BOOK REVIEWS

Through the Academic Looking Glass: A Critical View Reviewed by Abdul Rasheed

International Business Education Development Zafar U. Ahmed, Ed., The Haworth Press, London-New York, 1996 International Business Teaching Erdener Kaynak, Ed., The Haworth Press, London-New York, 1996

The internationalization of the business curriculum has become one of the most compelling concerns of business educators in the US and abroad in the 1990s. This is clearly a result of the rapid globaliza- tion of the business environment. The process of globalization is manifested through the increasingly free movement of goods, ser- vices, capital, people, and information across borders as well as the emergence of the stateless corporation. These developments have left the business schools with the challenge of designing programs that can truly prepare the global managers of tomorrow. The response of the business schools has been essentially a trial and error process, often ad hoc in conceptualization and arbitrary in implementation. The two books under review attempt to address various aspects of the challenges involved in internationalizing business schools and provide guidance to those who are involved in this effort. Both these

Abdul Rasheed is with the Department of Management, College of Business Administration, Box 19467, University of lkms at Arlington, Arlington, lX 76019. e-mail: abdul@uta.edu

Thunderbird International Business Review, Vol. 40(3) 333-337 (May/June 1998) 0 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 1096-4762/98/030333-05

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books appeared first as focussed issues of the Journal of Dansna- tional Management Development.

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS EDUCATION DEVELOPMEm, ZAFAR U. AHMED, ED.

International Business Education Development, edited by Zafar U. Ahmed, consists of five chapters that discuss issues associated with developing an international business curriculum. Four of the five chapters are detailed case studies of what individual schools have done to internationalize their business programs. The authors of the opening article, Syed Akhther and Zafar Ahmed, describe how their schools, Marquette and Minot State, respectively, have implemented the internationalization of their curriculum. In another case study, May and May explain how the School of Business at the University of South Dakota has implemented their internationalization pro- gram. This chapter serves as an excellent road map of what a school can do to internationalize despite constrained resources and isolat- ed geographical location. The final chapter, by Ser et al., suggests that efforts at internationalization are not confined to the US alone by describing what has been done at Nanyang Technological Uni- versity (Singapore) in this regard. The detailed course requirements and catalog description they provide, while useful, end up consum- ing multiple pages without necessarily providing commensurate value.

Hobson and Josiam’s chapter focuses on the Hospitality and Tourism (H&T) curriculum by studying the Hotel Management School Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands. The authors make a strong case for internationalizing the H&T curriculum considering that while it is one of the most international of industries, efforts at in- ternationalizing the H&T curriculum have lagged behind that of the business schools. The chapter also describes the various approaches adopted by different universities in this regard. It is unclear, how- ever, why any particular school was chosen as the subject of this study. A possible reason may be to alert the readers that US-based programs may have actually fallen behind their European counter- parts. If that indeed is the case, the authors’ call for a radical re- thinking of how the internationalization issue must be handled is timely.

The chapter by Franklin Krohn presents a conceptual exploration of how the international business curriculum of the future will have to change in response to the 10 major world trends identified by Naisbitt and Aburdene (1990). The chapter, although thought pro-

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voking, does not easily fit in with the rest of the book. It also suffers from some basic shortcomings. First, Naisbitt and Aburdene are not the only ones to have tried to identify trends of the future. Second, seven years after their predictions appeared, there is a need to as- sess their accuracy in light of subsequent developments. Finally, even if a trend like religious revival is actually valid, it is debatable whether business schools are doing the right thing by including chanting and tarot cards in their curriculum! Business schools should certainly respond to major environmental developments but should also resist the temptation to accommodate every passing fad. Further, many of the trends discussed may have implications for business schools in general, but have no particular international di- mension that requires accommodation within the international business curriculum.

