Strategic Management and Globalization:  The M4O and 5S Methods and International Partnerships in Universities

Since the 1990s, universities have become more internationally active through increased student mobility, staff mobility, and the increasingly international dimension of the curricula. The purpose of the research published in this book is to understand the application of the international strategy in universities through institutional partnerships, using an M4O approach designed and tested by the author. The M4O approach stands for Motivations, Objectives, Organizations, Obstacles, and Outcomes of overseas institutional partnerships. The research results are based on data collected from 415 international partnership agreements and twenty four interviews with senior and very senior managers from four leading UK universities. The advanced analysis of the study defines seven binary models simulated with the three stage analysis. These are analysis of ‘the design’ ‘the implementation’, and ‘the evaluation’ of international strategy.In addition to the M4O method, the study proposes a novel approach called 5S method to study the strategy of globalization.