Showing papers on "Intercultural learning published in 1995"

Experiential Activities for Intercultural Learning

Abstract: The need for new approaches, methods, and techniques in cross-cultural training and intercultural education are virtually insatiable, especially for experiential activities. The emphasis in this book is on activities that foster the development of intercultural awareness and cross-cultural sensitivity, helping learners understand some of the principal dimensions of intercultural communication, cross-cultural human relations, and cultural diversity. The selections include simulations, case studies, role plays, critical incidents, and individual and group exercises. A number address relatively complex workplace issues; others focus on intercultural dynamics in educational contexts. Some are printed here for the first time; others are culled from less accessible sources. They range from basic introductory activities to those that facilitate the exploration of intercultural issues in significant depth. In an introductory essay, Sheila Ramsey, an experienced scholar and trainer, examines the nature of intercultural training and lays out a conceptual framework for assessing its effectiveness. The rest of the book is made up of activities organized around six facets of intercultural contact: cultural differences for beginners, understanding oneself as a cultural person, the intercultural perspective, working across cultures, cross-cultural "foul-ups," and returning home. Each section opens with an introduction, followed by activities. Each activity includes, at a minimum, objectives, audience, materials required, setting, time required, and procedure for facilitation. Many of the activities include handouts or illustrations. This book will be especially valuable for trainers and educators who want to further ground their work in a solid theoretical base and at he same time augment their resources to expand heir repertoire.

Globalising Organisations and Empowering People for High Performance Leadership of Our Multicultural World: Or, Behold, The Demise of Business‐as‐usual is at Hand

Abstract: Reviews, from an anthropological perspective, three 1993 additions to the Gulf Publishing Company's “Managing Cultural Differences” Series. This trilogy is comprised of the volumes Developing the Global Organization: Strategies for Human Resource Professionals, Transcultural Leadership: Empowering the Diverse Workforce, and Multicultural Management: New Skills for Global Success. Examines the five concepts of globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism, transcultural, and empowerment central to the trilogy and to anthropology, and as they are used in both. Views the global paradox — a bigger world economy requires the more powerful smallest of players (e.g., entrepreneurs) — as a useful framework for understanding these and related concepts as they operate in the global village today, and as they may be employed throughout and beyond the 21st century. Finally, reports on: (1) the training, transformation and development tasks of global managers of complexity in business as well as in government, academia, and the military; and, (2) the intercultural learning strategies through which these tasks are achieved and through which these managers, the multicultural workforce and teams they lead, and their organisations are empowered to contribute, collaborate and fully participate in producing their major project: Service, country, group, business, or social structure through the mixture of peoples or technology” (p. 242). This suggests a process, a becoming. In Developing the Global Organization, Robert T. Moran, Philip R. Harris and William G. Stripp continue that globalisation is both a way to think and to act. Specifically, it moves individuals “away from parochialism towards transnationalism”. And it nurtures a state of mind geared toward a more effective use of personal and organisational resources (p. 299).