The Study of International Business: A Plea for a More Interdisciplinary Approach

scholastic efforts to study and teach international business is entirely dependent on our capability to marshal and organise the necessary human and other assets so as to supply a range of end products which are acceptable to the academic community of which we are part, our paymasters and the main purchasers of our products, viz, the business community. Of course, the determinants of success of the practice and study of IB are interrelated; and, in our particular pursuit for excellence, there is no unique or sure-fire recipe for success. But, I observe, that in an ever increasingly complex world of international business, which is dominated by rapid and far-reaching changes in technology and by environmental turbulence, this is no less true of successful practitioners. Rarely, in seeking to identify the reasons for business achievement, is one able to find a single common denominator. Sometimes excellence is primarily based on innovatory ingenuity; sometimes on the access to or control of key inputs or markets; sometimes on aggressive or novel methods of advertising and marketing; sometimes on super-efficient capital budgeting; sometimes on dynamic and imaginative entrepreneurship; sometimes on the diversity of operational experiences and capabilities; and sometimes on an unusual aptitude to manage human relationships. But in most cases, success is founded on some amalgam of these, and it is the way in which these discrete-though increasingly interdependent-advantages are &ombined with each other and with complementary assets in different countries and cultures, which contemporary research suggests is the key competitive advantages of international firms. Call it what you will-e.g.,