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Successful mainstreaming of internationalization throughout and across entire institutions in the United States will require an integration of knowledge about leadership, culture, and international education.
EVERY DAY, INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS (IEPs) in the United States perform many leadership functions. Managing work and planning work. Writing strategic plans. Supervising staff and students. Representing their offices at conferences and organizations. And the list goes on and on. In some of these functions, IEPs are both leaders and followers; in many of them they perform different roles. This raises several questions: Where does the knowledge about these multiple leadership functions come from? What kind of prior preparation is required? Which functions are domestic and which are global? What leadership theories guide their performance?
Many international educators take leadership for granted and do not pay much attention to its conceptual foundations and its multidimensionality. Global trends moving toward a "knowledge and innovation society" seem to have found their way into international education in recent years. The direction to switch the focus of our work from projects that we do to concerns with what we learn and know is welcome. Because knowledge is constantly being upgraded and renewed, such a shift is essential in the field.
The success of international education depends not on a few projects and programs, but on its institutionalization and mainstreaming throughout and across entire institutions. And that is a function of leadership for which we are still searching, especially at the highest places.
Of the more than 10,000 "studies" of leadership published in the United States, most of them are written from a management perspective. But as cynics claim, we have more studies than knowledge. If we are to address the trends of a knowledge society, knowledge is what we need, including knowledge about leadership and organizations. If we are to apply that knowledge to international education, we must also seek knowledge about the complex field of international education and the context in which it functions. To accomplish the task of internationalization also requires knowledge about change, for international education is about change and the future. That brings us to the question: Where is such knowledge?
Two Kinds of Knowledge
The first kind of knowledge is in several academic disciplines, ranging from history...