Lacking Entrepreneurship and Small Business Thrust in Business Education in Developing Countries: Case of Bangladesh

Purpose: Business Education is everywhere. But is business and management education modeled mostly in the North American model or corporate business model, suited for a developing country like Bangladesh, where most of the businesses are small businesses? Who teaches what to whom for whom, using what resources, and following what approaches? Is the need for entrepreneurial and small firms being fulfilled by current business education and management graduates? If not, what to improve? Where to start? This article explores these issues and draws a concrete scenario of business education in a developing country like Bangladesh.   Methods: This is an ethnographic reflection of eighteen years of corporate and academic experience. The author consolidates experiences from 'direct observant participation' including observations coming through continuous interactions with other stakeholders. Thus, the 'going native' syndrome has been minimized through peer validation from both industry and academic professionals.  Results: Business education has a gap or mismatch in expectation and orientation. Teachers are recruited fresh out of universities without any exposure to the industry. Research and journal articles by faculties are hardly relevant and read by industry practitioners. Textbooks are foreign, mostly North American, or copycat translations. Graduates are blindly taught theories, and examples of multinationals. Business schools are nurturing this corporate blindness without any homegrown exercise or comprehensive local need analysis. So, industry, particularly, huge and varied SME sectors are not getting 'person-job' fit management graduates with realistic orientation. All know some of it for sure but none knows the entirety. So, the paper also made actionable propositions for all stakeholders - who could do what from their respective positions. Implications: Current situation of business education in a developing country like Bangladesh is analyzed in detail. To initiate improvement in a meaningful way, all should have a starting big picture consolidation or situation analysis, on which a broad consensus can be developed, and synergistic progress can be made. This study consolidates that big picture of business and management education in one place, and it can be used one of those springboards from where stakeholders can take away their imperatives, and also work in collaboration with other actors. Originality: All issues are partly known and discussed partly, in a range of papers, seminars, and dialogues. But consolidation in one place, drawing a summary of all actors and stakeholders, along with the context they operate, is rare. This paper attempts to do that

Real Estate Industry in Chittagong (Bangladesh): A Survey on Customer Perception and Expectation

Bangladesh is an over populated country and day by day population is increasing rapidly which created the housing problem. Land prices skyrocketed. Due to high price, insufficiency of land, high cost of land registration, and high price of building materials, people are now not interested to buy a land for building their own house. This article shows the customer perception and expectation in different dimensions - budget, types of apartment, size of apartment, favorable location in Chittagong city, favorable facility in an apartment, factors related to purchase decision, factors in selecting developer company, how customers determine about quality, company brand selection, desired services from a particular company, preference between apartment and land, the risk factors perceived by the customers. Geographically, this study focuses on the Chittagong, and can be considered as a little contribution to the understanding of the real estate industry, particularly in Chittagong and particularly from the customer perspective. But the findings may be relevant for other cities also. Real estate companies and developers can take these factors into consideration while making their business strategy and marketing strategy.  On the other hand, Policy makers can take the customer perception and expectation cited in this study, into consideration while making related regulatory policies and framework. Keywords: Real Estate, Bangladesh, Chittagong, Customer perception and expectatio

