Due to globalization, economical and social reasons multicultural contact is increasing. As human beings we stereotype even without noticing because it is our way to understand the world and make sense of it.
This piece of writing will be looking at multiculturalism, how the process happens and how it is expressed in organisations.
Culture can be showed through values, rituals, heroes and symbols; thought grouping and categorising people and the word around us we make up our mind of what is good or bad and right or wrong. Although, human come from different backgrounds and “if you only try to understand humans in individual basis you will not understand the person or its reasons … you cannot judge the behaviour of a different culture with your own values” (Tchelebi 2013).
Gertz (1983) intellectualist Grande Pour argues that culture background surely plays a part in shaping identity but it does not determinate identity. People are forced to learn, unlearn and adapt new behaviour to cope with people from the county they are signed for.
In the organisational context culture plays an important role because it allows understanding people from different backgrounds and developing strategies to identify the best way to deal with multiculturalism in organisations.
Sojourner is a term used to describe people that spend two years or more in a culture other than they one in which they were socialised (Bochner 2006). When coming to a different culture people experience culture shock. The following culture shock symptoms are mentioned in the literature (Feicthinger and Fink 1998): lack of orientation, uneasiness and anxiety; psychological and physical problems (depression, stress, illnesses); feelings of helplessness and powerlessness; lack...
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...tions. Leadership & Organization Development Journal [Online].19 (6), pp. 302-308 Available [Accessed 25 November 2013].
Greene, M. (1992) Journal of Negro Education. The Passion of Pluralism: Multiculturalism and the Expanding Community [online]. 61 (3), pp. 250-261 [Accessed 25 November 2013].
Tchelebi, N. (2013) Study Unit 7: The Way Others do Things Around Here [Press release]. 11 November . Available from: https://blackboard.uwe.ac.uk/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_229970_1%26url%3D
Tchelebi, N. (2013) Study Unit 7: The Way Others do Things Around Here [Press release]. 14 November . Available from: https://blackboard.uwe.ac.uk/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_229970_1%26url%3D
Thesis statement: I agree with Turkle. There has been a negative shift in the way we communicate, we document when inappropriate times, Interpersonal communications have suffered and are too obsessive with their devices.
allow us to have a glimpse of social orders and the daily life of how
One big implicit social norm involves personal space. In our society it is implicitly know that you give people enough space when waiting in line or when sitting next to them as not to invade their personal bubble. I thought it would be particularly interesting to see what people did the moment you crossed that “bubble line.” Periodically throughout the day I would intrude upon people’s bubbles. For varied results, this occurred in classrooms, the elevator, the lunch line, the lunch table, and at work. During classes and at lunch I would move my chair really close to that of the person next to me. While in the lunch line and in the elevator I would stand really close to the person, even if there was plenty of space to spread out. At work, again I stood really close to the person when talking to them.
Although advanced technology acts as a surrogate that helps people make better decisions and saves their time; it distracts them from the everyday reality of life. Individuals face large quantities of problems in their whole lives, but they always get help from others. By contrast, if people try to solve every problem by themselves, they will waste a lot of time. Gilbert illustrates the situation as, “One of the benefits of being a social and linguistic animal is that we can capitalize on the experience of others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves”(211). People get benefits from communicating with others, because they share their knowledge and experiences with others. As a result, when they meet problems, they can use others’ experiences to get solutions. By contrast, if people do not talk with others, they have to solve problems by themselves at the expense of wasting a lot of time. Most people never
As people socialize, they create interactions whose products are influential to act back upon the people to determine or constrain actions. Moreover, social interactions may be likened to a theatre whereby people are the actors as the rest of the people are the audience. These other people actively observe the role-playing and respond by reacting to the performances. However, people’s behaviors tend to change when they are alone as they get rid of the roles they play in front of others.
‘An individual’s interaction with others and the world around them can enrich or limit their
Habitus is the ongoing collection of experiences informing future action in a person. It is both the internal principle informing their practices, as well as the lens through which they ‘make sense’ of external social structure. Most importantly, it is enduring, but not static or permanent (Wacquant 2005). Habitus bridges static notions such as ‘class’, as individuals exposed to like stimuli and conditioning will share a like habitus, but may be dissimilar in terms of socio-economic status, to give one
When the time was up to stop writing, I looked around the classroom and noticed some of the students appeared a bit confused. The assignment was not a difficult one, not for me anyway. When the teacher began asking students to share what they had written with the class, it was interesting to find that only a...
4) Ettinger, R. H. "CHAPTER 3." Psychology: The Science of Behavior. 4TH ed. Redding, CA: BVT Pub., 2009. 91. Print.
Symbolic interactionism perspective is defined as “the study of how people negotiate the meanings of social life during their interactions with others” (Rohall, Milkie, and Lucas, 2014, p.27). It asserts that “we construct meaning about things that are important in our own lives and in our society” (Rohall, Milkie, and Lucas, 2014, p.28). These meanings derive from social interactions among individuals which
Just like Richard Rodriguez one can have struggles with school and home, for instance at home one is taught to speak their mind, told that everyone will understand. At home formal does not exist; serious and organized is an option. Yet at school one must learn to think before speaking, to raise your hand and to make sure you sound just like everyone else. At school one is taught to not make a fool out of themselves, to be serious and formal to be just like everybody else. But yet again as a student, although one has been taught to be like everyone else, one can still feel like an outsider, like Rodriguez describes you still don’t fit in. As a student one must learn the difference between formal and informal and when to use both, for some students like me formal and serious might be the only way to socialize. And just like Rodriguez one
F., & Schutt, R. K. (2013). Making Sense of the Social World: Methods of Investigation (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Fundamentally, all human being’s capabilities and performances reflect a complex collaboration of biological and social-environmental factors. In fact, unique environments that are “nurtured” in one’s life can greatly influence the “nature” of basic biological processes. Such is the case with personal space. Even though human beings have a “natural” need to interact through human contact, the social-environmental factors in a human being’s culture dictate how much personal space is acceptable. Thus, it isn’t nature alone that determines what exact distance is comfortable between human beings during conversations. Instead, it is the individual’s cultural environment that determines the appropriate personal space necessary to feel comfortable. Indeed, research on personal space is an excellent example of how a supposed biological factor is influenced by social-environmental factors.
Brett, J., Behfar, K. & Kern, M. (2006) ‘Managing multicultural teams’, Harvard Business Review, 84 (11), pp.84-91, Business Source Premier [online].
Social facilitation, also known as the audience effect, is the tendency to act or perform differently when surrounded by others than when they are alone. Studies have shown that people tend to perform better when doing a simple or well-rehearsed task rather than complex or new ones. These two articles discuss the phenomena of social facilitation and how it affects different situations.