Editorial

Citation

(2008), "Editorial", Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Vol. 1 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebs.2008.34901daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Volume 1, Issue 4

This issue of the journal contains an eclectic array of papers designed to address a wide variety of issues relevant to economic and social development in the Middle East. Norman Wright and Haydn Bennett open issue 4 with a discussion of cultural differences between the Middle East and the West. Their specific focus is on team harmony and group participation and cultural differences are explored using a sample of female university students from the UAE and a sample of university students from the West, namely from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. Monica Gallant also focuses on females but only to demonstrate the effectiveness, in terms of feminist studies, of the ethnographic case study approach to research that sheds light on the “real” female experiences in UAE society. Monica Gallant’s emphasis on capturing reality or at least conceptions of it, is, in a sense, continued by Darwish Abdulrahman Yousef who examines the rather limited “take up” of Operations Research and Management Science in “real life” industrial and service organizations in the UAE. Given that these areas of study are common in business and management academic curricula; Darwish’s paper reinforces the need for educational organizations to produce curricula, specifically in the business context, that are relevant to the practical needs of society.

It can be argued that perceptions of usefulness and practical relevance are very much dependent on contextual variables and it is these variables that are explored by Nurit Zaidman in his examination of ICT implementation in multinationals in the Middle East. Similarly, Ghazi Ghaith and Hassan Diab emphasise the context specific variables that facilitate the acquisition of English language proficiency among Arabic college-bound learners. In the modern world, few would disagree that the effective use of ICT and the ability to converse and write in English are important pre-requisites for economic and social development. Finally, Abdel Moneim focuses our attention on the customer through his exposition of the importance of the customer value concept in the Middle East. Using the airline industry as an example and taking a business perspective, Abdel Moneim identifies arguably the most important contextual factor for organizations, namely the perception of customers. We, your editors, hope you enjoy the 4th issue of EBS.