Differentiating Culture and the Environments in International Business Courses: The Case in Marketing

The author has focused on the problem of repetition in material in international business confounding the course contents. This admixing of material to a large extent comes from the influences of the same cultural and environmental considerations being the source of much information across these courses. The author suggests a way to deal with this admixing through a judicious choice of examples to those impacting the issues in the course. There are many instances where the same cultural or environmental consideration influences some of the main issues in more than one course. The paper suggests the use of an example of that influencer impacting issues that are central to the content of the course being taught. This same strategy involving this same influencer in another course would suggest the use of an example relating to issues pertinent to that course. The use of an influence impacting different issues in different courses forcing a different explanation would help differentiate the courses and also give the student a much fuller and more sophisticated understanding of different cultures. Doing this would increase the cogency of each course and lay a better foundation for the student in understanding the multi-faceted nature of the influences of culture and the environments. (C) 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.