Search results

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

This chapter explores the emergence, growth, and current status of the sociology of sport in Canada. Such an endeavour includes acknowledging the work and efforts of Canadian scholars – whether Canadian by birth or naturalization or just as a result of their geographic location – who have contributed to the vibrant and robust academic discipline that is the sociology of sport in Canadian institutions coast-to-coast, and who have advanced the socio-cultural study of sport globally in substantial ways. This chapter does not provide an exhaustive description and analysis of the past and present states of the sociology of sport in Canada; in fact, it is important to note that an in-depth, critical and comprehensive analysis of our field in Canada is sorely lacking. Rather, this chapter aims to highlight the major historical drivers (both in terms of people and trends) of the field in Canada; provide a snapshot of the sociology of sport in Canada currently; and put forth some ideas as to future opportunities and challenges for the field in Canada.

This chapter complements the one that appeared as “History of the AIB Fellows: 1975–2008” in Volume 14 of this series (International Business Scholarship: AIB Fellows on the First 50 Years and Beyond, Jean J. Boddewyn, Editor). It traces what happened under the deanship of Alan Rugman (2011–2014) who took many initiatives reported here while his death in July 2014 generated trenchant, funny, and loving comments from more than half of the AIB Fellows. The lives and contributions of many other major international business scholars who passed away from 2008 to 2014 are also evoked here: Endel Kolde, Lee Nehrt, Howard Perlmutter, Stefan Robock, John Ryans, Vern Terpstra, and Daniel Van Den Bulcke.

The chapters within this Handbook have contained a very large amount of information about the political and administrative systems of a number of Latin American countries. This concluding chapter will attempt to extract some general themes from that material, and to relate the findings in the chapters to our general themes of turbulence, formalism, and politicization of public administration in the region. These themes appear throughout the national cases and in the cross-cutting chapters but should be highlighted as we attempt to integrate the findings from our chapter authors.

There are several ways that risks and uncertainties might be discussed in the context of assessment and analysis – several of which could be inferred from previous chapters. Here, Chapters 6 and 7 are structured around what might be called strategic risks/uncertainties and operational risks/uncertainties.

This chapter presents the strategic risk/uncertainty assessment and analysis challenge. Most current thinking on risk management – enterprise risk management (ERM), but even including more traditional approaches – place expectations on leaders and top managers to provide guidance on risk policy, but also require those individuals to understand the challenges for which they are responsible. As implied previously, this domain mainly consists of uncertainties. Typically, top managers deal with aggregated operational data that – in itself – might be measurable but owing to the effects of consolidation tend to present leaders with a singular strategy/issue that is unique to the organisation and therefore not well-suited to statistical analysis. Furthermore, scanning for future threats and opportunities is decidedly a matter of considering the unknown, the emergent, and even the unimaginable. Within this assortment of challenges are the very large-scale features that – among many things – compel consideration of collaboration with other organisations. Here these special risks/uncertainties are labelled global risks.

The issue of complexity is here revisited, and this discussion serves two particular purposes. Complexity theory (and complex adaptive systems) offers some insights into methods of assessment and analysis, but they also provide some useful views on the nature of the uncertainty field in the context of complex environments. This discussion will offer some consideration of traditional, ERM, and alternative approaches and the appropriate ‘fit’ of assessment and analysis into these frameworks.