The application of Western management to the development of a management education programme in Bahrain
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Abstract
Management education and development are recognised as
highly problematic in advanced industrial societies
that have a relatively long tradition of management
theory and practice. Problems of developing managerial
competence become all the more acute in non-Western
societies that require the transfer of managerial
know-how from external, mainly Western sources.
The focus of this thesis is Continuing Management
Education as a vehicle for Management Development with
special reference to Bahrain as a transitional
society. The investigation serves as a context for
evaluating the transferability of selected Western
Management theories to non-Western *environments.
Special emphasis is placed on the concepts of
leadership, motivation and managerial professionalism,
following a detailed empirical investigation of the
Bahrain management culture at the macro, intermediate
and micro levels. A strategy for Continuing Management
Education is designed within the broader context of
scanning four major management development options
available to Bahrain, namely Westernisation,
Bahrainisation, Japanisation and Pragmatisation. The
latter option is recommended in the light of evidence
generated through a collaborative approach involving an
extensive survey of the management community. The
strategy is applied to Bahrain through evaluating Gulf
Polytechnic's Continuing Management Education Programme
(COMEP) against it and identifying areas where specific
correctives are needed. An explicit attempt is made to
develop some guidelines pertinent to cross-cultural
management theory transfer with special reference to
such variables as specificity of a particular theory,
its level of analysis and its methodological
structure. At a parallel level, an effort is made to
derive pertinent lessons of experience; both in policy
terms and on theoretical grounds, out of the Bahrain
case by way of a series of tentative generalizations
whose applicability extends beyond Bahrain to the Gulf
region, the Middle East and possibly other transitional
societies.
The research is based on a processual-developmental
qualitative methodology and amounts to a managerial
evaluation of a particular body of management theory
and practice. This choice was partly influenced by the
author's duality of roles as researcher and director of
a major institution of higher learning. A future
research agenda is also charted out