The Regent’s Centre for Transnational Business and Management (RCTBM) promotes quality research and scholarship that benefits students, researchers and the wider community beyond Regent’s University London. The centre was initially named Regent’s Centre for Transnational Studies.
About the RCTBM
RCTBM focuses on the transnational phenomena cutting across disciplinary boundaries of Business and Management, Economics and Social Sciences. The centre promotes advanced interdisciplinary research and teaching across a broad range of fields in social and management sciences. Transnational is a key concept appropriate to facilitate in the understanding and explanation of today’s societies and organisations which are ever more connected. Transnational links and practices create a transnational space which gains increasing importance as cross border transfers and mobility of goods, finances and people grow.
The centre’s research focuses on several multi-disciplinary areas, broadly defined as:
- Human mobility: incorporating labour markets, human resource and diversity management, acculturation and integration, refugees, asylum seekers, migration governance
- Capital mobility: incorporating transnational banking, finance, remittances, money transfers and development
- Mobility of goods and services: incorporating transnational marketing, consumer behaviour, tourism studies, Islamic marketing, luxury brands and marketing
- Transnational education and culture: incorporating cultural heritage studies and cross border higher education.
The centre also welcomes work crosscutting these areas such as research ethics, ethical business practices, and methodological innovations.
RCTBM members carry out research and consultancy work in these fields, deliver lectures and seminars and organise events to foster research and scholarship in cognate areas. The Centre also hosts Regent’s PhD students supervised in these specific areas. Current PhD student profiles can be seen here.
Why Transnational?
The concept of transnational is key in understanding the fast-moving, diverse and connected societies and organisations today. Ubiquitous links bring together organisations and people in a Transnational place of enactment while these connections are becoming increasingly important. At Regent’s Centre for Transnational Business and Management, we focus on cross border transfers and the mobility of goods, finances and people.
The concept refers to the state of affairs in many areas but particularly in businesses and governance that we have to build and integrate globally to benefit from the connections, networks, synergies while also acknowledge the presence and power of the national and local that leads to client satisfaction and success in different markets.
Against the rise of and then growing critique of globalisation in the 1980s, from the 1990s onwards, the one size fits all approach has gradually left its place to a more nuanced one which was later expressed as glocal. Glocal is the practical equivalent of what we would call transnational in academia. It transcends what is local without overlooking the importance and influences of global processes and their interaction with the local and national.
Scope of Transnational Business and Management
Although earlier literature on transnational concentrated in other social science disciplines such as Geography, it is increasingly more relevant to business and management as well as higher education as mobile student populations in the world grew significantly in the last two decades.
Sirkeci (2013) has expanded the scholarship on transnational business and management into marketing and consumer behaviour where he came up with the concept of “transnational mobile consumer” which is pointing out the impact of transnational mobility and repercussions on the ways in which we buy and consume. In Transnational Marketing and Transnational Consumers (2013, Springer), it reads, “although transnationalism and transnational research is very well established in other social science disciplines, Transnational Marketing is a new and understudied field. The limited literature exists mostly deals with legal and contractual or cultural aspects. However, there are very few studies and no dedicated research institutions focusing on transnational aspects of marketing. The textbooks tend to mention it as part of internationalization but often without much scholarship behind it. Nevertheless, there are transnational companies, organisations and business practices as well as consumer practices and consumption patterns. Multinational organisations display examples for ‘transnationalisation’.”