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The impact of cultural and lingual context on modern clinical patient health
care can be considerable. "Words and language can be ambiguous and some
words give offense. It is one thing when this type of miscommunication is
easily noticed, it is quite another when the damage takes a year or more to
repair, cannot be repaired, or worst of all, when the patient's health is
affected..."
New Lingua Franca Upsets the French :
"That the French resent the global supremacy of the English language is
nothing new, but a newly evolved business-speak version is taking over... [and
yet] if Globish really does take over the planet with its stunted
business-speak... its culture-less access-for-all availability, then where does
that leave the real English?"
Charmant mit klarer Ansage :
Emotionen im Job sind unprofessionell? Nicht für Franzosen. Wie passen "Savoir
vivre" und strenge Hierarchien zusammen, und wie sollen Deutschen sich
orientieren?
Book Review:
Conflicting Landscapes: American
Schooling/Alaska Natives . "When
it comes down to the education of Alaska Native children, the system has a
long way to go before it can close the curtain on statistics that reveal
academic under-performance and high dropout and suicide rates year after
year". With the first two sections of the book chronicling the authors'
experiences, the sidebars feature stories that highlight varying interactions
and observations among teachers, administrators, and students and parents.
The conflict in urbanised Indian centers surrounding so-called pub culture
recently set off two weeks of shouting matches on TV talk shows and editorial
pages. In worst cases,
young women have become increasingly
targeted by mob attacks in the latest
battle in the Great Indian Culture Wars.
The recent "shoe attack" on former President Bush served as a reminder that
every culture has its unique insults ,with
its hand gestures, verbal expressions, often arcane behaviour such as that
involving flying footwear.
Book Review:
Innocents Abroad .
In his book, NYU professor Jonathan Zimmermann provides insights into the
experiences of American teachers abroad as purveyors of American soft power
that sustained American 20th century imperialism. Zimmermann's central
question "what did these young Americans make of their mission?" leads to some
challenging, surprising and politically sensitive answers.
In 2009, companies will be forced to juggle expatriates and their families
worldwide. Will companies around the world be able to find the ideal globally
competent employee? Once found, what will it take to retain this employee? How
have expatriate-family dynamics and needs changed from the classic model?
Balancing these three key issues is a major challenge for
HR executives worldwide today and will
remain so for a long time to come as trends of a global talent shortage
continue.
Cultural Sensitivity can Tame the Tough Customer : A new study shows where a
customer comes from - namely the impact of uncertainty avoidance - plays a
role on how the perception of a service drives customer satisfaction.
to the
pitfalls of cross-cultural communication.
Hein van Oorshot, President of Tilburg Uiversity, The Netherlands,
delivers a speech for the opening of the academic
year 2008-2009 . In his
address he positions European universities at the spearhead of change, to steer
the continent away from growing intolerance and nationalism, and towards new,
modern concepts of integration and a balanced humanism of knowledge and values
with historical roots in a common European cultural heritage tradition.
The LPGA set itself up last year for a "sucker punch", not for the first but
second time in the last two years, when it unilaterally imposed a tournament
policy to
suspend players with insufficient English
language skills . Given how
globalized the sporting marketplace has become through sponsorship and
technology, the ensuing serious "valuable feedback" and economic
backlash from a variety of constituencies within the complex LPGA community
were entirely predictable and avoidable, had a higher level of cultural respect
been maintained.
The recent movie "Babel", shot by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu
and set in Mexico with an international cast of characters is
one of several recent "nomadic films"
that have set the template for crossing borders and working in a transnational
mix of languages, genres and cultures. While any attempt to mix cultures in
cinema carries with it many risks for film makers and the market, it is a
source of tension that is increasingly not automatically viewed as negative.
On the eve of the first-ever European Commission's communication on
multilingualism, a Dutch academic has put a cat amongst the pigeons in the
debate of whether multilingualism is a bridge or barrier to international
dialogue by
describing language diversity as a "damned
pain in the neck" .
Foreigners and immigrants enticed to Australia by the lure of open country and
a bountiful job market often come up against
the difficulty
of having "no local experience" . For
many, the conservatism of hiring and the structure of the Australian economy -
rooted in the historical isolation of the country and risk-aversion of
predominantly small-medium businesses - throw up unexpected barriers that make
it difficult for newcomers to get jobs in a different cultural environment.
