INTERNATIONAL ISSUESROBERT E. MARKLAND, Feature Editor, College of Business Administration, University of South Carolina INTERNATIONAL PEDAGOGYby Roger W. Schmenner, School of Business, Indiana University There are fewer and fewer excuses these days for not including international materials in your courses, even if those courses are not international business courses. In the last 35 years, the percent of U.S. Gross National Product accounted for by exports doubled to 10.5%. The international tribulations of the dollar and the discussions of industrial policy across countries leaves it clear that one cannot teach a subject like operations management, or any other business subject, from a purely domestic point of view. As I see it, students deserve to have the various subjects in their curriculum taught from an international perspective, so that they feel "natural" about the global aspects of business, right from the start. At two of the truly international business schools in the world, namely IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, there are no courses strictly labeled International Business or International Marketing. There are simply courses in Finance, or Marketing, for which the materials and the point of view are consistently international in character. Naturally, students at these institutions benefit from the fact that there is no dominant country represented in any of their courses or even with their instructors. Everyone is a minority and the shared learning in such an environment can be very rewarding. On the other hand, schools in the United States cannot offer an environment other than one dominated by American culture. Even so, one can try to infuse into the curriculum materials, case studies, and points of view that represent a diverse international environment. Professors may balk because they do not see themselves as experts in international business, and, clearly, no one can be expected to master all the idiosyncrasies that afflict managers operating in an international environment. Is this, then, a hurdle that one cannot hope to clear? I think not. The saving grace is that what truly counts is not what we professors know, or say, in the classroom, but what students learn. Thus, the key element is to provide learning situations for students that will enable them to become more familiar with operating in an international environment. Providing international materials in a course makes the students think about global things in a way that becomes second nature. There are a variety of resources that can help an instructor gradually become more familiar with the international aspects of his/her field. Among the resources are the 25 CIBERS (Centers for International Business Education and Research) scattered throughout the country. Each of these CIBERS is charged with outreach to schools and are evaluated, in part, by the extent to which they have provided effective outreach. Exploit them. As of 1995, here is a list of the 25 CIBERS: Utah: C. Brooklyn Derr, Co-Director, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, 801-585-3360; BYU: Lee Radebaugh, Co-Director, Brigham Young University, 801-378-6495 Paul Van Orden, Executive Director, The Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, Columbia University Business School, 212-854-8958 Yair Aharoni, Director, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 919-660-7818 Stanley Nollen, Director, School of Business, Georgetown University, 202-687-3826 John R. McIntyre, Director, School of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, 404-894-1463 John Daniels and Roger Schmenner, Directors, School of Business, Indiana University, 812-855-1716 S. Tamer Cavusgil, Executive Director, The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management, Michigan State University, 517-353-4336 Marie Thursby, Director, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, 317-494-4463 Alvord G. Branan, Co-Director, San Diego State University, 619-594-6023 Kerry Cooper, Executive Director, College of Business Administration, Texas A&M University, 409-845-5234 David A. Ricks, Director, American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), 602-978-7011 Jose de la Torre, Director, John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA, 310-825-4507 Albert Madansky, Director, Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago, 312-702-7288 Donald L. Stevens, Director, Colorado University-Denver, 303-556-4738 David McClain, Co-Director, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 808-956-2875 Peter Schran, Director, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217-244-0951 Lee. E. Preston, Director, College of Business and Management, University of Maryland, 301-405-2136 Ben Kedia, Director, Wang Center for International Business, The University of Memphis, 901-678-2038 Brad Farnsworth, Director, School of Business Administration, The University of Michigan, 313-936-3917 Rich Bettis, Director, Kenan-Flagler Business School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 919-962-8201 Andrew Blair, Director, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, 412-648-1509 William R. Folks, Jr., Director, College of Business Administration, University of South Carolina, 803-777-3600 Richard Drobnick, Director, School of Business Administration, University of Southern California, 213-740-7135 Robert T. Green, Director, Graduate School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 512-471-5155 Gerhard G. Mueller, Executive Director, University of Washington, 206-543-4750 The CIBERS often have a wealth of information that can be easily accessed. One way to make use of the CIBERS is to use the newly installed CIBERweb that has been established by the Purdue University CIBER (see Exhibit 1). The Purdue University CIBER can be accessed by Mosaic or Netscape as follows: http://raider.mgmt.purdue.edu/ Centers/CIBER/ciber.htm The Indiana University CIBER is one that takes pride in its contributions to international pedagogy. A number of their pedagogy initiatives follow.
Roger W. Schmenner is a Professor of Operations Management at the Indiana University School of Business in Indianapolis. His research interests within the field include manufacturing strategy, factory productivity, and manufacturing and service operations location. He is the author of the textbook, Production/Operations Management: From the Inside Out (Macmillan, 5th edition, 1993); the editor of the casebook, Cases in Production/Operations Management (Macmillan, 1986); and the author of Plant and Service Tours in Operations Management (Macmillan, 4th edition, 1994) and of Service Operations Management (Prentice Hall, 1995). He has written over 70 published articles, book chapters, and cases. His book, Making Business Location Decisions (Prentice-Hall, 1982), is a compendium of much of his stream of research on industry location. Schmenner's international research has focused on (1) international factory productivity using data from Europe, Korea, and the United States, and on (2) Pan-European manufacturing strategies, especially in the wake of the Single Market initiative. Mr. Schmenner has a diverse range of consulting and corporate teaching experience, involving over 60 companies, several industry groups, and more than a dozen federal, state, and local government agencies or departments. He has worked with 12 European companies, either in consulting or corporate teaching assignments. Schmenner holds an A.B. degree from Princeton (1969) and a Ph.D. from Yale (1973) in economics. He lives in Carmel, Indiana, with his wife, Barbara, and their two sons.
Dr. Robert E. Markland
|