The prospect of four days in Milan, Italy, would entice travelers of all sorts. For scholars in the areas of international business and management, the lure was even greater when the Academy of International Business (AIB) held its 2008 annual meeting there during the summer. Considered the premier opportunity for scholars in the field to interact with peers, receive suggestions for their research, and learn about what others are doing, the AIB meeting attracted about 1,200 participants from international political economy, international relations, economics, and business. Approximately twenty faculty members and administrators from the College of Business Administration presented papers, chaired sessions, and got new ideas for future collaborations.

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Mary Ann Von Glinow, professor and Knight Ridder Eminent Scholar Chair in International Management, Department of Management and International Business; and director of Florida International University’s Center for International Business Education and Research (FIU-CIBER), was one of four AIB Fellows—a select group of leading scholars in international business—chosen to make 45-minute presentations to CEOs from Milan (Fiat, Cisco, Vodafone, Ernst & Young, among others), on behalf of the AIB Fellows.

“In my ‘guru lecture’ titled ‘New Dynamics of Next-Generation Offshoring and Global Distribution of Work,’ I discussed the fact that though much has been written about ‘offshoring’ to India and China, the complex dynamics—such as the limited supply of scientific and engineering (S&E) talent at home, the rise of new geographic clusters providing S&E talent abroad, and an emerging global talent race—are not well understood,” she said.

Other faculty members present their research, get valuable input.

G. Ronald Gilbert, clinical professor; Dana Farrow, professor; and William Newburry, assistant professor, Department of Management and International Business, expanded their previously conducted research to include a larger international component.

Dana Farrow		G. Ronald Gilbert		William Newburry

“Gilbert has developed a work preference indicator to look at ways in which seventeen variables—a person’s interests, temperament, and learning style, for example—predict his or her performance in a job,” Farrow said. “The paper we presented applied the instrument to production workers in Jamaica, where we found that ten of the seventeen variables were able to differentiate high from low performers.”

Newburry delivered a paper that broadens his research on the liability of foreignness.

“I look at whether multinationals operate at a disadvantage to local companies when they enter a new market,” he said. “For this paper, I examined how the concept works in six Latin American countries and Spain, which allowed me to compare the liability of foreignness construct across developing and developed markets.”