Case studies race focus could be changing
The reason? Baker, of Huston-Tillotson University in Texas, says it is partly because case studies almost always focus on white entrepreneurs — who live in a different business world from black business owners.
"Practically all the cases we have are for white-owned businesses," he says.
That could soon change, at least a bit.
Baker was one of several instructors at schools with large minority populations who gathered recently at Babson College, outside Boston, as part of a Ford Motor Co.-funded project to develop more case studies on black-owned businesses. They hope to create a dozen or so that could be worked into curriculums around the country as early as this fall.
Case studies form the backbone of the curriculum for hundreds of thousands of students in undergraduate business and graduate MBA programs. Students work through dozens of these short summaries of real-life dilemmas to simulate business decision-making.
But some teachers say very few capture the complexities of race in business.
"Doing some quick homework, it was about 2 percent," Spinelli says. "I said, 'We know entrepreneurship and we know how to write cases. You know the African-American community. Why don't we bring a group together?' "
In the catalog of Harvard Business School Publishing, which sells 80 percent of the cases used by business schools, just 2.8 percent of the 6,000 available cases deal with race. Of those, a few focus on minority-owned businesses and career issues, but others focus on managerial topics like overseeing a diverse team of workers, marketing to minorities and handling discrimination complaints.
The professors working with Babson say they have not found much that is relevant to the typical black entrepreneur.
According to a 2002 Babson study, blacks are 50 percent more likely than whites to become entrepreneurs — that is, to start a business. Among men with advanced degrees such as MBAs, blacks are 2.6 times as likely to start businesses.
But the companies they form tend to be smaller, community-based organizations rather than the tech startups with venture capital funding that figure prominently in published cases.
Last month, with Baker and other visiting professors observing, Spinelli conducted a test-run of one case the group is developing with a Babson MBA class. The case focused on Babson alumnus Eric Johnson, who ran a family hair-care products business and later turned an ice cream maker with roots in Chicago's black community into a national food company.
Recent comments
your are right;i am moroocan and i study business
madi dinia | Oct. 10, 2007 at 5:42 p.m.
