The Blog for Culture Vultures

Imagine you’ve been asked to play an unfamiliar board game and that you’re instructed to play it without any understanding of the rules.

You soon begin to irritate other players by making mistakes and getting things wrong and, after a while, the game becomes a stressful and confusing experience.

Living abroad gives you some excellent insights into foreign cultures and some of the key cultural differences viz-a-viz other cultures.

In this blog, we hear from someone who spent some time living in Thailand and her reflections on Thai culture; in particular how it differs to US culture.

Did you know that the USA is one of our most in-demand countries in terms of cross-cultural training?

We support a diverse spectrum of business professionals from across the globe who work with Americans by helping them understand the culture, and specifically the business culture.

We spend most of our time at Commisceo working on serious cultural stuff, such as, how to negotiate successfully with the Americans, or, how to give good service to American customers.

Every so often however, we feel that need to go off at a tangent and indulge in some of the quirkier aspects of culture!

Doing business internationally and/or outside your own country is exciting and much of the time fruitful.

However, international business is not always a bed of roses as American companies starting up in Germany seem to be finding out.

Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.

Joshua Arjuna Stephens, a 2007 graduate of Wesleyan University, works in Beijing for XPD Media, which makes online games.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.

“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.

“When I came over to China in 1994, that was the first wave of Americans coming to China,” he said. “These young people are part of this big second wave.”

Read more > China

An article published in the medical education-themed September 10 issue of JAMA finds that white medical students are more likely to consider themselves highly prepared to provide care for minority populations if they attended schools with racial and ethnically diverse student bodies.

Under the belief that diversity exposes students to a broader field of ideas, experiences, and perspectives, most medical schools in the United States explicitly try to keep their student bodies racially and ethnically varied. The schools also believe that diversity in the classroom better prepares student to provide services to the multicultural American population. However, little research exists to support the claim of educational benefits from diversity in medical schools.

Read more > Medical News

What are the top ten trends in training and human resource development that are expected to dominate in 2008?

 

With all the attention given to the Middle East today, it is important that the Western public receives a complete picture in order that their opinions and sentiment toward Arabs and their homeland’s is a responsible one.

One out of 35 people in the world is an immigrant, and in virtually every country, different languages, beliefs and cultures coexist. In this context, promoting mental health requires incorporating cultural sensitivity into mental health services and programs, experts said today at a special event held to observe World Mental Health Day 2007.

"Culture and diversity are central to the everyday perceptions, behavior, and interactions of individuals," said Dr. Carissa Etienne, Assistant Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). "It is no wonder therefore that culture and diversity influence the way that mental illness manifests itself, how individuals and communities perceive and cope with this illness, and how health care providers diagnose, treat, and care for persons with mental illness."

Led by the World Federation for Mental Health and supported by PAHO and other institutions, this year's World Mental Health Day focuses on the growing importance of cultural competency and sensitivity in ensuring effective mental health programs and services around the world.

Read more: WFMH 

One out of 35 people in the world is an immigrant, and in virtually every country, different languages, beliefs and cultures coexist. In this context, promoting mental health requires incorporating cultural sensitivity into mental health services and programs, experts said today at a special event held to observe World Mental Health Day 2007.

"Culture and diversity are central to the everyday perceptions, behavior, and interactions of individuals," said Dr. Carissa Etienne, Assistant Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). "It is no wonder therefore that culture and diversity influence the way that mental illness manifests itself, how individuals and communities perceive and cope with this illness, and how health care providers diagnose, treat, and care for persons with mental illness."

Led by the World Federation for Mental Health and supported by PAHO and other institutions, this year's World Mental Health Day focuses on the growing importance of cultural competency and sensitivity in ensuring effective mental health programs and services around the world.

Read more: WFMH 

The North American Free Trade Agreement (Weintraub, 2004) and lower labour costs in Mexico have caused many US companies to move their operations south of the border.  While the majority of the workers in the US-owned plants are Mexican, some of the employees are US workers on temporary expat assignments.

While not randomly selected from a large pool of expat workers, my ten interviewees did hold a variety of jobs.  Several of them were managers and engineers.  Others in the group included a US Air Force officer, an HR representative, a Director of Research and Development, and a missionary.  Two were female and eight were male.  For the vast majority of the group this was their first expat assignment and they considered the assignment a means of advancing their careers and providing their families with a rich cultural experience.  Half of the workers said that they would be interested in doing another expat assignment in the future.

Read more: Expatica 

Most Americans believe their fellow citizens hold strong biases against minorities, according to a landmark poll by Zogby International commissioned by GSN. The survey of 10,387 American adults, one of the most comprehensive ever conducted on prejudice, according to Zogby, explores attitudes about race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, physical appearance, and politics. The poll's margin of error is +/- 1 percentage point.

The "Report Card on American Prejudice" is part of a wide-ranging effort by GSN to spur a national dialogue on intolerance and bigotry. The survey's release provides a powerful follow-up to the July 17th premiere of the groundbreaking new television series, "Without Prejudice?" which airs Tuesdays at 9 pm (EST) on GSN -- the network for games.

Read more: Zogby 

"Being British is about driving a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, the travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows and a Japanese TV"