Teaching Entrepreneurship: The Role of Liberal Arts Institutions

Entrepreneurship has been recognized as one of the most effective engines for sustainable economic growth and development. To be an entrepreneur requires certain individual attributes that go beyond mastering the managerial and financial tools necessary for running a business. Unfortunately, whether as a stand-alone course or as a complete program of study, entrepreneurship has in general been placed under the management or business programs at many leading educational institutions in the U.S. and other countries. Furthermore, the structure and content of entrepreneurship programs have in general been transposed into other regions including the MENA countries without any significant adaptation to the local sociocultural and economic environment. In this paper, it is argued that liberal arts institutions are uniquely positioned to develop and implement a holistic, multifunctional approach in teaching entrepreneurship, and in developing and implementing context-specific entrepreneurship programs that build on student motivation, community engagement, as well as local and global institutional networks. We survey the structure of entrepreneurship programs in a number of U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, and propose ways in which liberal arts institutions in the region can leverage their unique mission and roles in developing human capital for the purpose of furthering entrepreneurship education and subsequently entrepreneurship-driven socio-economic development

Regional Trade Agreements as Structural Networks: Implications for Foreign Direct Investment Decisions

The last few decades have witnessed a proliferation of preferential trade agreements and regional trading blocks. Yet little research has been done to integrate trading block considerations into country attractiveness and foreign direct investment decisions. In this paper, we show how network analysis can be used to study, track, and forecast the structural changes among countries in regional trade agreements. Using intra-regional trade data, we analyze the overall trade structure and the relative positions of countries belonging to the European Union. The results show that certain countries offer better opportunities for within-EU market penetration than do others. Our approach provides managers with additional criteria for evaluating country attractiveness, therefore, allowing for more comprehensive and informed FDI decisions to be made

Educational Attainment and Career Success in the GCC: Does Gender Matter?

Extensive literature on labor markets has supported the proposition that gender is one of the most common attributes that explains disparity in wages, benefits, promotion, and other organizational achievement indicators. According to several scholars, work organizations can be treated as arenas on which social conflicts between different groups of employees take place. Many acknowledge that women in the GCC area have made great strides in achieving near-equality when it comes to educational attainment. In fact, recent studies by the World Bank and other regional and international agencies have shown that women in a number of GCC countries now constitute a significant percentage of university graduates. The increase in the number of private universities in the Gulf has further allowed women to claim a larger share of the region’s labor market. However, such successes may not have extended from the educational to the labor domain. Much of the existing literature exploring barriers and facilitators to women’s career advancement has focused on identifying the personal qualities and characteristics that are associated with career success. In this paper, we focus on educational attainment as the main predictor of career success. We argue that in the case of the GCC region, little research has looked at the different impacts of educational attainment on career advancement for men and women. This is especially disconcerting considering the monumental changes in the role of women as participants in educational and labor spheres in the region. We employ survey methodology to collect data on educational and career attainments in the GCC countries for both men and women, and discuss the implications of our analysis and results for higher education professionals and policy makers

Attachment Styles and Parasocial Relationships: A Collectivist Society Perspective

In this study we investigate parasocial relationships in media; more specifically we explore why audience members fashion attachments with television personalities. The study aligns with previous research in the area by Cole and Leets (1999) that looked at attachments formed with media figures and the correlation to level of attachments in real-life relationships. In their study, Cole and Leets (1999) used a three-dimensional attachment scale that included anxious-ambivalent, avoidant, and secure, and found those with higher insecurity or unstable real-life relationships have stronger parasocial relationships. We surveyed university age respondents and we used the same scales as Cole and Leets (1999) to examine whether in Kuwait, where dating violates social norms and looser bonds are found outside of the home, that stronger parasocial relationships with media personalities will be found because of the need to fulfill relationship needs outside of family. Our hypotheses in this chapter is that higher levels of anxious-ambivalents and avoidants both will be found due to the strict collectivist nature of the society forcing many to compensate for lack of real world relationships by forming mediated bonds. Moreover, we posited and discovered that that these two groups also showed the highest levels of parasocial relationships in our sample

The Impact of Ethical Concerns on Fashion Consumerism: Case-based Evidence

In continuation of our previous work, “The Impact of Ethical Concerns on Fashion Consumerism: A Review,” we present here empirically based reports to support our argument that ethical concerns in the fashion industry affect consumer behavior. In line with Paper I, the initial paper of this series, we address the concept of ethical marketing, with a focus on the two dimensions of sustainable environmental practices and societally appropriate messaging. The linkages of ethical concerns in fashion with corporate image and financial performance are explored, using a set of 15 real-life cases and anecdotes. We identify challenges in this area, offer guidance to practitioners in the field, and identify venues for further scholarly inquiry. We hope to contribute in this important and growing area of concern by presenting prior controversies and highlighting best practices, thus facilitating the process of learning through others’ failures and successes

The Impact of Ethical Concerns on Fashion Consumerism: A Review

Ethical and sustainable business practices have become some of the most significant concerns in the highly globalized fashion industry. Firms in this multi-billion dollar industry are taking these concerns seriously, and are carefully monitoring and responding to consumers’ actions that can range from expressing displeasure via social media to holding protests or even calling for boycotts of certain brands and firms. In this paper, the first output from a larger project on ethics of fashion, we review the extant literature on the ethical aspects of the global fashion system; and set the stage for further empirical and conceptual work

Human capital, social capital, and innovation: a multi-country study

We examine the effects of two forms of capital, i.e. human capital and social capital, on innovation at the country level. We use secondary data from the World Development Report on a country’s overall human development to test for a relationship between human capital and innovation. We also use previous conceptualisations of social capital as comprising trust, associational activity, and norms of civic behaviour to test for relationships between these indicators of social capital and innovation using data from the World Values Survey. Unlike most previous studies that examined human and social capital within a given country, we develop and empirically test a theoretically grounded model that relates human and social capital to innovation at the societal level across 59 different countries, thus providing a more global view of the role of these two forms of capital in generating value. We find strong support for the positive relationship between human capital and innovation and partial support for the positive effect of trust and associational activity on innovation. However, contrary to our prediction, we find a negative relationship between norms of civic behaviour and one of our innovation measures