Organization Change and Development in Higher Education, a Neo-Institutional Approach of Accreditation: The Case of a Lebanese Business School

The greater competitiveness and uncertainty of today’s environment have led a growing number of organizations to alter drastically the way in which they operate (Cummings and Worley, 2015). This article discusses organizational change and development in higher education with a neo‐institutional approach of an accreditation process. It presents accreditation as a fundamental change especially after becoming a central issue for trust and accountability, student mobility requirements and borderless markets for higher education following the Bologna agenda. Within this context, the neoinstitutionalism theory was adopted in order to explain and analyze why organizations end up having the same organizational structure even though they evolve in different ways. Using a qualitative approach, this paper reveals the actions currently undertaken by the Faculty of Business and Management in Saint Joseph University in Beirut which recently entered into the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) process of accreditation; pushed to extreme change in a very competitive environment in order to assume its competitive role on the market.