International Management (in English)

Course Description

The topics to be covered include the process of internationalization of companies, alternative forms of international business and international alliances (exports, franchises, subsidiaries, licenses, strategic alliances, joint ventures...). The class also looks at environmental factors, globalization, management functions, human resources and diversity, different organizational cultures and the role of strategic business management in a globalized world.  

Course Goals and Methodology

Saturday, September 7, 09.00 p.m. It is your first weekend in Seville and you decide to go out and have a nice dinner to celebrate your first experience in Spain. You enter a fancy crowded restaurant downtown and sit down…and wait…and wait some more…where is the waiter? Have they forgotten about me? Finally, they took your order and the food arrived…9.45 p.m. The food arrived, but you run out of drinks…why don’t they refill me? Don’t they see me? 10.15 Exhausted, you try to pay, but no one seems to care about you having your credit card on the table for 5 minutes…10.30 You storm out the restaurant thinking that you could open a restaurant here where waiters actually care about the clients and it would be a total success.  

Ok, maybe the 10.30 part wasn’t real, but the rest it might sound familiar to you. Let’s assume that your entrepreneurial soul is reaching out, and you decide to open that restaurant. Let me give you a hint about your future. 99% chances that you will fail. What happened? Culture happened. In response to a survey of Fortune 1000 companies enquiring about ''the biggest barrier in doing business in the world market", cultural differences ranked at the top of the list (The Guardian, September 20, 2007). The report suggested that the failure to recognize these differences was the most common cause of failure for cross- national enterprises. (Other barriers ranked were the concerns of law, price competition, information, languages, delivery, foreign currencies, and time differences.) Members of different cultures express different values and priorities when they make and implement decisions. These values influence work relationships, whether between superior and subordinate, peers, managers in headquarters and subsidiaries, and others. 

How do international managers recognize the opportunities and threats that cultural difference presents?  And how do they respond? The answers do not lie simply in learning more culture. The influence of culture is never stable and its effect on behavior can never be precisely predicted. Further, a range of other factors may intervene. These include the social and business environments, industry and organizational interests, and the personalities of the people concerned.  The problem for the manager is deciding which have priority in any given situation. Culture is SOMETIMES very significant; and on other occasions it is not, and the other factors are more so. The manager needs the skills to recognize WHEN culture is significant, to weigh its influence against that of the other factors, and then respond appropriately. (Mead, R: 2009) This course aims to equip managers with these skills. That’s why, in addition to the core topics normally discussed in international management courses (the process of internationalization of companies, alternative forms of international business and international alliances, environmental factors, globalization, management functions, human resources and diversity or the role of strategic business management in a globalized world) this class intends to introduce culture as a key factor in doing business internationally so you can make the most of your experience abroad. Welcome. 

Learning Objectives
Through this course, students will:

• Understand the particularities of the business decision making in an international environment such as self-awareness, self-management, collaboration, and teamwork

• Give students the skills and the knowledge set necessary to ethically manage today's business operations for productivity and performance in an international environment.

• Develop and strengthen various emotional intelligence skills

• Engender a global perspective in all students.

• Synthesize, analyze and integrate their knowledge from across the organization and use this knowledge to provide innovative and credible solutions that provide an immediate return on investment. 

Course Requirements and Grading
Your final grade will be calculated according to the following system:
• Mid-term exam (20%)
• Final exam (25%)
• Final project (30%)
• Class participation (25%)

Required Text

MEAD, ANDREWS. International Management, Fourth edition. Blackwell and Wiley, 2009.

Complementary texts

Adler, N. 2007. International dimensions of organizational behaviour. 5th ed. Mason, OH: Thomson South-Western. 

Ailon, G. 2008. Mirror, mirror on the wall: culture's consequences in a value test of its own design. The Academy of Management Review 33(4), pp. 885-904.

Barinaga, E. 2007. Cultural diversity at work: 'National culture' as a discourse organizing an international project group. Human Relations 60(2), pp. 315-340.

Bartlett, C. and Beamish, P. 2018. Transnational management: text, cases and readings in cross-border management. 8th ed. New York: McGraw Hill Irwin.  

Birkinshaw, J. and Pedersen, T. 2009. Strategy and management in MNE subsidiaries. In Rugman, A.M. and Waters, L.L. The Oxford handbook of international business. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 367 - 388.  

Hofstede, G. 2002. Dimensions do not exist: a reply to Brendan McSweeney. Human Relations 55(11), pp. 1355-1361

Hofstede, G. 2003. What is culture? A reply to Baskerville. Accounting, Organizations and Society 28(7-8), pp. 811-813.  

Hofstede, G. and Ailon, G. 2009. Dialogue on mirror, mirror. Academy of Management Review. 34(3), pp. 570–573.  

Kelly, P. 2009. International business and management. London: Cengage Learning.  

Lasserre, P. 2017. Global strategic management. 4th ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schneider, S.C. and Barsoux, J.L 2014. Managing across cultures. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.  

Steers, C. et al. 2016. Management across cultures: developing global competencies. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Thomas, C. 2017. Cross-cultural management: essential concepts. 4th ed. Los Angeles: Sage.  

Verbeke, A. 2013  International Business Strategy, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 

Course contents
• Unit 1 - International Management and Culture
• Unit 2 – Analyzing Cultures: Making Comparisons
• Unit 3 – Organizational Culture
• Unit 4 – Formal Structures and informal Systems
• Unit 5 – Globalization and Localization
• Unit 6 – Planning Strategy
• Unit 7 – Forming an International Joint Venture
• Unit 8 – Risk and Control: Headquarters and Subsidiary
• Unit 9 – Controlling by Staffing
• Unit 10 – Expatriate Assignment