Past Pacific Region Forum

2–3:30 pm, Thursday, November 24, 2011
Room 1425, SFU at Harbour Centre,
515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver.
Admission is free, reservation is required.

Watch the recorded presentation.

Countries can greatly enhance their national competitiveness by leveraging their diasporas in different parts of the world. Diasporas can act as catalysts to enhance human capital development in their country of origin (COO), as well as use their transnational social networks in both the COO and country of residence (COR) as conduits to drive trade and investment. They can also help in introducing the COO culture and products to the COR, and using their social networks to favorably impact the COO effect. In this presentation, we will also explore what makes them so effective in these roles by indicating how they can foster trust across diverse cultures. We explain how members of ethnic diasporas can leverage the trust that they have built with their COR (through education and/or work experience) and their COO (through ethnic ties) to bring about trade-related bene­ts to both their COO and COR. Examples from two of the largest and most prominent diasporas today, the Chinese and the Indian diasporas, are used to illustrate these issues. The presentation will review some of the roles that modern diasporas can play and explain how trust can constitute an important aspect in each of these roles. The changing role of diasporas is examined though issues that are of particular concern to them, such as bicultural identity, regionalism, COR acculturation policies, and rising living standards in their COOs. The presentation concludes with a look at how the changing role of diasporas could affect national competitiveness, and how different countries could deal with it.

Speaker

Masud Chand is an Assistant Professor of International Business and a Faculty Fellow at the Barton School of Business in Wichita State University in Wichita, KS, USA. He completed his PhD in International Business from Simon Fraser University in 2009. His current research deals with the role of diasporas in driving trade and investment between their countries of origin and countries of residence, the differences in entrepreneurship behavior across different immigrant groups, and cross cultural issues that affect international business decisions. His work has previously been published in Thunderbird International Business Review, the Journal of Trust Research, International Business Review, Advances in International Management and Asia Pacific Business Review.

2–3:30 pm, Friday, February 18, 2011
Room 2270, SFU at Harbour Centre,
515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver.

Free and Open to the Public

Abstract

Global staffing as a managed process has a number of challenges and opportunities. This presentation will review the literature to date on decisions and functions related to managerial stafng decisions in multinational companies with an emphasis on those operating in and with home bases in the Asia Pacic region. In the focal study managerial functions valued by expatriate and reasons for appointing host country managers were examined in an exploratory, multi-method (interview and questionnaire) study with expatriates and local managers as the respondents. Based on theoretical perspectives of agency theory, transaction costs theory, resource-based views, and organizational learning theory agency theory changes in the valuation of these functions were hypothesized and examined for subsidiary age and nationality of the respondent. Expatriate and local managers' views supported previous research on certain management functions but differed on others (e.g. management development). The data indicated curvilinear relationships in stafng decisions (which have also been found in other studies) for a number of managerial functions between nationality of top manager and age of the subsidiary. Strategic factors were analyzed by subsidiary age and nationality of the respondent manager to understand more about maturity of host company operations and strategic orientations. The results indicated the growth in the strategic functions of technological leadership and market development/branding in older subsidiaries. Implications of these and other related study results and suggestions for future studies will be examined.
 
Speaker

Dr. Sue Bruning is a Professor in the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. In her years at the U of M she has served as the Director of the Ph.D.program and as the Department Head of the Department of Business Administration from July 2000 through June, 2005. During 2006 she served as the Canadian Studies Scholar at University of Trier, Trier, Germany, and in 2010 as a Visiting Professor at Kobe University in the Research in Economics and International Business (REIB) Institute. She has served as the President, Conference Chair for 2002 and VP of Membership for the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC) and as President of the International Scholarly Associations of Management (IFSAM). Dr. Bruning's research interests include work on high performance human resource practices, international human resource management, expatriate adjustment, diversity, workplace aggression and justice issues in organizations. Her current research is funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Worker's Compensation Board of Manitoba. Dr. Bruning has received rewards for her teaching, research and service activities. She has published a textbook in Organizational Behaviour and a number of academic and practitioner articles that have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Resource Planning, Journal of Management and others. She has taught courses or a visiting basis in a number of countries including Finland, Switzerland, Germany, China, Australia, Singapore, South Africa and Tanzania.