The Ascent Of Western Business Ideals In ASEAN Schools – Analysis

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In today’s rapidly urbanising South East Asia, upward career mobility requires a diploma, degree and some form of postgraduate qualification, particularly within desirable publicly listed companies.

However, closer scrutiny of what is taught at these business schools shows a lingering colonial hangover and psychological dependence on Western ideas, an irony in a region where most governments publicly tout their own national values. Business schools stick steadfastly to occidental business curricula.

Business, entrepreneurship and management courses are the fastest growing areas in South East Asian education. Along with ICT, these are the most popular areas within both the private and public higher education sectors. The relatively low overheads and operational costs represent a financial windfall for colleges and universities. Business education has become the cash cow.

What makes these courses financially lucrative is the relatively low cost of teaching resources for basic courses, compared to other disciplines. Very little infrastructure aside from classrooms and lecture theatres is required.

A great number of business schools develop curricula around an array of international edition US-sourced textbooks on offer by major educational publishers strongly competing for business.

Consequently many regional business schools are bureaucratic diploma factories based upon single-textbook unit courses, oriented around exams that at best measure memory and retention rather than creativity and the potential of the student to be innovative.

To cap it all, these schools are burdened with quality assurance processes at administrative and teaching levels. Given the considerable time commitment needed to adhere to these processes, mediocrity is ensured.

The leaders and lecturers have a preference for the imported hype of management gurus who are popular in the media, even if these positivist instruments are not directly suited to the different contexts and varied business situations within the local environment. Local academics educated in the Western paradigm locally or abroad are mesmerised by international management gurus.

Little debate

There is little debate about the fit between Western management thinking and the make-up and behaviour of local corporations, entrepreneurs and the general environment. As a consequence, the relevance of many theories has been accepted without question.

For example, in the theory area, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is accepted into the management curriculum, where there may be many other, more suitable, theories and meta-theories that could be advanced. And in the contextual area, the legal system, the supply chain, where the emphasis on particular marketing tools should lie, interrelationships between people – which could all be described as “the way of doing things” – make applying Western management theory challenging, to say the least.

The preference for the latest popular management knowledge often leads to misinterpretation, as few management and entrepreneur instructors actually have much first-hand business experience. Thus rigid interpretations of management still influence entrepreneurship courses.

Many entrepreneurship courses advocate market research through focus groups, which are not suited to new products in developing markets. Business plans are almost always at the core of any curriculum, despite little evidence that planning leads to success in entrepreneurship.

Misconceptions

Furthermore, business schools base much of the curriculum upon general misconceptions that both the media and imported textbooks have evolved over the past 15 to 20 years.

Entrepreneurship has been glorified by media stories, biographies of successful entrepreneurs, and events like ‘entrepreneurship weeks’, ‘business plan competitions’ and ‘entrepreneurship awards’. Course curriculum is shaped in the mould of media-made myths of hi-tech and high-growth entrepreneurs.

Importantly, the US-based business literature reflects the needs of post-industrial society rather than of developing economies. This is partly responsible for one of the biggest tragedies of entrepreneurship education in the region.

Very little, if any, focus is given to various technologies that a potential entrepreneur might require in a new business. The acquisition of technology is one of the greatest difficulties small and medium enterprises in developing countries face, yet little is done within the education sphere to solve this problem.

A graduating student may have acquired some general business skills but has little or no knowledge or access to the means to acquire the knowledge to develop a farm, a small engineering shop, a food manufacturing operation, or a cosmetic manufacturing operation.

One can see around the ASEAN – Association of South East Asian Nations – region that it is the non-business schools that show innovation with their outreach programmes, while business schools fall into the trap of cashing in on their BBA, MBA and now DBA programmes.

New product development

Due to the developing nature of most South East Asian economies, there should be an emphasis on manufacturing, including new product development and manufacturing line and system development. However, business schools in post-industrial societies have largely dropped manufacturing from their curricula due to the cohort’s interest in the services sector, where opportunities exist.

This leads to a mismatch of what South East Asian business schools offer and what business and entrepreneurship students need. As a result, business and entrepreneurship graduates flood out into the marketplace without any technology skills, crowding the services sector, which is not creating extra employment or real economic growth.

Business and entrepreneurship graduate employability is a major issue facing South East Asian economies today, with thousands of unemployed business graduates across the region.

These two issues – technology and pedagogy – require deep thinking. Content and delivery need to be closely examined, experimented with and utilised with close adaptation to the needs of South East Asian students, a challenge that requires a large investment in time and staff resources.

To compound the problem, governments and local corporations have a preference for foreign advisors and consultants, shunning their own, even though foreigners may have little real understanding of local context.

This doesn’t occur because of any vacuum in knowledge and wisdom of local academics. In fact many South East Asian academics are very successful in other universities around the world. Some have written very sound academic dissertations and hypothesis but fail to get them to mass popularity. Rather, the publications sell a few hundred copies and can be found gathering dust on library shelves.

Colonial hangover

This colonial hangover is holding back indigenous intellectual development and preserving neocolonialism at a time when the US and Europe are far from possessing a monopoly on new ideas.

The irony is that Asian ideas have more influence on Western management thought than on Asian thinking. The only probable exception is Confucianism, which could cautiously be associated with the structure, process and strategies of family-owned Chinese businesses.

Although Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Buddhist Dharma originated in Asia, it is Western management thinkers who have applied their respective philosophies to management, at least in contemporary times. Although the Islamic Tawhid is 1,500 years old, it is probably only now that it is being considered seriously as a management philosophy.