Expatriate assignments are important for multinational companies and may be a
source of competitive edge. Managers going overseas perceive their experience
as an opportunity to develop individual competencies that render their careers
"boundaryless". Yet, the HR challenge remains in how to
adequately support expat managers once they are
abroad, how to evaluate their performance objectively in accordance to the
particularities of the situation and culture, and fold that experience back
into the dynamic of the company at home.
Finally a first family that gives non-North Americans
a
look at the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic reality of North American
families
that is rarely represented in media to the rest of the world. More than simply
the first "black" or "African-American" president of the U.S.,
Barack Obama is the first president to more than just a black and white view
of the immigrant experience of North America, indeed of the world today that
brings so many people together to re-define the look of many countries. Here's
the word "mixed" finally entering the world's consciousness and active
vocabulary!
(in German) looks at
Jürgen Klinsmann who, for a man who has one of the most high-profile public
roles in German national sport, however, injects a decidedly "un-German"
spirit into his training philosophy.
When is an university degree not enough?
Wenn der
Universitätsabschluss nichts mehr wert ist
(in German) looks at the challenges foreigners to EU countries face on the job
market, despite solid academic qualifications and field experience.
"Nothing is as simple as black and white." In our endeavor to avoid appearing
reductive and unsuperficial, we are quick to repeat this mantra disclaimer,
even as we often do exactly that when interacting with other
people.
Crossing the Cultural Divide: A Personal Story of
Angst looks at the
experience of one mixed race American, whose personal story illustrates how
interpersonal communication to be hampered daily by ill-informed and
stereotypical boxed thinking regarding racial/ethnic appearance and identity.
In the heated run-up to the US elections in Novemeber, debates, discussions
and polls have concentrated on how each candidate is faring in winning "the
black vote", "the Hispanic vote", or simply the all-encompassing "immigrant
vote". What of the Native Americans?
Opportunities
abound for new prez takes a look at
what opportunities present themselves to the perspective candidates as they
present different interpretations of Native sovereignty, self-governance and
self-determination.
This article
in a Spanish online publication takes a look at how a general under-valuing of
cross-cultural communication awareness issues and consequential skills
training is undercutting an entire nation's potential success in international
business.
Even in cultures whose core values and behaviours are fundamentally different,
common ground exists, and it is often a matter of knowing where to look and
how to build on it. In the current climate of political and religious tensions
that divide many nations and parts of the world,
Arab
Culture And Muslim Stereotypes
looks at how in particular Western media's repetitious use of negative
stereotyping and imagery of Arab culture and Muslims tends to further entrench
misunderstandings, and mutual suspicions. In the interest of breaking down
barriers and prejudices what needs to be understood of the differences between
cultures and what can be built upon the foundations of similarities that can
be recognised when looking beyond the stereotype?
,
2 ,
3 ,
4 ,
5 ,
6 ,
7 )
from diversityinc.com take a good look at a few race/diversity awareness issues that are rarely addressed in European media: the
potential faux pas that can arise in social dialogue when one assumes that
racial/ethnic appearance is an automatic indicator of nationality. These
articles examine the offence that can be given by such an "innocent"
question as "Where do you really come from?" Despite the many
cultural/ethnic mixtures that the globalised village produces, our
sensibilities and skills in how to appropriately ask about them often reveal
themselves to be not only wanting, but also to reflect quite simple cognitive
structures of classification.
Despite Japan's traditional buffetlike inclusion of diverse religions, a
confluence of factors is leading to an
accelerated decline
in the practice of traditional Buddhism .
This article
takes a look at how brand positioning is different in different parts of the
world, and how this has enabled McDonalds' European operations president to
transform this region into the surprising top performing market of the brand.
How similar and different are geographic neighbours from each other? The
Austrian-German divide is
another example of where real degrees of communication differences can be
distorted by the lense of history.
This article
looks at the recent interfaith conference hosted by Saudia Arabia in Madrid
from the perspective of the lone Jewish participant, who nonetheless believes
dialogue is a necessary step to reaching understanding.
