Ioan S. Fotea

Managing Perplexity: Lessons from Inside the Romanian Business Culture

Despite the passage of several decades since the revolution of 1989, there is little professional literature designed to prepare foreign investors for the Romanian business culture. Visitors to this nation discover a friendly people who engage in business practices often characterized as perplexing, frustrating, and imbued with self-defeating actions. The communist period in Romanias history imbedded unethical behavior into the nations culture, including the morally ambiguous practice of favor trading. This paper describes this central business activity and how it shapes business dealings and often undermines opportunities. The cultural context that created the favor trading environment is discussed, and methods for managing this perplexing practice are explained.

Innovation Networking, Knowledge Transdisciplinary Spaces

Abstract In this paper a novel approach on knowledge integration in presented in the context of the knowledge-based society/economy (KBS/E). What this paper brings new is the transdisciplinary integrative approach of the knowledge through the “conceptual knowledge space” as a potentiality, and the “practical transdisciplinary knowledge space”, as actuality, with the transition between them through the included middle. Are introduced some of the most important practical educational environmental transdisciplinary conceptual and applied spaces, as innovative groundbreaking clusters that foster the origination, transfer and implementation of knowledge in the process of achieving sustainable development of the continuously integrative society. The University is considered the most appropriate space for this transdisciplinary approach of knowledge achievement, being a natural habitat of the synergistic integration of education, research and industry, and with its adaptability and adequateness in the knowledge economy space. University should become an open space in a reconfiguration in a integration of a highrequired degree with breadth profile competence in the integrated fields of different disciplines, with the need to have a depth profile of the knowledge in research on particular cognitive field. A new redefined mission of university by collaborating with industry should be linked to a redefinition of the role of the research in universities in the knowledge based society/economy.

Utilizing Data from Social Media to Inform Business Decisions: The Case for Facebook

We argue that the true power behind social media lies in its ability to provide data for business decisions. This chapter presents a framework and mapping process for extracting data from social media into the various marketing functions. We use Facebook as the particular social media and show how the data from Facebook maps into the four major functions of marketing. We then show how this data can provide information that is new, more genuine, more efficient to obtain, and more readily available than data obtained from traditional marketing research tools. Finally, we provide a simple example of how this process was used for an educational institution.

Domains Where Business Integrity Matters

Building business relationships based on trust is essential in obtaining long-term success.

A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO BUSINESS EDUCATION THROUGHOUT FAMILY FIRMS AS COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Abstract The paper explores the relationship between family businesses (FB), communities of practice (CoP), and entrepreneurship education in the context of the knowledge production and sharing within and between these communities. The relationship between these three spheres of knowledge is presented from a transdisciplinary point of view. The contextual legitimacy identifies the communicational channels between the fields of family businesses and the communities of practice and entrepreneurial education in a transdisciplinary generative synergistic context. The notion of CoP suggests that organizational community boundaries do not correspond with typical functional boundaries, including practice - and person - based networks, while family businesses underlie the necessity of sustainable business education which can be achieved through collaborative interaction in a creative entrepreneurial framework. The paper proposes to find the common ground of the three fields of knowledge and the way these points develop new knowledge windows towards a new entrepreneurial understanding of life, and generating new alternatives.

Engaging Faculty and Students: A Premise for Excellence in Business Education at Romanian Business School

This chapter focuses on explaining the importance of the faculty-student encounter in a business school, with a new paradigm of quality management that combines the classical view of human resources management with modern relationship marketing. Utilizing the Human Sigma model, which is a modern relationship management instrument for measuring and aligning the interest of both customers and service providers, we measured the student-faculty encounter at a small Romanian Business School (RBS) in order to enhance the quality of the education. We begin by discussing the importance of quality in education, then we outline the patterns of engagement, and finally, we present our research findings at the RBS.