Introduction

Management education has expanded dramatically around the world over recent decades. The expansion has been particularly salient in Europe, where existing business schools have flourished, and new ones have proliferated. As business schools have grown, so has the number of programs on offer, particularly Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs. Linked to this expansion, professional associations, the media, states, expert groups, international organizations, and many other entities perform monitoring and assessment activities and circulate extensive information about management education. Accreditation and ranking are two such activities, originating in the US but nowadays also well established in Europe. Since the late 1990s, management education providers in Europe have been accredited after going through quality assessment processes of, for instance, the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), and the leading US accrediting organization, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Schools and programs have also been assessed in international rankings in major business newspapers and magazines. These rankings were largely inspired by those conducted by US newspapers, and were also influenced by European and US accreditation standards and by the characteristics of the most prestigious management programs worldwide.

Accreditation and ranking are not only ways of monitoring, assessing, and spreading information about management education; we argue that they have become new modes of regulation for management education. Their emergence affects other forms of regulation and the development of management education in general.