'Field Trip'
takes a look at the growing number of journalism school initiatives in the US
that send students abroad for an immersion course in the skills and
experience needed for international corresponding reporting.
of her African experience to school children following a 2-year stint
with the Peace Corp.
Schweigsame Chinesen
(in German) looks at the frequent phenomenon at many universities
where Chinese students are often the "silent majority".
I'm more than just a comedian, says Dashan
features the Canadian comedian, raconteur, and cultural mediator, Mark
Rowswell, who, known widely in China simply as "Dashan" (or "Big
Mountain"), has uniquely positioned himself to promoting better
cross-cultural communication between China and Canada.
International ads don Indian colours
looks at the successful "glocalisation" of global brands for local
Indian markets and how the growth of user-generated discourse on the
internet has created a "bottom-up"-driven development of local
marketing strategies.
This article
describes another example of the challenge of globalising Arab brands
in a comparatively uncompetitive market dominated traditionally by
family-owned monopolies.
IC "Onions" understand all too well that a smile doesn't say the same
thing everywhere!
This short tidbit
tells us that German psychologists have now warned "professional
smilers" that too much smiling can cause stress.
The
Needham question : How
did it come to pass that a civilisation with such a history of
inventiveness and scholarship and intellectual curiosity failed to
make the leap into the modern world of science? Why did the industrial
revolution take off in Europe and not China? One of the hard scholarly
questions that still remains to be decisively cracked. But this
article looks closer at the man who rose to the challenge rather than
the enduring unanswered question.
This article looks at the
spread of mobile phones in Namibia and how this is causing a cultural
shift in the oral communication tradition.
In this issue
of an ongoing series of articles on cross-cultural communication in
the Middle East context, this article takes a look at how the American
military security issues are bound together with cross-cultural
considerations when nurturing professional relationships. The aim is
not necessarily to acquire a penetrating intellectual understanding of
“culture” as an abstraction but to understand and deal with the
behaviour that is encountered and offer succinct guidance.
These articles take a look at the issues that arise when cross-cultural training is undertaken between certain pairs of cultures:
Cultural Empathy Doesn’t Need Your Sympathy 
looks at how cultures from both sides of a spectrum need to adjust
their expectations and critical perspectives to both the other as well
as their own cultural context.
You say potato, I say potato
looks specifically at the questions facing Germans and Indians working
in teams that span international boundaries. Is it effective to work
with people from other cultures if cultural and linguistic issues make
working in teams stressful and difficult? Can companies do even better
than what they are doing? Are teams that rarely or never meet in
person as effective as colleagues who meet regularly and clarify tasks
either in a boardroom or just over an informal cup of tea?
Two longer articles take a more academic look at
transcultural nursing ,
and the
early infant sensitivity to eye gaze
and other social signals of emotional expression which may lay the
foundation for the later development of more sophisticated social
skills.
.
Whether you are an engineer working in the oil and gas industry in Africa, or
an executive banker providing micro-financing to villages in Fiji, working
across cultural borders is a challenge. The need to recruit, develop, and rely
on local staff requires managers and others in leadership positions to be
constantly aware that what they consider neutral technical issues can often be
perceived by locals to be cultural issues. Especially in industries that rely
on government institutions and national company relations, awareness and skill
in dealing with cultural differences can mean success or failure. Here are a
few tips from the field:
Cross wired? Avoid the pitfalls of
working across cultures ,
Pitfalls abound in foreign fields ,
Around the world around the clock
The medical profession is also a sector where there is an awareness of the
importance of cultural awareness and skills in a multicultural setting, not
only in terms of doctor-patient relationships, but also in the physician's
ability to identify
culture-based barriers to effective
physical and mental health care .
This
interesting article from The Psychiatric Times looks at
such barriers as socio-economic disparities, stigma, poor health education,
etc., which lead to the avoidance of or underuse of mental health care services
by minority or immigrant youth in the US.
This articles
takes a look at how one school in San Diego is rising to the challenge of
improving the integration of immigrant children from East Africa by also
developing cultural guides for immigrant parents.
