In 1993 I served as a Fulbright Scholar in the Arabian Gulf. Having little prior knowledge of the area, I was eager to learn as much as possible about the people, their history, their values, and the state of marketing in the region. I was warmly welcomed and found that my faculty colleagues, graduate students, and other local professionals were as enthusiastic as I was about the modernization of marketing practices. This Special Issue was inspired, to a large degree, by the enthusiasm for marketing that I found among the business people and students of Bahrain.
For those readers who are unfamiliar with the Gulf region, it is surprisingly close to the Indian sub-continent in terms of "psychic distance." This international marketing concept describes the degree of familiarity or "comfort" that a member of one culture experiences when visiting another culture or when dealing with foreign nationals. Thus, the greater the feeling of familiarity and comfort, the smaller the psychic distance is said to be. In addition to Western expatriates in the Gulf, there are many workers (at all levels of professional training) who originate from the Indian sub-continent, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Also wellrepresented are nationals from other Arab nations and the Pacific Rim. The region is truly a cross-road for travelers from many countries. It was the strikingly cosmopolitan character of the Gulf as a marketplace that first suggested to me the need for further study, not