New horizons for education

Any nation hoping to complete the journey from labor-intensive to knowledge-based economy has to cultivate an improved level of skills. This ineluctably augments the desire for higher education - and it is a desire these countries are not yet in a position to meet without outside assistance.

China, for instance, may be investing heavily in education, but, like other emerging economies, it will not be able to satisfy domestic demand, especially at postgraduate level. It has to encourage its students to study overseas, almost unavoidably in the West and most likely in the US and the UK.

There, if the criticisms of Delves Broughton and others are to be believed, there is a good chance these students will soon be introduced to a Western form of guanxi. They will join networks of influence. They will get to know "the right people". They will learn whom they should court and what they might expect in return. They will generate what is politely referred to as "social capital", precious little of which will ultimately be used for the greater good of society as a whole. They will begin to embrace the myth.

In China it is widely accepted that guanxi allows individuals and companies to gain preferential access to a host of scarce information and resources, including financial capital. Indeed, there is a growing consensus that small and medium-sized enterprises can hardly expect to survive without it. According to a study produced by academics at Nottingham University Business School in Ningbo, "wining and dining" has become so vital to many new firms in China that expenditure on entertainment accounts for almost 7 percent of their total assets. At worst - or at best, depending on one's viewpoint - guanxi facilitates insider trading, kick-backs and back-door deals. Yet few discourage it. Again, the given is acknowledged as taken.

Guanxi has its role, of course, whether in the most prestigious business schools or in the boardrooms and bars of China. But that role should not be to serve the interests of a chosen few to the exclusion of all others. Like business schools themselves, guanxi should function to benefit the wider world rather than to enrich a self-selected elite. The positive aspects should be supported and cultivated. The negative aspects should be carefully considered and, if necessary, appropriately regulated.

The most pressing of the many challenges that now confront the financial services industry is the need to develop a new narrative - one that offers an alternative to the privatization of gain and the socialization of loss and is safely removed from a Darwinian fight for survival in "efficient" but unforgiving markets.

In large part this is a matter of ethics, of fairness and trust, of how people are perceived and whether they actually care. Research carried out by Nottingham University Business School for the influential Financial Services Research Forum has repeatedly highlighted the degree to which the average consumer neither trusts financial providers nor considers them especially fair. A common thread running through the findings of various studies is disillusionment, a feeling that such trust as does exist in the mind of the customer is present only because of an overwhelming conviction that there are no superior alternatives.

It is a sad state of affairs when consumers are not just dissatisfied with the system but see no meaningful alternative, yet this is where we now stand. However much the investment community has endeavored to refashion its collective public image - and the extent of efforts in that direction remains a source of debate - the judgment must be that the effect, at least so far, has been negligible at best and that the road to redemption will be lengthy for all concerned.

The long-term objective - one that must be pursued on a genuinely global basis - has to be the creation of strategies that bring about sustainable shareholder, customer and societal value. Key to this will be new kinds of management practices and new forms of education and training; and if education and training are to dictate management practices rather than vice versa then it is in business schools that the tone will have to be set.

The issue is therefore this. Should the world's leading business schools be content to await the next narrative, leaving its composition to others before absorbing the trickle-down effects in the hope that the new mood music's coda will prove less disastrous than its predecessor's? Or do they have the means, the wherewithal and the enthusiasm - not to mention even an obligation - to try to write it themselves?

The author is a professor of Management and Organizational Learning at Nottingham University Business School, where he is also Director of Research.

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