In the wake of recent world critical reactions to China's reaction to
pro-Tibetan protests, Chinese students abroad are suddenly confronted with
very different media coverage and public opinions of their country that they
have seldom heard of through their own media. This particular product of
globalization - open critical exchange by everyone about everything - is one
that can prove more difficult to transfer across cultures than others:
Chinese Student in U.S. Is Caught in Confrontation ,
Chinese Students in U.S. Fight View of Their Home
The rules dictating meeting and marrying in the Saudi tradition can have very
little to do with romance. But even young Saudis, steeped in their own
traditions of going through the proper channels of communication that lead to
wedded bliss, can nonetheless still find themselves straddling the divide of
what the heart seeks and what culture forbids .
The intensified airport immigration security measures since 9/11 sometimes
lead to heavy-handed treatment of foreigners who get inadvertently caught up
in a bureaucratic tangle of paperwork errors. Even for visitors from
visa-waiver first world countries, the more than 60 grounds for finding
someone inadmissible to the US can prove to be harrowing,
as one Italian experienced .
East is East and West is West, and the difference between them is even
starting to turn up on
brain scanners .
In a reversal of the traditional wave of cultural
migration ,
an increasing number of people from many other countries are going to India to
work, especially from information technology companies, and discovering that
successful adjustment to other cultures requires one to understand people
first, rather than being understood first.
is an introductory overview
of the main issues that impact and perpetuate the long-standing rivalry
between China and Japan. Where are the roots to this unique relationship, how
do the conflicts operate on many levels, and inevitably, are they
reconcilable? Are there elements in each country with an agenda to continue a
destabilise efforts at reconciliation? Prof. Gurtov suggests a concerted
combination of options - governmental, non-governmental,
popular/civil-society), business, workshops, conferences - which could bring
the parties together in a cooperative network of common ground on which their
future paths together depend.
2008, the designated International Year of Languages and the European Year of
Intercultural Dialogue, has the Australians continuing their re-examination of
the current challenges they confront in creating a unique national identity
based on cultural diversity... an urgent reality essentially faced by all
immigrant cultures. To counteract the encroaching trend towards monolingualism
in Australia,
the country is now trying to institutionalise
bilingualism as both
a stool for communication and a symbol of the diversity in the national
Australian identity.
How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Working Across Cultures
looks at some of the difficultues that arise due to different cultural
approaches to work that we are often not fully aware of, or entirely
overlook. For example, why do some cultures take so long to respond to your
enquiries? What is considered a "good working relationship"? And how is that
relationship built up? How is power perceived? Is face loss an issue? How
does one handle dubious requests? What drives "good teamwork" in different
cultures?
While you all know our wariness when it comes to "happy little checklists",
there are doubtless certain general principles to bear in mind when engaging
in cross-cultural communication.
This article gives
you an overview of some tips to consider when identifying some potential
conflict interfaces in cross-cultural dialogue.
Best Practices for Improving the Cross-Cultural Competency
of Offshore Teams
offers a snapshot of how Indian companies are grappling with the training of
their offshore staff to deal with American business and leadership styles at
more substantive, core values-based level.
Jingju or Peking Opera looks at
the challenge of finding the "perfect" English translation for often less
tangible foreign ideas or characteristics without losing or compromising their
cultural integrity.
And last but not least, in the spirit of Valentine's Day,
Europe's heart puts cross-cultural love to the test
takes a humorous look at the charming side of the cultural and lingual mix-ups
that is a characteristic of international relationships.
features a profile on
the background and activities of Kenyan Virginia Wangare Greiner, whose social
work in Germany over the last 20 years to address issues of integration,
health and the African family has made her a major driving force in enhancing
cooperation and harmony between Germany and Africa.
European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008 looks at the multimillion Euro
campaign to make 2008 the "year of intercultural dialogue", aimed at fostering
better understanding and communication between the diverse crowd that makes up
European citizens.
Facing up to contact looks at
cross-cultural sensitivity and awareness about body language, specifically eye
contact, one of the most important, and tricky non-verbal language vocabulary
for the global communicator to master.
No joke! Wisecracks benefit workplace takes a look at the difficulties
of carrying humour across cultures, and the well-known pitfalls awaiting
insensitive jokers. Nonetheless, the article also examines the potentially
meaningful impact of context-appropriate humour on cohesiveness in the
workplace and communication quality among workers that is built on common
ground or shared identity.
