Page 19 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

upon a number of disciplines not necessarily only with the aim of producing an integrated approach to problems, but with a view to generate perspectives”, as well as contribute overall to the “body of knowledge” in Organisational studies.
After the completion of the educational trajectory for the Degree of Master of Business Administration (MBA) based on the Action Learning approach (BSN/MCI) in 1994, a desire for the continuation of exploration into intriguing issues in the area of international management and international business, already touched in the MBA programme, has been manifest and grounded in a severe curiosity. However, the previously considered enrolment in a PhD programme was refrained from, since an orientation to predominated academic goals and a research process guided by a narrow and closely defined structure was considered as being inappropriate for a research in practitioner’s management and business environments. As a practitioner, the route provided by a project-based research trajectory, as included in a Professional Doctorate study, leading to the Degree of “Doctor of Business Administration” (DBA) seemed the most preferable and supposedly the most beneficial for involved clients, partner- consultants, my professional development and the “body of knowledge” in general. Not being an academic by education but driven by curiosity and ambition, I embarked on the research journey with the aim of providing insights on the cross-border learning relations, which proved to be difficult and challenging at the same time.
Over the past years, I have been struggling with my research for DBA. Extended travel for business, managerial and social obligations caused large intermediate interruptions in the process of the research. The research was a sideline in my daily activities as an internationally operating consultant and a founder and a managing partner of Orange Business Improvement, which is an Alliance of Independent International Business Consultants. As a result, time spent for the research was rather limited. It took me thirteen years to reduce my daily involvement in the consultancy practice and to be able to devote the most part of my time on completing the study and the dissertation, expected to be finalised in the summer of 2017.
Glossary of Terms
• Competitive advantage: A superior position, established by an organisation when it is able to provide a better “value for money” compared with the competitors through differentiation (researcher’s definition). Competitive advantages are attributed to a variance of conditions e.g. quality of products or services, brand
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