By Menachem Wecker
When Elizabeth Davis, director of GW’s organizational sciences program, told her comparative management students their course would expose them to other cultures, she was not exaggerating.
This spring, Dr. Davis and her 10 students spent 10 days in Romania and Albania studying Eastern European emerging democracies in a program sponsored by the Office for Study Abroad. The class had a private tour of the Romanian Parliament and visited a variety of sites, including Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, the University of Tirana, the mobile phone company Vodafone Albania and the Romanian Banking Institute.
According to Dr. Davis, both Albania and Romania have been transitioning to free-market economies since emerging from communism in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Romania joined the European Union in 2007, and Albania is “furiously” pushing for membership, so visiting the countries offered a “unique opportunity” to examine countries “in flux after decades of isolation behind the Iron Curtain as they look to compete in the global economy.”
“The trip gave us a window into this development and exposed us to two very interesting and different national cultures,” says Dr. Davis. “One of our objectives was to develop our cultural intelligence and begin to understand how organizations are developing in this complex and highly uncertain environment.”
Some of the other course objectives, according to Dr. Davis, were studying European management practices firsthand and developing an appreciation for the cultural differences between market capitalism and cultures transitioning to the European Union and market-based economies.
“This wasn’t your typical trip to Western Europe,” says Dane D’Alessandro, a second year master’s student in the organizational studies program who participated in the trip. “Even 20 years on, you could sense that the region is clearly still coping with the transition from communism to democratic republics with market-based economies.”
One of the site visits that stood out most in the mind of Mr. D’Alessandro, who is director of program management at the Treasury Department’s Home Affordable Modification Program, was Dracula’s castle.
“We were surprised to discover that the sparsely furnished castle, while certainly majestic, is neither scary nor even imperial when viewed in context of the bucolic Transylvanian countryside,” says Mr. D’Alessandro.
The structure, which was completed in 1382, is formally known as Bran Castle, named for the town of Bran, Transylvania, 30 kilometers from the city of Brasov. The castle is alleged to be the residence of the character Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel but is historically associated with Vlad III (or Vlad the Impaler), prince of Wallachia, who was briefly imprisoned there in 1462.
“We enjoyed the castle tour, which provided amazing views of the surrounding Transylvanian countryside,” says Mr. D’Alessandro. “As we descended, our thoughts turned to a long overdue lunch, rather than bats and vampires!”
In addition to literary and historical characters colliding, the trip also showcased juxtapositions of rural and urban elements.
“We would see a high-rise development, and an elderly man would be herding sheep nearby,” says Annie Moore, a second-year master’s student in the program and an account director at Feinstein Kean Healthcare in D.C.
Despite the proliferation of “Soviet-style” architecture in Albania and Romania, Ms. Moore found both countries have their own style, from Tirana’s “colorful block buildings” to French-influenced architecture in Bucharest, earning it the name Paris of the East.
Though some of the exteriors of the buildings the class encountered looked beautiful, the organizations inhabiting them were struggling to compete with their Western counterparts.
“Both Albanians and Romanians yearn to have a standard of living equivalent to the West, not within another 20 years, but now!” says Ms. Moore. “Over and over we heard that it takes one generation to make a complete change, and the people we met were impatient.”
“You could literally feel the changes taking place in front of you, with modern Western-style high-rises built next to communist-era apartment buildings,” says Mr. D’Alessandro. “I plan to visit again in a few years, because I expect these countries will be completely different places from what we saw on this trip.”