TABLE OF CONTENTS Let's begin with a short case in Box 5.6 that gets to the heart of some of the problems of developing managers for an international role, either at home or abroad.
A study by Reiss and Ones (1995) showed that the attempts to internationalize US undergraduate and graduate courses by including substantial information about the global environment and cross-cultural differences in a business context may have backfired! The headline findings were that:
Ethnocentric attitudes, as measured by standard questionnaire studies, increased during the period of the course.
Most significant increase in ethnocentrism occurred when taught by US faculty members.
'International' faculty members, who had been recruited specifically to provide an international perspective, were associated with neither an increase nor a decrease of the subsequent ethnocentricism of these students.
This study showed that the conventional solution of education and training may not produce the intended outcomes that, to revert to our original question at the beginning of the chapter, are to reduce the liability of foreignness. I have suggested that this means developing a global mindset, sometimes translated into 'thinking global but acting local'. However, this is not an easy skill to develop, given the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of the problem, because it attempts to link abstract issues such as global competition and outlook with concrete issues of 'place'. Moreover, as Lorbiecki (1997) points out, acting local usually assumes some kind...
