Panelists:
Jacqueline McGlade, Valley City State University, Paper Title: “Championing Collaboration over Competition: The Role of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Liberalizing 20th - 21st c. World Trade Facilitation and Governance”
Adrien Jean-Guy Passant, Léonard de Vinci Business School, “The Role of Stakeholders Collaboration in Business Schools Survival: The case of ESCP Europe, the Oldest Business School in the World (1819-2019)”
Laurent Béduneau-Wang, HEC Montreal: “The evaluation of public-private collaboration in water management in the Paris’ suburb (1923-2017): from discretion to publicizing”
Panel Description and Themes:
Through three distinct case studies, the panelists explore the impact and legacy of business collaborations, which contributed significantly to the transformational re-development of organizations involved in world trade, regional business education, and local municipal services. In her presentation, Jacqueline McGlade will trace the dynamic rise of the International Chamber of Commerce, its efforts since 1919 to foster worldwide business congeniality leading to vast corporate association networks, which enabled the current INCOTERMS create rules-based global trade governance and facilitation system. She argues that it is precisely because the ICC, as the strongest world business association body, came to emerge over governments as the most effective champion of global corporate collaboration and the realization through INCOTERMS of 20th-21st c. universal compliance with international trade and movement facilitation standards. Born of dynamism of ICC-led business collaboration, the INCOTERMS, largely understudied in historical as well as political economic legacy terms, is also highly significant as it has enabled the rise of regulated global business supply chains, which in turn are transforming and liberalizing the previous Cold War segmentation of organizational arrangements of world trade. In his presentation, Adrien Jean-Guy Passant examines the critical role played by business leaders in collaborating with educational stakeholders leading to the foundational re-direction and long-term success of Europe’s oldest Business School, ESCP. Building on business school origin studies that largely centered on the foundational and re-development organizational strategies of educational directors, Passant adds through his case study of ESCP the critical, fresh perspective of how the entrance of private business leaders as collaborative stakeholders re-shaped and ensured the long term evolution and longevity of the ESCP. In this way, Passant’s study also opens further reflection of the rise of the direct presence and influence of business collaboration, along with educational and government actors, in driving transformational, competitive organizational strategy and operations in the ESCP and similar regional business schools. Adding a further view into the dynamic legacy of private-public collaboration, Laurent Béduneau-Wang traces the creation in 1923 of the Water Syndicate of the Paris’ suburb, which acted as the foundational organization in the management of water on behalf of 132 municipalities. His study emphasizes the necessity of government-business cooperation to maintain the complex technical and management arrangements essential to the operational integrity and operation of management of Paris’ water suburb system. Underpinned by interwoven political imperatives and technical abilities, the ensuing close business-government collaboration led to the formation of, “Compagnie Générale des Eaux” (CGE), called Veolia today. Béduneau-Wang shows how the legitimacy and longevity of the collaboration leading to the delegation of a public water service to a private company has lasted through Veolia – even in the midst of serious consumer challenges in the 1990s. He argues that even after the entrance of a third partner – the client- after the 1990s, the dyadic collaboration between the Syndicate and Veolia in the Greater Paris, not only weathered but spurred greater organizational transformation resulting in improved services delivery and a highly beneficial international investment position in the municipal water management business arena.