AN INTER-, TRANS-, CROSS- AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE FIELD OF BUSINESS STUDIES

Modern academic education in economics, and especially that in the field of business, frequently tries, and rather seldom manages to combine, interfere and unify, to varying degrees, distinct disciplines with practical interests usually similar or even seemingly adverse; its concrete action is an example of the successful attempt at prompt adaptation to the entrepreneurial reality, which is constantly changing, and also to the more and more dynamic economic environment, perhaps excessively so in the last two decades. This paper attempts to clarify the conceptual differences and the relatively common parts of inter-, trans-, cross- and multidisciplinarity in general, and in particular in education, focusing on business education. A brief introduction structures the inter-, trans-, cross- and multidisciplinary investigative approach within an educational context in business, and a review of the scientific literature section clarifies both the meaning of those major concepts, extending from simple paradigm of each concept to their multiple aggregative paradigm, and some modern educational trends in economics. A second section is devoted to the method of investigating opinions, based on the volume of a sample determined statistically and from a scientific methodology of observation and recording, by collecting individual data, validating the rigor of research on the diversity in business education approaches, by simply and consistently noting them by the students and graduates of faculties of economics. The study of the graduates' opinions focused on an original questionnaire, presented in the a annexes of the paper, and the resulting databases were subjected to a descriptive statistical analysis, made with the software package Eviews, with emphasis on the homogeneity, symmetry, skewness and normality of distributions. The third section is a brief analysis of the research results, supplemented naturally by some clarifying discussions, which outline the current option of the graduates towards early multidisciplinarity as a necessary goal resulting from the content analysis of opinions. The conclusions briefly describe the expected trends of inter-, trans-, cross- and multidisciplinary education in economics, relating to business, approached as any job well done, from several scientific viewpoints.