Internationalisation strategies: The case for staff mobility and the strategic entrepreneur

There’s a vicious circle of execution failure in HE internationalisation strategy, especially in staff mobility. Repeated failure to implement results in a culture of under-performance, in which failure is expected, tolerated and ignored. Hardly surprising in institutions in which Gresham’s Law applies: discussions about bad operations drive out discussions about good strategy implementation. Strategy documents, where they exist, contain vague statements about the “encouragement” or “facilitation” of staff mobility tacked onto the end of the student mobility section. The ‘rhetoric-reality gap’ in HE internationalisation strategy and the resulting deterioration in the global position of UK universities are well documented.