education and business in the 21st century era of globalization is highlighted by challenges: the successful B-schools will need to ensure an adequate resources to concretize their missions and afford qualified faculty, adequately funded doctoral research programmes in management, to globalize faculty, student body (to train them to be responsible leaders) and their curricula (in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary areas) (Cornuel, 2007). (6) The multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary nature in global business knowledge needs is explained by Lehmann (2008): (1) Twenty-first century global business is no longer a Western-dominated playing field - and will become less and less so - the growing business ties that bind them in what is referred to as the “New Silk Road�; (2) until recently, European and U.S. business executives needed basic business skills (such as marketing, finance), but now they must be well equipped with broad four attributes: business acumen (to cover business activities in non-Western markets: China, India and the Arab world), global knowledge, an ethical compass and committed citizenship. Regional projects in higher education are becoming much more politically influential than their global counterparts because the major strategic purchase occurs at the levels of regions, but still educational regionalism cannot be disentangled from the phenomenon of globalization. The EU is a pioneering regional integration process and currently one of the most advanced, where the Bologna Process is associated with the EU (but it goes beyond the EU’s geographical scope). Higher education regionalisation processes are clearly affected by the regions themselves in their efforts to enhance their global competitiveness (Vergera & Hermo, 2010). While these challenges are common to B-schools worldwide, great concerns exist in Europe for the declining level of its higher education offerings. The great discrepancy in resources available to European universities, when compared to those of its competitors may offer some insight into this decline: European B-schools are finding themselves unable to recruit the same quality of researchers and faculty as those of the USA, spend less in research programmes, and are smaller in size, often struggling to provide good offerings in the competitive market of higher education. Those taught at business schools are notoriously Americacentred, and only around a third of those published deal with an issue outside of America. (Economist, Sep., 2011). European B-schools have realized that the business education market will become increasingly competitive. More providers, new methods, creative strategies, global opportunities will provide a varied choice to students across the world (Cornuel, 2007). That is why the most competitive B-schools are looking for benchmarking opportunities, quality improvement programmes that gain a thorough understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, to develop better programmes, and to prove the level of their offerings through accreditations. When the European Council met in Lisbon in March 2000, it identified as one of the central targets of turning the European Union into the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by the year 2010 with an emphasis on the construction of a common European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which constitutes a decisive step in the commercialization of higher education, and quality assurance has a central role to play (Perellon, 2005). According to Serrano-Velarder & Stensaker (2010), a) quality assurance became a key policy issue with the Bologna process; b) a national systems of external quality assurance of higher education have been established in the European countries since 1999 (in the form of audits, accreditations or assessments); and c) institutional autonomy have been strengthened to enhance the entrepreneurial and innovative dimensions of universities. Apart from the fact that the Bologna Process is implemented quite differently across countries, weakening its harmonising or convergence effects, parallel to it, divergent trends can be observed (Marginson & van der Wende, 2006), especially in the case within countries. Examples are Germany and France; where there is an increased diversity occur due to the parallel existence of different degree structures in the transition phase, and the increased curricular autonomy of HEIs (Witte, 2006). This paper focuses on the international accreditation of B-schools, one of the key trends on global and regional markets. The main question of this paper is why and how this process progresses globally as well as
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