On September 27, 2018, assessors from the Association of MBAs (AMBA) visited the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus. Responsible for accrediting the Thammasat Business School (TBS) in their association, they included Professor Philip McLaughlin, former co-founding Dean and Executive Director of KEDGE Business School, France. The group also comprised Professor Allan KK Chan, Ph.D., former Associate Vice-President and Executive Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Hong Kong Baptist University and Sukanlaya Sawang, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Internationalisation and Associate Professor in Small Business, Innovation and Wellbeing at the School of Business, University of Leicester, United Kingdom (UK). Ms. Katherine O’Flynn, Director of Accreditation for AMBA, was also present. As its website explains,

the Association of MBAs is the impartial authority on postgraduate management education and is committed to raising its profile and quality standards internationally for the benefit of business schools, students and alumni and employers… Our accreditation service is the global standard for all MBA, DBA and Master’s degrees, currently accrediting programmes from the top 2% of business schools in over 70 countries.

By accrediting over 250 international business schools, AMBA, based in London, differs from other accreditation bodies as it only examines postgraduate management programs, rather than undergraduate studies. Since AMBA only accredits about 2% of the world’s business schools, and is international in focus, it has an exclusive approach and world view of the business community. Founded just over 50 years ago by UK graduates of the Harvard Business School, Wharton, Stanford and Columbia, among other schools, AMBA aimed to resolve a lack of awareness in Europe of the importance of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree.

In the 1960s, the MBA was still considered an American tradition, using scientific approaches to management. After pioneering establishments of business studies in the United States such as the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration founded the first MBA program in 1908. Even 60 years later, outside of America, employees were expected to learn by working, rather than prepare with specific business-oriented studies on the graduate level. With the founding of the London Business School and Manchester Business School in the UK, that approach changed.

Of the visitors on September 27, Professor McLaughlin was born in Liverpool, UK, and is a specialist in psychology and business ethics. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield, UK in Spanish language and literature, writing a thesis on the poet Pedro Salinas. The Thammasat University Library owns a copy of Love Poems by Pedro Salinas: My Voice Because of You and Letter Poems to Katherine. It is shelved in the general stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Pedro Salinas (1891 – 1951) was a noted Spanish modernist poet. Fleeing the Fascist regime of General Francisco Franco in the 1930s, Salinas spent many years teaching at American universities. One of his university students before he left Spain was the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, whose works are also in the collection of the TU Library. After investigating the thought processes of the poet Salinas, Professor McLaughlin took an interest in teaching business English, business ethics, human resources, psychosociology, and psychoanalysis and management at the Reims Management School, France, among other institutions of higher learning. His recreational interests are listed as rock music, blues, and jazz, as well as jogging.

Professor Allan K.K. Chan teaches in the Department of Marketing of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). Originally founded in 1956, Hong Kong Baptist College gained university status in 1994 as HKBU. Today consisting of eight faculties, HKBU focuses on teaching and research as well as service to society. Its website states that its vision is

To be a leading liberal arts University in Asia for the world delivering academic excellence in a caring, creative and global culture.

Mission

HKBU is committed to academic excellence in teaching, research and service, and to the development of the whole person in all these endeavours built upon the heritage of Christian higher education.

Professor Chan earned a BBA in marketing from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1977), an MBA from University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Ph.D. from the University of Strathclyde, U.K. He has a diploma in marketing (DipM) from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (U.K.) and a diploma in Christian Studies (DipCS) from the China Graduate School of Theology (Hong Kong). Professor Chan is particularly interested in Chinese brand naming and business ethics. Some of his research is based on the Chinese philosophical concept of Renqing. The Chinese word Renqing might be translated as human sentiment or favour. Renqing means that if someone does you a favor in Chinese society, you are expected to do something in return. If you do not do something in return after receiving a favour, according to traditional Chinese beliefs, this does not follow the concept of Mianzi, or saving face. Mianzi is about personal reputation and dignity in social ad business situations. These terms relate to concepts from Confucianism. Professor Chan has co-authored a study, The Role of Renqing in Mediating Customer Relationship Investment and Relationship Commitment in China, published in Industrial Marketing Management in 2011. Industrial Marketing Management, published by Elsevier, provides research of interest to the marketing scholars and practitioners. In 2012, Professor Chan co-authored an article published in the Harvard Business Review, In China? Pick Your Brand Name Carefully. The article notes:

Choosing a name when taking a product to China is the biggest challenge of all. Chinese has thousands of characters, each with many meanings and with pronunciations that vary from region to region. In the early days of Coke’s introduction in China, for example, shopkeepers advertised the drink using characters that sounded similar to “Coca-Cola” but had nonsensical meanings such as “wax-flattened mare.” To help companies avoid having their brands associated with strange images or messages, we used our research on 100 multinational brands to develop a naming framework that takes into account both meaning and sound. Companies can take one of four tacks, each with its pros and cons. Ideally the Chinese name would have both phonetic and semantic associations with the original—but fewer than a quarter of the companies we studied achieved this branding nirvana.

Professor Chan followed this up with a co-authored article in 2015, How are Brand Names of Chinese Companies perceived by Americans in the Journal of Product and Brand Management. This was an experimental study of Americans’ preferences for the English version of Chinese brand names. The findings:

Our results reveal that shorter brand names and those with semantic relevance to English are perceived as more memorable. We also find that pronounceability of the brand name does influence brand name preference in terms of their meaningfulness, memorability and likeability.

Dr Sukanlaya Sawang, also among the visitors on September 27, is an organisational psychologist and researcher who has lectured on psychology and worked as a consultant and trainer at Chulalongkorn University. Dr. Sukanlaya has taught in Australia and the UK, after receiving a bachelor of science degree from Chiang Mai University, an MA degree in psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, and a Ph.D. in Innovation Management from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, among other degrees. As her website explains,

My research primarily focuses on organisational behaviours, especially in a small business/entrepreneurial context, innovation management and wellbeing.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)