in Europe became obvious only in in the late 1990s, and it is a rather new phenomenon (Helmig et al., 2010).
How business schools react to pressures for change? In addition, accreditation bodies adapted major revisions or introduced the new standards in 2013. This paper discusses our current knowledge on the impact of international accreditation, highlighting inconsistencies and gaps as well as providing direction for future research.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a comprehensive literature review on the institutional international accreditation from AACSB and EQUIS accreditation bodies from about 100 papers and 30 dissertations on international institutional accreditation in Management and Organisation field with the future research agenda. Second, it also provides a conceptual framework to summarise the research in the field international accreditation comprising three parts: the forces to gain accreditation, effects of institutional accreditation and institutional changes in business schools. The institutional theory’s framework proposes a model to explain the forces that influence business schools to seek accreditation based on the institutional isomorphism, bandwagons and information asymmetry’s reasons. However, the recent studies show that we can expect both compliance and resistance to isomorphic pressures (Wedlin, 2007).

Keywords:

AACSB, EQUIS, International Accreditation, Forces, Effects, Changes.