Factors Affecting Job Satisfaction in the Tourism Sector of Bangladesh

Purpose: The tourism sector is a very potential sector for Bangladesh in terms of growth and employment. Analyzing the literature, it can be observed that most of the researchers studied the tourist market and the degree of satisfaction of tourists. But job satisfaction as a human resource management concept, in the tourism sector has not been sufficiently investigated. Job satisfaction is particularly important in tourism sector as it is service oriented and people intensive. This study identified the antecedents of job satisfaction in tourism sector and their relative importance to the employees. Methods: The study is quantitative in nature. A number of hypotheses were tested for relationships between job satisfaction and related facets like payment and benefits, advancement and growth, the work itself, leadership, communication, performance feedback and recognition, rewards, colleagues, and employee stress.  Data were collected through a survey method and structured questionnaire from employees of different tourism-related businesses. With 81.8% response rate, a total of 409 error-free response sheets containing a total of 38 independent variables were considered for the analysis through Smart PLS 3.01 software. The hypotheses were tested by following the path coefficients of the factors where job satisfaction was the dependent variable. The model of the satisfaction of employees for Bangladesh was established by using the coefficients of relationship with all nine facets and job satisfaction. Results: The standardized regression weights are shown with the nine factors Payment and Benefit (PB), Advancement and Growth (AG), Work Itself (WI), Work Itself (WI), Leadership (LE), Communication (COM), Performance feedback and Recognition (PFR), Rewards (RE), Colleague (COL) and Stress (STR). It was found that five factors (PB, AG, WI, LE, COM) are relatively more significantly responsible for job satisfaction or dissatisfaction, than other four factors (PFR, RE, COL, STR). It also found that the managerial and non-managerial employees show considerable differences in their job satisfaction across the organizations. Implications: The results found in the study may act as a basis for future research in the HR issues of the tourism sector. The owners and managers of tourism companies should appreciate the necessity of employees being satisfied, because this will lead to greater commitment, loyalty, and quality service to the customers. Originality: Due to the dominance of other factors like machines, materials, and other technologies, there is weak evidence in some cases whether there is always a positive and strong relationship between job satisfaction and firm performance. But in a human intensive service industry like tourism, job satisfaction of employees who are directly responsible for consumer experience, is bound to be a dominant factor. This paper is expected to be cited in that particular idea or context.&nbsp

Citizen Engagement Challenges in Urban Disaster Management Programs with Special Reference to Fire, Waterlogging and Pandemics : Case of Bangladesh

The main objective of this study is to explore the challenges of engaging citizens in urban disaster management (UDM) in the urban fire, waterlogging, and pandemic like COVID 19. A qualitative research approach, mainly in-depth interview method was applied to gain insights from different government officials of civil defense, police force, and ward councilors of Dhaka and Chattogram City Corporations, who were experienced in working at the field level UDM. The study tried to investigate the challenges faced by the officials during disaster rescue operations with special reference to the role of urban citizens. The findings of the study capture, in detail, the challenges faced by different personnel involved in UDM operations. While citizen engagement is expected to be a positive notion, in most cases, citizens themselves become the main obstacle of disaster management, due to their ignorance, negligence, and lack of patience in the given disastrous and pandemic situation, and thus, hinders UDM operations and crisis management. The lessons learned from contemporary urban disasters like fire and the COVID 19 pandemic are recorded elaborately. Based on that, different recommendations are made to ensure the active engagement of citizens to facilitate UDM activities in an orderly manner.  &nbsp

Integration of theory of planned behavior into actual social distancing behavior amid Covid-19

In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most effective way to minimize the COVID risk was maintaining ‘social distancing.’ In places, where vaccinations are still not easily accessible, this is still the most valid preventive measure. This work investigated whether attitude, subjective norm, behavioral control, behavioral intention to social distancing (SD) and actual maintenance of social distancing using the theory of planned behavior framework. The present study applied a deductive reasoning approach to applying the SPSS tool for quantitative techniques. Three hundred thirty-one people participated in a self-administered survey, which was utilized to gather data. The study found significant correlations among attitude to SD, subjective norms, behavioral control of SD, intention to SD and actual social distancing. In logistic regression analysis, behavioral control and intention to social distance profoundly affect the actual use of social distancing except for attitude and subjective norms. Given the data, the TPB model's goodness of fit and accuracy indices based on log-linear ratio, Cox and Snell's and Nagelkerke's R2 is 22.47%, 26.69%, and 35.64%, respectively. The insights generated will help public health policymakers in improving attitudes, subjective norms, and behavioral intentions to enhance social distancing in epidemic crises