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In today's global village, you will work with people whose cultural backgrounds differ from yours.
Culture refers to the beliefs, customs, and assumptions that determine perception and behaviour. For example, residents of small towns and rural areas have different notions of friendliness than do people from big cities. Montrealers and Cape Bretoners talk and dress differently, as do people who live in Vancouver, Regina, Halifax, and Toronto. The cultural icons that resonate for baby boomers mean little to members of Generation X and Y. And gender culture often creates conversational incongruence between men and women.
All human beings conform to a culturally predetermined reality. Part of Canadian cultural identity, for example, has been formed by our dual linguistic heritage and by the economic and military might of our southern neighbour. Geography, weather, population density, and natural resources also contribute to cultural reality. For example, the Canadian values of courtesy, community, and cooperation may have evolved as survival strategies in a vast, sparsely populated land. Perceptions about gender, age, and social class are culturally based, as are our ideas about race, ethnicity, religious practices, sexual orientation, physical appearance and ability, and regional and national characteristics.
Regardless of your own cultural biases, however, your organizational productivity and individual professional success depend on your ability to communicate sensitively and flexibly with others.
View both works published by McGraw-Hill |
Communicating Across Cultures
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/olc/dl/39663/Mod_3.pdf
Locker, Kitty O., Steven Kyo Kaczmarek and Kathryn Braun
McGraw-Hill
2002
Abstract: In today's global village, you will work with people whose cultural backgrounds differ from yours.
Culture refers to the beliefs, customs, and assumptions that determine perception and behaviour. For example, residents of small towns and rural areas have different notions of friendliness than do people from big cities. Montrealers and Cape Bretoners talk and dress differently, as do people who live in Vancouver, Regina, Halifax, and Toronto. The cultural icons that resonate for baby boomers mean little to members of Generation X and Y. And gender culture often creates conversational incongruence between men and women.
All human beings conform to a culturally predetermined reality. Part of Canadian cultural identity, for example, has been formed by our dual linguistic heritage and by the economic and military might of our southern neighbour. Geography, weather, population density, and natural resources also contribute to cultural reality. For example, the Canadian values of courtesy, community, and cooperation may have evolved as survival strategies in a vast, sparsely populated land. Perceptions about gender, age, and social class are culturally based, as are our ideas about race, ethnicity, religious practices, sexual orientation, physical appearance and ability, and regional and national characteristics.
Regardless of your own cultural biases, however, your organizational productivity and individual professional success depend on your ability to communicate sensitively and flexibly with others.
| Reviews | | Indira | Cukture bound communication
Culture is an inevitable part of communication and it is shaped by the norms and customs prevailing in the socites concerned.
Unless you are well versed with the culture of a particular society, it is difficult to encode the symbols and messages, essential for the effective transformation and dissemination of information |
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