Functional Areas in Improving Depth of IB Teaching

Abstract

As any senior executive or a corporate board member will tell you, business, perhaps to its discredit, does not separate itself neatly into finance or marketing or another single functional discipline as taught in most business schools. However, we must teach individual disciplines to facilitate in-depth understanding of business. But then, we need to integrate these individual disciplines into a wholistic view and understanding of business and business decision-making. Generally, most business schools struggle with such integration and few are satisfied with their efforts. Strategic business problems, such as competitive response, by their nature are integrative. Further, many within discipline problems and responses to them have cross-disciplinary impacts. So, business decision-making must take a holistic view of business. In the case of international business this holistic view must also account for cross-border effects including national differences in political and economic institutions, nature of laws and their enforcement, languages, and cultures. International business should be and is integrative in nature. The unique contribution of the IB discipline resides in two sets of activities: 1) observing complex interacting issues to define phenomena that affect business activities in the international context and 2) integrating different discipline-based theories to extend the understanding of these phenomena (Zettinig and Vincze 2008, 2011). IB education can offer students a total enterprise perspective grounded in a global environment (Peng 2004). To achieve this outcome, students should have suffiecent knowledge in multiple business disciplines in order to form a valid wholistic enterprise perspective. In addition, students and faculty need to understand the complexity of the international environment (Aggarwal 1989). For example, Leonidou and Kaminarides (2007) propose three levels of factors that comprise the global marketing environment, including macro factors such as physical and sociocultural, meso factors such as economic and political-legal, and micro factors such as competitors and customers. As a result, effective IB teaching involves