Contributing to an International Business Curriculum: An Approach from the Flank
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JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONALBUSINESS STUDIES, SECOND QUARTER 1994
foreign countries, to respond to the needs of students who planned to spend their business lives in Argentina or Nigeria or India or Japan. If I had come up from the ranks at the Harvard Business School, I might have known that all of these problems had been touched on by one member or another of the faculty in years gone by. I could hardly have failed, for instance, to have been exposed to the work of Steve Fuller, Harry Hansen and John Fayerweather, among others. But that familiarity developed too late to shape the priorities that I eventually set for myself. I soon came to the conclusion that the choices were mine, that my colleagues would take anything I had to offer. However, I had been well conditioned by bureaucratic struggles in other institutions over a quarter century. So I was not so naive as to assume thatthe toleranceof my colleagues represented an affinnation of the importanceof my mission. Where resourcesare plentiful, there is no great incentive for a territorialstruggle; so tolerance could not be interpreted as enthusiastic consent. Besides, I thought I sensed anotherelement in their response, a manifestation of the same propensity that led the Chinese to call their ancient empire the Middle Kingdom and of American mapmakers to draw the world map with North America at its center. Most of my colleagues, according to my interpretation,were sufficiently taken with the power of theirrespective specialties to believe that its principles were valid throughout the business universe, irrespective of the diverse conditions offered around the globe. Indeed, as one or two expressed it, only those concepts that had certifiable validity under all conditions, such as the concepts of substitution elasticity, a linear program, or a prisoner's dilemma, represented a legitimate part of their curriculum.If the concepts they were teaching needed a little supplementing in order to be applied to the circumstances of Japan or China, that activity could be left largely to sociologists or to instructorsin internationalbusiness. Presiding over the internationalarea, therefore, my job was simply to place a little gilt on the verdantlilies thatalreadyflourishedin thebusinesscurriculum. To understand these views, one has to recall the conditions of 1959. For one thing, foreign markets and foreign competitors did not yet play the critical role in the existence of U.S.-based enterprises that they occupy today. For another, the world was viewing American business at the time as the most advanced and invulnerable of institutions, the model to be emulated. To be sure, the elite of America, not least the faculty of the HarvardBusiness School, were a well-travelled lot, with considerableexposure to foreign environments. Indeed, some members of the HBS faculty and other business schools were already devoting th
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