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After completion of this case, students will be able to: define and understand the external and internal components of the strategic management process; define and explain various alternative strategies that help companies create a sustainable competitive advantage; understand and explain the five main choices of entry mode that are available to organisations when considering entry into a foreign market, suggest an entry mode that is relevant to Standard Bank and explain the pros and cons of each entry mode; and understand how a company can offer or phase in its service offerings.

This case situates Sola David-Borha, CEO for the Africa Region at the Standard Bank Group, in April 2018, considering whether and how to expand into personal and business banking in Cote d’Ivoire – a country that Standard Bank had just re-entered, having exited there in 2003 because of the civil war. The bank has operations in 20 sub-Saharan African countries and its growth strategy is focussed on Africa. This strategy is reflected in its slogan: “Africa is our home. We drive her growth”. David-Borha has a number of questions on her mind. These include: can the bank offer financial services that will meet the needs of the Ivorian people, how can the bank expand into personal a business banking – indeed is rapid expansion into this sector the right decision for now?

Advanced/graduate courses in strategic management and international business.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 5: International business.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the board structure and process disclosure (henceforth BSPD) level on corporate performance, depending on the Anglophone vs Francophone business culture prevailing in African emerging markets.

The BSPD score is measured by searching 220 annual reports (year ended 2006) for information of 35 items provided by S&P's template in 11 emerging markets in Africa. The empirical model builds on multiple regressions and assumes interaction between the Anglophone/Francophone business culture and BSPD level to affect corporate performance.

African companies from countries having historical links with Great Britain exhibit substantially higher BSPD scores than those from countries having historical links with France. The influence of BSPD level on corporate performance is more pronounced for financial Anglophone African companies than non‐financial Anglophone African companies.

Providing BSPD levels for African emerging markets helps to a better understanding of the board of directors' activity and characteristics that prevail in both Anglophone and Francophone African companies. The implications are potentially useful for regulators, market authorities and standard setters in order to provide new requirements on corporate governance narrative reporting in African emerging markets. BSPD scores obtained for African emerging markets can also serve for comparison with other emerging markets in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

This paper is one of the first to examine the effect of BSPD level on corporate performance in African emerging markers. This study contributes to asserting the role of Anglophone vs Francophone business culture in shaping the level of disclosure on board structure and activity and its influence on corporate performance in Africa.

To determine whether French and English Canadians had different information search patterns prior to automobile purchase, 210 buyers of 1983 and 1984 Ford and Toyota automobiles in two Ontario and two Quebec cities were surveyed. We hypothesised the English‐Canadian car buyers prefer printed sources of information, while French‐Canadian buyers prefer personal sources, consider fewer alternatives, devote less time to the search process, and generally search less extensively for a new car than do English Canadians. Three of the five hypotheses were supported. Compared to their English counterparts, French Canadians evaluated ten per cent fewer alternative car makes, spent 30 per cent fewer days in the search process, took 67 per cent fewer test drives, and scored eight per cent lower on a measure of overall depth of search. As the French search pattern perhaps entails a greater risk, marketers in Quebec may need to provide better warranties and after‐sales service than in Ontario.

The Disaster Awareness Game (DAG) was designed to evaluate and promote disaster awareness among children in multicultural societies. This study seeks to discuss this.

The validation methodology was undertaken in four stages: Pre‐Test Stage – this stage is intended to evaluate the existing levels of disaster awareness among the target population using a questionnaire survey. DAG Exposure 1 – This represents the second stage of the pre‐test through exposure of the target population to the DAG. Provision of disaster information – In this stage, participants are provided with disaster management information on hazards that are pertinent to their environment. Post‐test stage – this stage was intended to evaluate the impact of the DAG and the provision of disaster information on the level of awareness among participants.

Preliminary results suggest that the tool is effective in educating children about hazards, and measuring levels of disaster awareness and is interesting enough to hold children's attention.

The present study provides a starting‐point for further research in the design and development of tools for measuring levels of disaster awareness and in educating children about disaster preparedness.

The DAG can be used as a benchmarking tool for gauging levels of diaster awareness within various groups in society (children, adults, gender, language groups etc.) or across regions in a country (rural versus urban) and in different countries in the Caribbean region (e.g. High income versus Low income) in order to determine and prioritize interventions for disaster education.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the factors attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into emerging economies.

This study uses secondary data from the World Bank and the Global State of Democracy Indices of 16 West African countries (WACs) over the period from 1989 to 2018. Fixed- and random-effects econometric regression models are used to assess the nexus between 12 macroeconomic indicators (including political risk and cultural factors) and FDI inflows into WACs.

