The U.S. economy slouched toward recession when Nicole Woolsey Biggart joined the University of California, Davis, business faculty in 1981.

Now, as the 61-year-old economic sociologist prepares to step down in July as dean of the university's Graduate School of Management, the economy is slumping again.

Visitors to her "silver sage" office (a "chill-out color," Biggart says) see mementoes from her global travels: an abacus from China, an Iranian vase. A rack filled with bottles of wine made by former students sits next to the door.

During a recent hourlong conversation, Biggart covered everything from education to Wall Street and the U.S. auto industry:

How has teaching at the university changed over the years?

The methods have changed. When I started you stood in front of a class and lectured, then you stopped and answered questions. Now plenty of learning is done in other ways and outside of the classroom. We have a lot of students who do projects. They learn from each other. We do team-based training.

The basics of business education still fall into the same categories: finance, accounting, marketing, organizational behavior and so forth. But the actual content of what's inside those categories has changed. In the '80s and '90s there was a real move toward the internationalization of the curriculum. We were interested in what the Japanese were doing.

It's now much more about globalization, looking at the entire world and flows of capital and companies across borders.

How have business students changed?

It's a much more international student body. California has had so much immigration. And we also recruit students from around the globe. We send our admissions staff to India, China, South America. What we teach in the classroom and the ways we teach it have changed because of that.

And this generation of students has become very, very interested in social entrepreneurship and sustainability. Business education is seen as playing a leading role in transforming global business in that way.

How has faculty changed?

Faculty is also extraordinarily diverse. We have several from Southeast Asia. We have French-speaking faculty.

We also have several more women. I was the only woman here for a long time. Today about a third of our faculty are women. About 30 percent of our students are women. More women are going into business. That's consistent with other professional programs here.

What are the up-and-coming career areas for business students?

I see tremendous opportunity in making people aware of alternative energy and energy efficiency.

Here's an example: How do you market an energy from a sustainable source vs. energy that comes from a non-sustainable source? Answering business questions like this will be tremendously important as we start to make these lifestyle and business shifts.

You've studied foreign businesses, including the car industry in South Korea and elsewhere. What do you see down the road for U.S. auto makers?

There's going to be a renaissance of alternatives to the combustion engine that will mimic what happened when cars were first invented. There were electric cars, steam-driven cars. There was no dominant design. We may see some regression back to chaos before we lock in on new alternate ways of getting around.

Some people look at the auto industry and other parts of the economy and conclude it's the end of American global dominance.

Well, I wouldn't give up on the U.S. just yet. One of the truly amazing things about our country is the willingness to take risks. That spirit does not exist in many other places.

I teach in Italy every year, I can tell you risk taking isn't big in Europe, for example.

In countries where failure causes embarrassment and shame you don't see people sticking their necks out, trying something to see if it will work. Here, we don't have a problem with that. We just pick ourselves up again. American culture, the belief that you can try something and fail and try again, is almost unique in the world.

What about China?

The Chinese are very entrepreneurial, but they do it differently. They network together as family and friends to absorb risks, but there aren't many other places in the world that have the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that we have.

What are business historians going to say about 2008? Will this be a benchmark year like 1893 or 1929? Or does that kind of talk overinflate the significance of what's going on right now?

I'm not a finance specialist, so I can't say how this probable recession is going to compare to depressions or recessions in the past. But it will be one of those memorable moments. A lot of money is being lost. We are seeing a cataclysmic disruption in our financial system, no doubt about it.

On the other hand, there are a lot of opportunities out there right now. Everything is on sale, from General Electric stock to houses. People will make money as they always do when times are tough.

What lasting changes will we see from the markets' shake-out over the last few months?

What we'll see is a resurgence of government in the economy. Not that we're going to approach becoming a socialist economy, but government's role as rule maker and rule keeper is going to come back.

We historically swing between little regulation to a lot of regulation, and probably appropriately so. In this next cycle there's going to be more regulation going on in the financial markets.

We saw the same kind of thing a few years ago when accounting rules tightened after Enron got out of whack. The problems surfaced with many other companies. People weren't responsible or accountable and now those things are demanded. We're going to see more of that in our financial markets.

Call The Bee's Jon Ortiz, (916) 321-1043.