An online job advertisement of the School of Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, aiming to attract applicants from home and abroad, declares: ‘The School plans to grow aggressively in the next several years, and therefore starting dates are flexible. Ranks are open, and salaries are competitive’. The fact that this advertisement is written in English and posted by one of the top-ranking business schools in China, affiliated to a prestigious university, is telling. Underlying the advertisement is a broader trend characterizing the general Chinese business schools (hereafter CBSs): that they aim to ‘grow aggressively’ and those academics who can publish in English medium Anglo-American journals are considered important agents in this growth and are sought after with high salaries. To tap into the voices of CBSs, in this chapter, we report a study that analyzed a collection of institutional texts originating from a range of high-ranking CBSs to demonstrate how these schools are pursuing growth through international publication and, in doing so, categorize academics in light of their presumed chances of contributing to this enterprise.

It is significant to examine the case of CBSs. The first reason has to do with the prominent connection between business schools and the global economy so that, compared with their counterparts in other social science disciplines, business schools around the world have been in the avant garde in striving for international standards in teaching and research and, accordingly, have been following a ranking regime on a global scale (Wedlin, 2007). Business schools are obsessed with ranking (particularly, that of the schools and of journals), which parallels their institutional status: As Tourish (2011: 369) put it, ‘as cash cows in many institutions, business programs are subject to penal levels of classification, comparison and rankings’. The elite members among CBSs, such as the Top 10 named by Forbes China (Flannery & Chen, 2010), have been actively participating in this ranking race.