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Letters What Doctoral Shortage? In the article "Perfect Storm," which appeared in the Janu- ary/February issue of BizEd, D. Michael Fields indicates that there is a shortage of management doc- toral students. While this is true in several disciplines, there appears to be less shortage in the areas of operations management and opera- tions research/management science, partially due to the fact that these disciplines are supplied by business, industrial engineering, and applied mathematics doctoral programs. During the 2005 job market, I learned through correspondence with hiring committees that compe- tition for faculty openings in these disciplines is keen. Business schools at the University of Miami and Iowa State University each received more than 50 applications per faculty opening. It is not clear how many of these applicants are experienced faculty versus recent doctoral gradu- ates, but supply appears healthy in this field. William P. Millhiser Visiting Assistant Professor of Operations Weatherhead School of Management Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio Not So Common Good I was pleased to see the article by Louis E. Lataif, "B-Schools and the Common Good," in the March/April issue of BizEd. I was, however, disappointed by the lack of a critically reflective per- spective in the article by Lataif. For example, Lataif appears to argue that outsourcing inevitably creates strong economies in the countries that are the source of lower cost labor. Such an argument ignores the erratic impact of outsourcing in many other countries, particularly those in Central America. At one point Lataif does use the phrase "responsible outsourcing," but he never clarifies what makes outsourcing either responsible or irresponsible. than 120 applications for assistant professorships in these fields; at the University of Utah and the Univer- sity of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, applications for openings in such fields were 170 or more. And at the Wharton School, the depart- ment of operations and information management received more than 250 applications. Operations departments in the smallest schools are receiving more 8 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2006 In a similar manner he highlights the success of Wal-Mart in driving down prices and saving consumers money. Wal-Mart is also routinely the object of great scrutiny for its labor practices and the manner in which it structures its benefits programs to keep many full-time or near full-time employees from having health insurance. Acting as if Wal-Mart is an unmixed blessing is hardly a credible stance. Arguing more, such an uncritical approach seems to imply that these practices will somehow automatically produce a better world. I would argue that business lead- ers must be clear about the need to be intentional in their commitment to "serve the common good," rather than assuming that outsourcing, technology innovation, and global- ization are a panacea for the world's economic ills if we are just patient and wait for good things to happen. George Lehman Chair, Department of Economics, Business Administration and Accounting Director, Bluffton Graduate Programs in Business Howard Raid Professor of Business Bluffton University Bluffton, Ohio that globalization is some kind of inevitable law on a par with gravity suggests a naiveté about the nature of uncertainty in a complex world. My point is not that outsourc- ing, technology innovation, and globalization are bad, but rather that promoting them so uncritically actu- ally weakens rather than strengthens the case for these practices. I would hope that any of our MBA students who have had a good international business course could poke holes in many of Lataif's points. Further-