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Business and trade, along with the development of arts and crafts, have always offered wonderful opportunities for interaction between different people, customs, and cultures. Doing business and trading, people needed effective means of communication to manage their businesses and administer related institutions. Folk wisdom has treasured, from a popular prospective, this language of business—over all natural, cultural, and language obstacles—in its extremely concentrated but self-explanatory form: proverbs. Surprisingly, the relatively new principles of business management and entrepreneurship have quite interesting correspondents in peoples’ oral culture as proverbs. Certain proverbs distil people’s experiences from diverse business situations, management positions, and entrepreneurial standpoints, regardless of country of origin, hence their universal and global value. As part of more extensive work on the above subject, as well as a base for comparative studies, this paper is the first research work to illustrate how elements of global management culture are reflected in proverbs. Hence, a number of proverbs are analyzed and their educative value emphasized as cases or examples in business, management, and entrepreneurship education. This paper tries to set off the almost unexplored and challenging potential of proverbs to be used as teaching aids, while working with both undergraduate students (mainly) and international students. Moreover, this paper aims at analyzing the correspondence between Romanian and Portuguese proverbs (as two countries of similar cultural background—Latin), as far as the way they reflect the elements of business, management, and entrepreneurship. Illustrative examples are analyzed according to 21 different key-issues of business, management, and entrepreneurship (7 for each). The major conclusions are these: (i) all 21 principles are covered by proverbs in both languages; (ii) there is an astonishingly high degree of correlation between Romanian and Portuguese proverbs: out of a sample of 30 Romanian proverbs on business, management and entrepreneurship issues, 28 have Portuguese counterparts. A good part of this paper is based on previous research (Scarlat, 2008a, 2008b). |
