Research Note: Asterix in Disneyland. Management Scholars from France on the World Stage

Organization Studies, Winter, 1998 by Lars Engwall

A closer look at the geographical locations reveals that the authors come from 49 different places (see Table 3). The authors based in France worked at 14 different locations, of which the Paris area, including Fontaineblean, account for three-quarters of the French contributions (38.7 out of 49.8 authorships). The rest come from Grenoble and 10 other places. Co-authors of the French writers were based at 22 North American institutions, 9 European institutions and 4 institutions in the rest of the world.

The geographical locations described above contain 62 different institutions. Of these, most of the authorships (one-third) originate at INSEAD in Fontainebleau (see Table 3). Among the rest of the French institutions represented in the database are another seven, whose authorship level is equal to, or above 1.5. These are five institutions in the Paris area (ESSEC, Ecole Polytechnique, ESCP, HEC/ISA and le Laboratoire de Sociologie du Travail) and two in other parts of France (Grenoble and ESC Lyon). The remaining 13 institutions together account for about eight full authorships, i.e. on average about one co-authorship to a two-author article per institution.

The predominance of INSEAD emerges even more clearly when the contributions of individual researchers are analyzed (see Table 3). It then turns out that eight of the eleven authors who have contributed 1.5 or more authorships come from this institution, while the other three come from ESCP and ESSEC. Together, these eleven authors account for 30 percent of all the authorships and almost half of the French contributions. The top name on the list is Sumantra Ghoshal who alone, and together with Harvard and MIT colleagues, has published widely on multinationals. He is followed by Max H. Boisot with two papers of his own and one co-authored paper on comparative management, and Karel O. Cool with five co-authored papers with a leaning towards operations research. All these three scholars have non-French doctor's degrees: Ghoshal from Harvard, Boisot from London and Cool from Purdue. They also have a non-French origin. Ghoshal comes from India, Boisot from the United Kingdom and Cool from Belgium. The same pattern is also true further down the list. Only a few (Bemmaor, Larreche and Thietart) are Frenchmen, and the majority have degrees from American business schools: Berkeley (Corstjens), Chicago (Winkler), Columbia (Thietart), Harvard (Kets de Vries), New York (Makridakis and Schneider), Purdue (Bemmaor), and Stanford (Larreche).

The data shown in Figure 3 thus indicates that when co-authorships are taken into consideration, the French contribution to international publications in the area of business studies is not 73 full authorships but 50. Of these 50 authorships, about half come from the Fontainebleau-based institution, INSEAD, which, although physically located in France, must be regarded as an essentially international institution with a majority of non-French nationals and holders of American doctoral degrees. The remaining 25 full authorships are concentrated to a large extent on a few other institutions in the Paris area, or in Grenoble or Lyon. This suggests that, in the period studied, French scholars of business studies have largely chosen to publish in French publications (books, journals, etc.). This is not necessarily a deficiency in terms of scholarly work, but it might be a disadvantage in the international diffusion of significant research results.