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Business Professor Wins International Teaching Grant

Musa Pinar, an associate professor of marketing in Valparaiso University’s College of Business Administration, has won a grant from Rotary International and will receive support for teaching activities in Turkey next summer.

Pinar will spend three months in Turkey, where he will teach marketing courses at Bilkent University in Ankara and visit several cities in central and south central Turkey to give presentations on basic marketing concepts to business executives and managers.

“I think it will be very beneficial for business people in Turkey to see marketing from an American perspective,” Pinar said. “Marketing has been a big challenge for Turkish companies as the nation seeks to become a more developed economy.”

The Rotary grants are awarded to support teaching activities in developing nations and build international understanding. Pinar was sponsored for the $12,500 grant by Roy Austensen, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valpo and a member of the Valparaiso Rotary Club. Pinar has spent the past several years conducting research on perceptions of gender in developing and managing sales forces both in the United States and in emerging markets.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, his research shows that businesses looking for good salespeople—even in emerging markets where workforce and management positions have long been dominated by men—can profit by forgetting gender stereotypes.

His studies have looked at gender perceptions of salespersons in the United States, Turkey and Tajikistan.

In 2007, Pinar received the Best Presenter Award at the Global Business and Economic Research Conference in Istanbul for a study on gender perceptions in Tajikistan.

Rotary grants for university teachers are awarded to university faculty members to teach in developing nations. Since 1985, grants totaling more than $4 million have allowed more than 430 professors to share their expertise with institutions of higher education and businesspeople in these countries.