While it is important to acknowledge the contribution of the book to familiarizing the readers with internationalization efforts at sev- eral schools, it leaves many questions unanswered. First, the gener- al audience is not particularly interested in what a specific school does as much as in understanding the best practices in the field so that they can adopt them or adapt them to their individual schools. It is not clear what criteria were used in choosing the five institu- tions discussed in this book. An alternative approach would have been to identify five or six leading-edge programs and analyze them along significant common dimensions in order to identify what made these programs the premier ones in the field. Second, descriptions of programs are not followed by any effort to evaluate them according to some performance criteria. In spite of these limitations, the book does make some valuable contributions. It is particularly useful for those institutions with modest resources or located in geographical- ly isolated towns.

I N T E R " A L BUSINESS TEACHING, ERDENER KAXNAK, ED.

The second book, International Business Teaching, edited by Erden- er Kaynak, contains five chapters encompassing a wide variety of topics related to teaching in the international business area. In the first chapter, Marca Bear and Riad Ajami attempt to evaluate the ef- ficacy of international business teaching by assessing undergradu- ate students' retention and understanding of business lexicon. While it is questionable whether understanding of terminology constitutes a meaningful indicator of the success of the internationalization of a business program, their empirical study is a much needed first step

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in developing evaluative tools that can be used across institutions. The chapter by Khosrow Fatemi develops a multidimensional ap- proach to the internationalization of business programs. These di- mensions are curriculum, faculty, research, students, and exposure. The multidimensional approach proposed in this chapter is a useful framework for evaluating the progress made by business schools in internationalizing their programs.

The chapter by Harvey Arbalaez discusses various academic link- ages among Latin American business schools. Alliances among aca- demic institutions is not a new phenomenon. However, the interna- tionalization of business in recent years has led to an increase in cooperative institutional linkages among universities as well. Al- though the chapter provides considerable new information on al- liance strategies of Latin American schools, it fails to stay within the scope of the chapter by proposing generic vision and mission state- ments for Latin American schools.

The chapter by Gary Gregory, Brian Buckler, and Patrick Okonkwo discusses issues of transferring marketing education to sub-Saharan Africa. The value of this chapter goes beyond shedding light on a region that remains largely unknown to Western mar- keters and marketing educators. The program development model that the authors develop is in fact a general model, applicable to transfer of knowledge from a developed to a less developed society. The authors’ delineation of the different roles of the educator in a de- veloping society-namely, lecturer, trainer, facilitator, problem solver, and indigenous developer-should help those individuals who undertake such teaching missions to clearly understand their roles and attendant resource requirements. The final chapter by Daniel LeClair does a good job of discussing the possibilities for interna- tionalizing the economics curriculum but is thoroughly unconvincing in its basic thesis that repackaging the economics curriculum in terms of economics of organization and management (EOM) and game theory would actually accomplish this.

A review of these two books raises some basic questions. First, when should a specific issue of a journal be published as a book? One criterion may be to focus on a special topic or issue. Another may be comprehensiveness of coverage of aspects related to an issue. Al- though both these slim volumes cover the broad area of internation- alization of business schools, neither seems to be characterized by thematic consistency, comprehensiveness of coverage, or focus on specific issues. Internationalizing the economics curriculum and linkages among Latin American schools, although individually in- teresting, are topics too unrelated to be part of an edited volume with only five chapters. Alternate approaches could have been to focus on

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functional areas (such as economics, marketing, and HR) or to focus on geographic regions (such as Latin America and Europe). Mixing these approaches results in a product which, while giving the read- er a flavor for many different topics, fails to provide in depth un- derstanding of any. Second, what is the role of an editor in an edit- ed volume? The approach followed in both these books may be characterized as “passive” in the sense that the editor compiles a small number of articles that appeals to him. A more logical alter- native might be to follow a more “active” approach where in the ed- itor develops an overall framework, invites contributions following the framework, and also provides introductory and concluding chap- ters that introduce and evaluate the field. The lack of thematic con- sistency and the passive roles played by the editors in these two books limit their ability to realize their potential.