Anthropology and International Business

Three years ago, Bart Tebbs, head of the Department of Management at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, approached me, waving a copy of a new paperback that he had just received from the publisher. "Would you be interested in teaching a course around this book?" he asked. The book was entitled "The Cultural Environment of International Business. It was written by Vern Terpstra, a professor at the University of Michigan Graduate School of Business Administration, with contributions by Ian H. Giddy, Thomas Neil Gladwin, Stephen J. Kobrin, and Ravi Sarathy. The table of contents promised to relate eight categories of culture—language, religion, values and attitudes, social organization, education, technology and material culture, the political environment—to the operations of international business.