"Speaking English" harder than just speaking English
offers another humourous anecdotal look at the "myth" of a neutral
"international English": the difficulties of communicating, even in the same
language, with people from other cultures with different cultural contexts of
meaning. Can managers speaking English as a second or third language truly be
effective leaders of those from other countries and cultures?
EuroTopics is a daily
press review of selected articles, compiled by editors and correspondents who
sift out the most important newspapers from 28 European states (EU and
Switzerland) and deliver excerpts from opinion articles, reflections, essays
and commentaries, This portal provides a very interesting comparative overview
of how the same issues are reported and debated differently around
Europe. What issues move one country and hardly register a blip in another?
What are considered issues of national honour for some cultures and merely
matters of personal opinion in others?
Mind Matters: Culture Shock
looks at both the often mundane day to day challenges and academic hurdles
faced by people moving abroad for study, work or travel. These may include
adjusting to different teaching and learning styles, acquiring the mechanics
of a foreign language, building new relationships in the new social and
academic environment according to very different rules, and dealing with not
only the expected psychological barriers of culture shock but the often
unexpected wall of reverse culture shock when one returns home.
Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian
Return Migration in Transnational Perspective (ISBN 0231128398), by Takeyuki
Tsuda, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Dr. Tsuda also writes a great 7-page article on his experience researching
this topic for his doctoral dissertation, which you can find
here
It's an interesting look at how in many ways he, as the observer who is himself a nikkeijin becomes as much the observed, as he finds himself also the stranger "returnee" to the disorienting land of his ancestors. Undergoing constant paradigm shifting of perspectives, he distils in his book the very essence of the paradoxical transnational experience, of belonging everywhere and yet curiously nowhere. The specifically Japanese-Brazilian experience described here therefore appeals to all those who have crossed borders, but explores additionally the much trickier racial divide, that adds to the projections, expectations and assumptions that can further burden cross-cultural dialogue.
Another very interesting
article is by Hans
A.H.C de Wit, a Dutch IC consultant ad manager living in Istanbul, who writes
of his experience mediating between Turkish and European business partners,
and specifically of the IC challenge that face both partners of the
relationship.
Another article takes an inside
look at the intercultural communication training itself as a growing
"industry", and features commentaries by such well-known consultants as
Richard Lewis, who some of you may already be familiar with from our reading
list. It takes a look at how the training approach can/must often be quite
different depending on the cultural group being trained or the cultural region
in which one is teaching, a question I am frequently asked by workshop
participants. Given that Richard Lewis is the main interviewee of the article
and that Finland is one of his cultural specialities, much of the article
looks at the communications of Finns, the IC challenges they face in working
with other cultural clusters, and their reception of IC training.
From The Jakarta Post comes an
article
on a particular characteristic feature of certain ethno-linguistic groups in
eastern Indonesia, specifically how the central cultural concept of
reciprocity (yes, THAT word again!) plays out on the lingual level in
indigenous vocabulary. In other words, in the "language of drama" of
reciprocal gratitude and face-giving, why is a mere "thank you" simply not
enough?
We'd think that of all cultural products, comics and cartoons are some of the
most culturally transferable products we have, truly globalised in their
appeal as McDonalds, as born out in the universal appeal of the Peanuts,
Spiderman, and Hello Kitty. But when do even comics and cartoons cross the
cultural line?
The
article takes a
look at the extraordinary power that comics and animation have and how it can
be harnessed as a tool and used as a medium for the exchange of cultural
ideas, and thus to bridge cultural gaps.
And finally,
revisit the issue of "global
English" and the hidden conflicts therein as we have looked at in the seminar,
when for example, "German-English" talks to native "English-English" or
"Japanese-English". The article looks at the challenges other than correct
grammar, such as navigating local accents, colloquial expressions, different
cultural associations with certain words (e.g. what constitutes "clear" or a
"committed" yes), giving critical feedback and instructions, expressing
sarcasm, etc. The point is of course not to only learn vocabulary and grammar
but the cultural context in which dialogue is exchanged, and to understand how
to use language to inspire and persuade.
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