International Business in Academia: The State of the Field
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* These are interesting and difficulttimes in internationalbusiness and interna- INTRODUCTION tional transactions. This talk is presumptuously titled, "InternationalBusiness in Academia: The State of the Field."Ithas forced me to organize my thoughts about the Academy of InternationalBusiness and the "field"of internationalbusiness. These are personal views, and certainly not universally shared. At yesterday's "Fellow's Panel," Jack Behrman and Phillip Grub sparked a discussion which I found familiar,disturbing, partially correct, and substantially unsolvable-but interesting and useful. Ichoose to join this discussion. Let me presume to summarize the concerns, which may apply to business/ management education generally. AUIBand its successor, AIB, were organized as a departure or reaction to the excessive rigorin internationaleconomics and its esoteric theorizing from perfectcompetition assumptions. Inthat abstract realm, no decisions need be made. AIB was formed to emphasize the policy (decision making) of governments and business. Now, with our own over-emphasis on research technique and neglect of understanding the problem and its context, internationalbusiness has caught the disease of irrelevant esotericism, tunnel vision, and technique for the sake of technique-in other words, we are about to succumb to rigor mortis, just as economics has done. We don't want to be irrelevant, do we? Ininternationalbusiness, and in business education programs generally, students are not adequately prepared: for communicating (advocating) effectively; for knowing the "fundamentals" upon which more learning may be built;fortheirfirst jobs; for long-term success; for the computer/information revolution; for an integrative position with a long-term view. They are trained in skills and techniques which quickly are obsolete, never used, or inappropriatefor quick decision making under uncertainty.They do not know how business (orgovernment) works -in other words, they have no experience. Thus, why should businesses hire MBAsor business BSs just to retrainor untrain? This criticism comes from businessmen, fromelder statesmen in the AIB,and, of course, from people who do not publish in scholarly journals and are concerned with practical (useful) skills and knowledge. A corollary to the above relates to publication, to the fact that academics insist that we must publish frequently, in scholarly journals, as a criterionfor success. This biases our activities away from real understanding of internationalbusiness to a focus on the narrow application of technique on readily available data. It detracts from the application of the scientific method to the solution of business Business during1983-84,is *RobertG. Hawkins,whowas Presidentof the Academyof International currentlyDean of the Schoolof Managementat RensselaerPolytechnicInstitute.He was formerly Businessat NewYorkUniversityforseveralyears andserved ProfessorandChairmanof International at NewYorkUniversityfrom1980until1984. as Vice-Deanof the Facultyof BusinessAdministration
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