Mutual Intercultural Relations


Book Description

By examining intercultural relations in seventeen societies, this book answers the fundamental question: 'how shall we all live together?'




Communication Across Cultures


Book Description

Communication Across Cultures remains an excellent resource for students of linguistics and related disciplines, including anthropology, sociology and education. It is also a valuable resource for professionals concerned with language and intercultural communication in this global era.




Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life, and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities


Book Description

This book generates a fresh, complex view of the process of globalization by examining how work, scholarship, and life inform each other among intercultural scholars as they navigate their interpersonal relationships and cross boundaries physically and metaphorically. Divided into three parts, the book examines: (1) the socio-psychological process of crossing boundaries constructed around nations and work organizations; (2) the negotiation of multiple aspects of identities; and (3) the role of language in intercultural encounters, in particular, adjustment taking place at linguistic and interactional levels. The authors reflect upon and give meaning and structure to their own intercultural experiences through theoretical frameworks and concepts—many of which they themselves have proposed and developed in their own research. They also provide invaluable advice for transnational scholars and those who aspire to work and live abroad to improve organizational participation and mutual intercultural engagement when working in a globalizing workplace. Researchers and practitioners of applied linguistics, communication studies, and higher education in many regions of the world will find this book an insightful resource.




Figured Worlds


Book Description

"World Visions can conceive of everything except alternative world visions." If this pronouncement by Umberto Eco is right, how can any ethnic group conceive of living with another group on the same territory - in Canada or elsewhere - if their world visions are incompatible? Can we sidestep incompatible world visions or should we try to understand them? Figured Worlds explores the possibilities of equilibrium between commitments to mutual understanding and the framing of strategies of negotiation. This collection begins its rich analytical investigation by describing how people - Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori, Japanese, and Africans - first learn the figured worlds of their own culture, made up of sensations, affirmations and will, prophecy, revelation, myth, dream, and metamorphoses. It then sets out how diverse figured worlds within a given social system are related, and concludes by offering insightful mappings of the dynamics of these relations, perceived in both their existential-ontological aspects, as well as their material-practical means. Comprising scholarship that is half Canadian and half British, this work offers important foundational perspectives into the thought worlds of cultures found within other cultures.




Intercultural Friendship


Book Description

Elisabeth Gareis breaks new ground in her study of intercultural friendships. She probes the scantily researched subject of friendship to report on the nature of relations between foreigners and Americans in the United States. The approach is descriptive, using data derived from an extensive review of literature, questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Participants in the study were 15 unmarried graduate students from Germany, India, and Taiwan who had been in the U.S. for at least one year. From her study, Gareis concludes that cultural background is much less significant for the successful development of intercultural friendships than might be expected. The investigative results show that other factors play a more important role in developing strong intercultural friendships. These factors include: individual personality, level of confidence, the meaning attached to the concept of friendship, and general cultural expectations. As the only book of its kind to exist in the market, Intercultural Friendships will enlighten students and teachers of intercultural communication classes, counselors working with foreign students, and cross-cultural leaders. It will prove indispensable to foreign students in the U.S. and U.S. citizens working or studying abroad.




Managing Intercultural Conflict Effectively


Book Description

In this volume, Ting-Toomey and Oetzel accomplish two objectives: to explain the culture-based situational conflict model, including the relationship among conflict, ethnicity, and culture; and, second, integrate theory and practice in the discussion of interpersonal conflict in culture, ethnic, and gender contexts. While the book is theoretically directed, it is also a down-to-earth practical book that contains ample examples, conflict dialogues, and critical incidents. Managing Intercultural Conflict Effectively helps to illustrate the complexity of intercultural conflict interactions and readers will gain a broad yet integrative perspective in assessing intercultural conflict situations. The book is a multidisciplinary text that draws from the research work of a variety of disciplines such as cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, sociology, marital and family studies, international management, and communication.




Handbook of Research on Cross-Cultural Business Education


Book Description

"This book explores the role of teaching tools used in business education to add competitive benefits with the business skills and make them applied in cross-cultural business environments. It explores significant pedagogical practices in the cross-cultural environment and identifies the teaching tools competent in cross-cultural environment those make business education competing and applied"--




Manual for Developing Intercultural Competencies (Open Access)


Book Description

This book presents a structured yet flexible methodology for developing intercultural competence in a variety of contexts, both formal and informal. Piloted around the world by UNESCO, this methodology has proven to be effective in a range of different contexts and focused on a variety of different issues. It, therefore can be considered an important resource for anyone concerned with effectively managing the growing cultural diversity within our societies to ensure inclusive and sustainable development. Intercultural competence refers to the skills, attitudes, and behaviours needed to improve interactions across difference, whether within a society (differences due to age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ethnicity, and so on) or across borders. The book serves as a tool to develop those competences, presenting an innovative adaptation of what could be considered an ancient tradition of storytelling found in many cultures. Through engaging in the methodology, participants develop key elements of intercultural competence, including greater self-awareness, openness, respect, reflexivity, empathy, increased awareness of others, and in the end, greater cultural humility. This book will be of great interest to intercultural trainers, policy makers, development practitioners, educators, community organizers, civil society leaders, university lecturers and students – all who are interested in developing intercultural competence as a means to understand and appreciate difference, develop relationships with those across difference, engage in intercultural dialogue, and bridge societal divides.




Intercultural Public Relations


Book Description

This book continues the groundbreaking work begun in Intercultural Public Relations: Theories for Managing Relationships and Conflicts with Strategic Publics (Routledge, 2018), by applying the theoretical framework of intercultural public relations to actual practice. Practical public relations contexts examined by the contributing chapter authors—both scholars and practitioners—include corporations, government, military, healthcare, education, and activism. The book covers real-world situations, including the training of practitioners to become more interculturally competent, identifying and understanding publics or stakeholders with different cultural backgrounds and identities, building and maintaining relationships with these publics/stakeholders, and managing conflicts with them. Offering practical guidance while examining both best practices and difficult challenges, this book is useful for public relations researchers, practitioners, and students as they explore how intercultural public relations contributes to organizational effectiveness and social change.




T-Kit 4 - Intercultural learning


Book Description

Intercultural learning is an important topic for the priorities of both the European Commission and the Council of Europe, and of their partnership in the field of youth. Intercultural learning is an educational approach that can lead to social transformation, so that people from different cultural backgrounds can develop positive relations based on the values and principles of human rights and on seeing cultural differences as positive things. It is a form of political and social education that needs to pay attention not only to intercultural relations, but also to different understandings of culture and diversity, power relations, distribution of resources, political and social context, human rights, discrimination, history and daily interactions among different groups. This T-Kit was developed for the context of youth work and non-formal education with young people, both of which support the personal development, social integration and active citizenship of young people. Educators and youth workers have an important role in addressing intercultural learning in their work with young people. They can stimulate young people’s learning in their daily lives, so that they can question and extend their perception, develop competences to interact positively with people from different cultural backgrounds and embrace the values of diversity, equality and dignity. In today’s Europe, these values and skills are fundamental for young people and for society as a whole in order to continue building peace and mutual understanding.