Study Abroad and Cross
Culture Issues
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Dr. Carper’s paper “GLOBAL BUSINESS: A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE”
Dr. Clark's Message 1 on Study Abroad and Cross Culture Issues
Dr. Clark's Message 2 on Study Abroad and Cross Culture Issues
Dr. Clark's Message 1
-----Original
Message-----
From: Clark,
Donald [mailto:dclark@Trinity.edu]
Professor of History and Director of
International Studies
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas 78212
Voice: 210-999-7629. Fax: 210-999-7305
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/int_studies/Faculty/dclark.htm
Also see our program website:
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/int_studies/index.htm
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2000 12:09 PM
Subject:
RE:
Some Thoughts About Study Abroad
Bob, I enjoyed the paper
you posted on tigertalk, but I can't resist making some comments.
I assume that knowledge of
the other people's language, religion, at least recent historical experience,
and such are all in the model somewhere even though they don't show.
I figure the purpose of the paper was to discuss process and not content
of cross-cultural understanding.
In my experience, mostly limited to cross-cultural training for East
Asia, businessmen and foreign service officers and military people with
assignments that require cross-cultural skills approach the thing feeling very
daunted, and of course they don't ever have time in their professional lives to
learn the languages well enough to function effectively, so they almost never
penetrate and are limited to working in English with people on the other side
who are Western educated.
This is usually good enough (unless it's a situation in a post-colonial
southeast Asian country where the only people we can talk to give us a distorted
picture of what's going on); but one important job of the cross-cultural trainer
is to make his/her students aware that this level of interaction is not the same
as (and does not require) understanding the other culture. This is why, when we sent Trinity students abroad, we strive
to put them in language-intense situations such as homestays and classes taught
in the target language--immersion experiences.
That's a different level of exposure that leads to a much better
understanding than the sojourn where things are done basically on the American's
own terms.
I've read any number of theoretical papers emanating from the
cross-cultural consultant industry, but comparing the results of what they're
trying to do with what happens in other countries among real expats,
whether long-term career missionary, long-term resident business people, people
who actually marry into the other culture, or long-term
military/intelligence/area officers, I would argue that without real immersion
one merely invents one's own "version" of the country ("My Japan,
My Germany, My Hong Kong, My Indonesia") which is just an amiable
caricature of what the culture really is. Most
expats, especially short-term expats, even though they would like to do better,
end up having to settle for that relatively distorted experience of the other
culture. And in most professions, it's still OK to get by with that.
When we think about the future, though, even a future in which the world
seems to be learning English at a rapic clip, we have to prepare students to
look deeper and develop skills and instincts that enable them to understand
what's in the minds of the people they're dealing with.
In colleges we are motivated to promote study abroad because our students
actually enter the culture on a deeper level (provided it's an immersion
experience). We hope this compensates for the fact that they're only there a
semester (a year is better) and that it will habituate them to try for real
communication in later life when they're dropped into business (or whatever)
situations the way people actually are, for shorter periods for more superficial
encounters.
For myself, even being
raised in a country in a missionary family that had been there two generations
with parents who spoke the language, I was protected in a foreign expat
environment growing up and did not realize the difference between life in the
foreign ghetto and life in the actual culture until I went back as a grownup.
Then, after laboriously learning the language of educated adults and
after a year of life in a remote mountain village followed by degree work in a
Korean university where I was subject to (and completely at the mercy of) their
rules, requirements, performance standards, and so forth, I learned that there
are all levels of "cross-cultural" experience.
It was a rich and rare level of training
against which most other experiences pale--obviously useful for an area
specialist but not normally accessible (or perhaps even useful or desirable for
most business people going abroad for short terms in a particular place).
But it did teach me the difference.
There's nothing wrong with
the analysis of the whole process set forth in Carper's paper but I don't
think it makes this distinction clearly enough. He speaks of "culture"
as an 800 pound gorilla to be described but not necessarily comprehended.
But what's the content of culture and where are the questions
about that? Is the objective to
"master" a foreign culture? If so, how?
What does culture consist of? At
level three of figure one, it's referred to, but one senses that the author
wouldn't actually think it necessary to get very deeply into it.
I'm much more impressed with cross-cultural papers that confront the need to work at doing what, after all, foreigners have to do when they come to the United States to study and work, and that is to change themselves. How many Americans in any profession expect or intend to change themselves when they go abroad? That is, to return affected by the experience? Isn't that what is really involved in entering and returning from a different culture.
Dr. Clark's Message 2
Go ahead and use what I wrote, any way you like. I'm glad to have stimulated a discussion.
Yes, I could see that Brent Carper was probably a good example of someone who crossed cultures and was changed in the crossing, and that his paper was about an approach and not necessarily about the experience itself, which in the end would have to come down to a bunch of anecdotes, since everyone's experience is different.
We're talking about the same thing, really, and I'm not arrogant enough to think there is nothing to be learned from the vast experience of Multinational Corporations--since they're succeding internationally and must be doing something right. My quickest reaction is really from encounters within academic disciplines and the raging battle in the last fifteen years that pitted disciplinary methodologies against area competence, with disciplines winning--if funding patterns are any indication. My characterization of the disciplinary view is that, "heck, everyone's pretty much the same so if we learn the methods of anthropology, or comparative politics, or marketing, or whatever, all we have to do is plug ourselves into a foreign culture and if we understand our craft well enough we'll know what buttons to push." It's the very thing that area people grow tired of--seeing people fly in, get handled, and fly out thinking that they know where they've been.
On the other hand I know plenty of area people who are in the cross-cultural studies business and, faced with producing something like "Ten Keys to Succeeding in Japan" will step right up and attempt it. It comes out as, "Be polite, be yourself, listen carefully, learn how to say thank you in their language, pay your social debts, and take your shoes off when you go indoors." But they don't usually present this as cross-cultural study; it's just common sense about not making a fool of oneself in a foreign context. On this level there's no pretense of substantial dialogue: it's just social communication as a business too. Which is fine. But it's not the same thing as crossing cultures, at least in my understanding of the term.
Donald Clark [mailto:dclark@Trinity.edu]
Professor of History and Director of International Studies
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas 78212
Voice: 210-999-7629. Fax: 210-999-7305
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/int_studies/Faculty/dclark.htm
Also see our program website:
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/int_studies/index.htm