The critical drivers of FDI inflows into WACs are the richness of natural resources, market size or gross domestic product (GDP), imports and exports of goods and services, trade openness and the currency's strength as measured by the exchange rate. The result also reveals that French-speaking countries attract more FDI than other English-speaking countries. The previously cited determinants of FDI, such as infrastructural development, inflation, tax and political stability, are insignificant in determining FDI inflows into WACs.

This study uncovers the critical drivers explaining the FDI inflows into WACs, where FDI accounts for 39% of external finance. The study's contribution is that Francophone WACs attract more FDI than Anglophone WACs. The most important drivers of FDI are abundant natural resources, GDP, imports, exports, trade openness and exchange rate.

The African continent is filled with a textured history, vast resources, and immense opportunity. The landscape of higher education on such a diverse continent is extensive and complex. In this review of the landscape, four primary topics are evaluated. The historical context is the foundational heading, which briefly covers the evolution from colonization to independence and the knowledge economy. The second main heading builds upon the historical context to provide an overview of the numerous components of higher education, including language diversity, institutional type, and access to education. A third section outlines key challenges and opportunities including finance, governance, organizational effectiveness, and the academic core. Each of these challenges and opportunities is interconnected and moves from external influences (e.g., fiscal and political climate) to internal influences (e.g., administrative leadership and faculty roles). The last layer of the landscape focuses on leveraging higher education in Africa for social and economic progress and development. Shaping a higher education system around principles of the public good and generating social benefits is important for including postsecondary institutions in a development strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS) production.

This paper proposes a sociological analysis based on Bourdieu field to understand the variation of reception the French OS production have had among the Anglo-Saxon field. The paper aims to underline some key elements, which can explain the differences of reception experienced by the French OS scientists. The paper opted for a general review using historical data; reviews of OS literature; and Google scholar, Web of Science and major OS Journal data.

The paper provides some evidence about how the degree of visibility of the French OS production is related to translation, cognitive and social resonance, producer place in the scientific network and relationship between the fields. It suggests that the degree of visibility is the result of a complex set of socio-cognitive schemes, social issues raised by the scholar and the place occupied by the researcher in the field.

The paper brings interesting ideas concerning the international development of the OS field, the degree of visibility of diverse contributions coming from non-English speaking researchers, notably the French ones, and how the dialogue between different linguistic and social universes can be ameliorated.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is mandated by the international community to collect, analyse and disseminate internationally comparable statistics on education, including those on and related to teachers. Based within a framework that emphasises quantity and quality issues for teachers, this chapter describes the current UIS international collection of teacher data, the policy options they intend to inform, as well as key limitations and challenges of the present data. In reaction to this, the chapter also presents UIS’s on-going developmental work related to the global data collection and statistics on primary and secondary teachers ranging from the measurement of current shortages, particularly in developing countries aiming to achieve universal primary education (UPE), to the expansion of an international framework that sheds additional light on teacher and teaching quality.

To examine the impact of culture on customer service expectations, specifically, how individualists and collectivists use internal and external sources of information to formulate their service expectations.

The context was the airline industry and the subject pool consisted of experienced consumers. A survey was employed to measure individualism/collectivism, various internal/external information sources, and the functional and technical dimensions of “should” and “will” service expectations. Hypothesized relationships were tested using a structural equations modeling approach.

Both individualists and collectivists relied more on external information sources in formulating their service expectations, gave variable weight to the functional and technical components, and used more realistic “will” expectations to judge service offerings. Internal (external) information sources were relatively more important in forming expectations for collectivists (individualists) than for individualists (collectivists), and “will” (“should”) expectations were more diagnostic for collectivists (individualists) than for individualists (collectivists).

Generalizability of the findings is limited due to the specific industry under study (airlines), the sample (two geographically‐proximate sub‐cultures), and the scope of the cultural variables considered (individualism/collectivism).

Whether managers should leverage the functional and/or technical components of services depends in part on the cultural orientation of their customers. Managers should also recognize that customers’ usage of various information sources in forming service expectations is also, in part, culturally determined.

In this era of globalization, researchers and managers alike need to consider the subtle influences of culture on marketing theories and the formulation of service expectations respectively.

This paper looks at how two sports teams, hockey club the Toronto Maple Leafs and Football Club Barcelona, have each built and leveraged their brand equity. The main differences between the two clubs lie in how they position their brands. For TML, the affective and experiential sides of the product are emphasised to make the brand grow; for Barcelona, the cognitive and affective dimensions of the product are prioritised to nurture the brand. Differences between hockey and soccer also contribute to branding discrepancies in terms of exposure and global influences.