How do companies and their subsidiaries become profitable and develop in emerging countries?  

ManaGlobal, an ambitious new research project launched in January 2019, will strive to measure the gap between globalized management standards and local day-to-day practices. A central theme of the project will also be to explore hybrid and innovative forms of governance of private companies and enterprises and how they can be shaped by the mobility of people, capital, goods and knowledge.

ManaGlobal is part of the Research and Innovation Staff Exchange programme (RISE) of the European Union. It is receiving  €1.5 million over 4 years through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and Marie Sklodowska-Curie programmes.

The project is being led by Rennes 2 Professor and Member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Societal Innovations (LiRIS) Ulrike Schuerkens, a specialist of social changes, globalization, and glocalized transformations in the South, and in particular sub-saharan Africa.

“I have been working on issues related to social changes, social inequalities and transformations, particularly in the wake of globalization for some time now. A few years ago, this work led me to start a research project that incorporated more of an economic dimension. […] When I began to look more closely at RISE projects, I thought it was a good opportunity to get started.”

The research project will also analyze how “traditional” local business practices, often perceived as obstacles to development, can be transformed into opportunities.

“There is a certain world image of a global management style, which you can often find in business schools for example, that has been conveyed to the south. But it’s not adapted to the local cultures that are often based on mutual assistance, such as that one can find in families or ethnic groups. We would like to know how successful local entrepreneurs help their employees to understand the need to combine the two: the globalized discourse and the localised practices.”

By bringing together sixteen partner organizations in different European, African and Arab countries, ManaGlobal is also innovative and pioneering in the collaborations it has set up. It relies on a network of African, Arab and European academics and practitioners, as well as business leaders, managers and institutional decision-makers.

The first three participants from Senegal have recently arrived on the Rennes 2 campus: Mbaye Sar, Manager at the Confédération nationale des employeurs du Sénégal; Aissatou Coulibaly, Researcher and Doctoral student at the Afi Business School; and Moustapha Seye, Researcher at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop.

A Kick-off meeting for the project was held on 21-22 February in Rennes 2, and was open to consortium participants from France, Great Britain, Germany, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, Cameroon and the United Arab Emirates.

To learn more about the ManaGlobal project (events, news, related publications, work package plans, participating institutions, etc.), please see the project’s blog. You can also follow the project’s news through their twitter feed.