The Research Institute for Industrial Economics (IFN), The Leverhulme Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy and CIBER at Michigan State University has arranged a workshop on globalization and labor markets. Trade models with heterogeneous firms have been a major focus of research for the past decade. More recently, some trade theorists have begun to enrich these models by incorporating heterogeneity in the labor market as well. Such research holds the potential to uncover connections between the nexus of worker and firm decisions with characteristics of the global environment. The idea of the workshop was to bring together a small group of theorists who are working on such models with empiricists who are familiar with matched worker-firm data sources.

This special interest group of the AMA has a long history of partnership with the annual UIC Marketing and Entrepreneurship Research Symposium. At this year's Research Symposium, we are instituting a consortium for doctoral students to encourage and guide students who are considering or are researching the intersecting domains of marketing and entrepreneurship. Doctoral students selected for the consortium will have their Symposium fees waived, have complimentary meals during the official portion of the Consortium and the Symposium, and have a portion of their hotel expenses subsidized.

The theme of this year's Conference "Bridging with the Other" could hardly be more relevant to the world and to the context of international business in 2004. The programme assembled by Nakiye and her colleagues looks fantastic and highly relevant to both the theory and practice of international business as we enter the new Millennium. I am sure that the sessions will be provocative and stimulating and that we will leave Stockholm with our horizons widened and our understanding deepened.