The Role of Politics and Culture in French Business
11:00 a.m., Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006
Cornell Auditorium in Plaster Hall
Admission: free

No matter which political party is in office, France is essentially a socialist state. In this discussion, Dr. Mary McKinley covered the positive and negative impacts that this form of government has on doing business. For example, in international rankings of national competitiveness, France is falling farther and farther behind, largely because there is a strong tendency for everyone to wait for the government to “do something.” Entrepreneurism is stifled and change happens slowly. At the same time, government intervention in protecting the rights and responsibilities of both employee and employer makes working in French companies exceptionally fair and rewarding.

Dr. Mary McKinley is a professor of marketing at the Ecole Superieur de Commerce et Management (ESCEM) in Tours, France, where she is in charge of courses in strategic marketing, international marketing, green marketing, and consumer behavior. From 1992 to 2002, she lived in Budapest, Hungary and taught marketing, negotiations and conflict resolution, organizational communications, and business ethics at the International Management Center, the University of Economics and Pazmany Peter Catholic University. She is presently an adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest, where she teaches each summer. Dr. McKinley has had a long career in marketing and communications in such diverse fields as architecture, marketing research, public relations, higher education, politics, and environment. She has also worked for several agencies of the United Nations, USAID, and the European Commission. In 1996, the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva commissioned her to design the first WWW-based distance education university. Her work has taken her to more than 20 countries.