Business school deans tend to play the role of patriarch, which often degenerates into crude authoritarianism. Consequently, major positions within the hierarchy tend to go to those are liked and favoured rather than those who have worked meritoriously, successfully and are qualified.

Consequently, many business schools in South East Asia see personal power as the prize and Machiavellian behaviour as the norm. Motivation among staff at the institution will most probably be very low.

There is a drastic regional shortage of business and entrepreneurship lecturers. Stringent criteria for lecturers eliminate the potential to employ mature, experienced practitioners or practademics.

For example, under the regulations of one aspiring university in Malaysia that portrays itself as the ‘Harvard of the East’, it would not be possible to employ people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or the late Steve Jobs, even as adjunct, due to issues of qualifications.

Thus those who gain employment within the region’s colleges and universities have formal qualifications, usually without much experience, if any.

Translation

Business and entrepreneurship academics consequently tend to lack the depth of knowledge about what they teach, and rely on textbooks and popular management books. This lack of depth of knowledge in many fields leads to a lack of confidence to develop curriculum outside the familiar available textbooks, thus inhibiting the ability to provide an education according to local needs.

With this comes a reinforcement of an unconscious bias towards Western literature, as local publications are still few and far between, and in many cases are just a translation of existing foreign textbooks. Any original, local material usually lacks peer acceptance due to the lack of ability of many to critically appraise it.

South East Asian business schools have fallen into a rut of pursuing quantity for the windfall incomes they can accumulate through popular products like the MBA.

Foreign universities, through setting up branches or strategic alliances, are also cashing in on the rapid growth of business education, further perpetuating the myth that foreign business theories are the first class product. They have adopted the classic post-colonial market strategy of importing their product into a local market with minimum modification, and exploiting the market to the maximum.

This rut goes deep into the structure and processes of local colleges and universities.

ISO quality accreditations and their logos are prominently displayed as symbols of quality, even though they have little or no relevance. ISO standards make no claims about product quality or relevance whatsoever and only mislead the public.

The resources needed to implement these useless ISO standards are taken from potential academic development resources. This leaves a single-textbook approach to courses, predominately delivered through formal lectures, rigid assessment and examination criteria and reliance on outdated curriculum development tools like Bloom’s taxonomy.

The result is a sanitised teaching paradigm that doesn’t reflect the real business environment, leaving students ill prepared for the outside world. This ‘cut and paste’ culture without questioning and adaptation, is holding back the development of business education in the region.

Rankings

Of late, universities have realised the need for research to build esteem and gain rankings. However, this has been turned into a meaningless chase of key performance indicator figures. Many new academic journals are cashing in on this unhealthy focus on SCOPUS indexing and now offer pay for publishing arrangements, rather than the traditional double blind peer review system.

To date, most local research has tended to emulate other research, applying theory to local contexts, rather than developing indigenous hypotheses. This lack of originality is preventing the rise in international stature of local business academics and is the loss of a great opportunity to develop Asian-based management knowledge.

Local academics have not asked whether there is a distinctively Asian type of management based upon traditional philosophy. Management theory has been something secular in Asia, in contrast with the West where it has been tainted with spiritualism.

Asian academics have preferred to keep both issues in separate boxes. Maybe it is just from lack of confidence to think outside their trained discipline and merge new ideas into their existing knowledge.

The education gap between South East Asia, Europe, Australia and the US is going to be felt for a long time. Part of the problem is resistance to change. Part of the problem is the lack of skilled, experienced and knowledgeable people. However, the rigidity of educational institutions is something that can be solved through some visionary thinking.

Creativity

There is also another problem. It is apparent that creativity is an important aspect of education, which is deeply lacking in the Asian curriculum within most of the region.

In business and entrepreneurship, creativity is vital in the areas of opportunity recognition and construction, strategy development and execution, marketing, new product development, and solving general problems related to entrepreneurship. Creativity, rather than intelligence, appears to be the critical factor in achieving success.

It could be argued that the failure in the ASEAN to develop contextually relevant theories and corresponding positivist practices, where instead culturally unsuited practices are employed, is a missed opportunity to develop new forms of dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage within the region.

This is the challenge to management academics and practitioners in the ASEAN. It is the task of looking through the rich history, culture, society, stories and philosophies of the region for the inspiration to develop and construct homegrown management ideas, rather than importing ideas developed in other parts of the world, which are suitable for those parts of the world.

Confucian, Buddhist, strategy and Islamic institutes exist all over the region, but there has been little focus on developing these philosophies as management paradigms. Today there is an intense vacuum of original management thinkers.

Murray Hunter

Murray Hunter has been involved in Asia-Pacific business for the last 30 years as an entrepreneur, consultant, academic, and researcher. As an entrepreneur he was involved in numerous start-ups, developing a lot of patented technology, where one of his enterprises was listed in 1992 as the 5th fastest going company on the BRW/Price Waterhouse Fast100 list in Australia. Murray is now an associate professor at the University Malaysia Perlis, spending a lot of time consulting to Asian governments on community development and village biotechnology, both at the strategic level and “on the ground”. He is also a visiting professor at a number of universities and regular speaker at conferences and workshops in the region. Murray is the author of a number of books, numerous research and conceptual papers in referred journals, and commentator on the issues of entrepreneurship, development, and politics in a number of magazines and online news sites around the world. Murray takes a trans-disciplinary view of issues and events, trying to relate this to the enrichment and empowerment of people in the region.

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