“When we see elephants held by only a small rope tied to their front legs, we wonder why they don’t break away from what they are tied to…”
It started about 200 years ago. The West has since become the center of the world’s economy, culture and politics. Scottish historian and Harvard professor Niall Campbell Ferguson attributes this to six reasons: competition, science, property rights, medicine, a consumer society and work ethic. British historian and Stanford professor Ian Morris, on the other hand, claims that western dominance can be partly attributed to geography. In the 1870’s, when coal was being burned and railroads were being built, an abundant supply of iron, technology and labor was instrumental to America’s economic ascendancy.
One historian quipped, according to a BBC report, that Western dominance might be seen as the “rise to dominance of the new capitalist economic system.” Although this system “unleashed tremendous productive forces on the world, it was based on the global exploitation of the majority of the world’s people by a few.” Other historians claim that Western dominance since the 1800s is an accident, an aberration. Since the start of human civilization, Asia has been in the lead for most of the time, both economically and technologically. Western dominance started during the Industrial Revolution. And the time is about to end.
In 2009, Kishore Mahbubani, now Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National Singapore University (NUS), made a prediction. According to him, after embracing the “pillars of Western Wisdom,” Asia shall overtake the West in the 21st century. In his book The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, Mabubhani observed that there is “a seeming unwillingness of the West to share the power. “Morris strongly supports this prediction. In his book Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, he echoed that “with nations such as China and India flexing their economic muscles, it seems inevitable that global dominance will move east by the end of this century.”
According to a 2016 article in The Economist, western management theories are organized around four basic ideas. These ideas are repeated “ad nauseam in every business book or business conference.” Ironically, these ideas are dead, bearing almost no relation to reality.
One, competition. The most striking business trend today is not competition but consolidation. Since 2008, there has been an average of 30,000 deals a year. A quick browse on the web reveals an increase in mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry. Ironically, in an industry with the most startups, it is dominated by a handful of behemoths. Two, entrepreneurship. Truth is, more companies die than they are born. Based on figures, continued survival is probable only if the company is able to hurdle the first five years. Three, business is getting faster. While information gets around faster, the corresponding increase in bureaucracy and processes negates the momentum gained. And four, globalization. Despite being preached as irreversible, there is a reverse turn as countries like the US, Britain, and China are taking a more nationalist stance.
In most parts of Asia, business school curricula are designed or copied from textbooks written by Western authors. White lecturers and visiting professors are preferred over their Asian counterparts. Citations from US or European journals are given more credence. ISO accreditations are accepted as confirmations of quality. It is seldom questioned if the Western-based curricula and examples fit the local context. No one asks why students have to be herded to attend the lethargic lectures. It is a resignation that research in Asia does not measure up to those done in the West. By accepting western notions of academic standards, we tacitly admit that we have none.
… and the elephant trainer explains, “Well, when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size of rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”
[Note: Most of the information used in this article were culled from dominant Western sources.]
Real Carpio So lectures on strategy and human resource management at the Management and Organization Department of the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. He is also an entrepreneur and a management consultant. He welcomes comments at realwalksonwater@gmail.com. Archives can be accessed at realwalksonwater.wordpress.com.
The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.