Camaraderie and Conflict: Intercultural Communication and Workplace Interactions in South Korean Companies in Bình Dương Province, Vietnam

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (6) ◽  
pp. 832-847
Author(s):  
Nguyen Thi Hong-Xoan ◽  
Catherine Earl

Rapid expansion of South Korean investment in Asia and Africa highlights a need to understand how local staff manage intercultural communication, particularly involving conflict with their superiors. South Korea is Vietnam’s largest investor and the Southern Key Economic Zone hosts the majority of 1252 projects and 70,000–80,000 South Koreans working in Vietnam. This paper reports on a mixed methods data set comprising 356 survey responses and nine in-depth interviews of Vietnamese workers at South Korean companies in Bình Dương province. According to workers, the main causes of conflict in workplace interactions with Korean managers are ‘differences in working culture’ – especially about workplace time use – and ‘attitude differences’. The most popular solution from both sides is to apologise. However, workers report frequently remaining silent when they are verbally abused. This research shows that intercultural communication is an ongoing and dynamic interpersonal process that is influenced by social, contextual and individual factors.

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422199676
Author(s):  
Cristina Mora ◽  
Julie A. Dowling ◽  
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

The idea of U.S. democracy rests on the assumption that all citizens will see their issues and needs reflected in elected officials. Yet, historically this has not been the case, as racialized minorities have been excluded and systematically marginalized from the representative process. Today, nonwhite populations remain significantly underrepresented in federal and state governments. Although scholars have examined the effects and mechanics of ethnoracial political representation, less is known about how individuals from minoritized populations perceive and make sense of political (under)representation. Drawing on a novel data set of 71 in-depth interviews with Latinos in the Chicagoland area and the San Francisco Bay, this article examines Latino understandings of representation. Our findings show that respondents view Latinos and other “people of color” as largely underrepresented amid an exceedingly white federal government. Yet Latino sentiments on the issue go beyond race, as respondents contend that class and a record of experience advocating on behalf of immigrant and working-class communities also matters for feeling represented by elected officials. Our findings make a case for bridging the sociological literature on racialization and political theories on representation, and have implications for understanding broader notions of political belonging and government trust.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110141
Author(s):  
Eunhye Yoo

This study explores the influence and sociocultural meaning of self-management of South Korean sports stars in the context of their social media activity. The study utilizes netnography to analyze social media posts to determine the meaning of sports stars’ self-management. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with study participants. Ten South Korean sports stars, who are active users of Instagram, were selected as the study participants. Photographs, videos, and stories from their accounts—around 1800 posts in total—were analyzed. The results indicated that the sports stars attempted to share their daily lives on social media to build a close relationship with the public. Moreover, they used their accounts to publicize their commercialized selves and to promote their sponsors. They uploaded only strictly composed and curated posts on their accounts as a form of self-censorship. Finally, it was determined that digital labor was used for self-management on social media, where there is no distinction between public and private territory. A sports star has become a self-living commercial today, and self-management is now a prerequisite for survival. Thus, self-management on social media has become a requirement for sports stars.


Author(s):  
Christopher Lange ◽  
Jamie Costley ◽  
Seung-Lock Han

<p class="3">Online instructors need to avoid unclear and confusing explanations of content, which can reduce the quality of learning. Extraneous load is reflective of poor instruction, in that it directs student effort towards processing information that does not contribute to learning. However, students may be able to manage poor instruction through effort regulation. Students who show high levels of effort have been shown to overcome poor instruction in some cases. This study analyzed survey responses from South Korean university students studying online (n = 1,575) to examine the relationship between self-regulated effort and germane load within varying extraneous load conditions. The experimental design separated extraneous load responses into three conditions (low, medium, high). Within each extraneous load condition, self-regulated effort responses were also separated (low, medium, high). The results showed that as extraneous load increased, self-regulated effort had a weaker relationship with germane load. It was also found that the use of effort regulation is effective only when dealing with low and mid-level extraneous load situations and that use of such strategies within high extraneous load situations was not effective. These results show the importance of improving instruction to reduce extraneous cognitive load, in that, not even high levels of effort can overcome poor quality instruction.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 124
Author(s):  
Wulan Purnama Sari

Indonesia is one of the largest coffee producing countries in the world. Coffee plants themselves are not native to Indonesia, coffee was brought in by the Dutch during colonial times, since then coffee has become part of the culture and habits of the Indonesian people. Lately the trend of drinking coffee has begun to return to popularity. This can be seen from the large number of coffee shops that have emerged. The trend of drinking coffee and coffee shops also reaches Ambon. Coffee shops in Ambon are also a symbol of peace, that in coffee shops all groups are free to gather. This study examines intercultural communication that occurs in coffee shops in Ambon, and aim to describe how actors involved in communication create their social reality. The study elaborate CMM (Co-Ordinated Management of Meaning) theory and conducted using qualitative methods, with a phenomenological approach. The research data was obtained through in-depth interviews with speakers and also observation and literature review. The results of the study show that the consequences of the conflict in the coffee shop are distinguished by region, Islam and Christianity, so that visitors also become separated between groups. Communication occurs between actors in one group, both between owners and visitors who are in the same category. Different of communication can be seen verbally and non-verbally. Indonesia merupakan salah satu negara produsen kopi terbesar di dunia. Tanaman kopi sendiri bukan tanaman asli Indonesia, kopi dibawa masuk oleh Belanda pada masa penjajahan, mulai sejak itu meminum kopi telah menjadi bagian dari budaya dan kebiasaan masyarakat Indonesia. Belakangan ini trend minum kopi mulai kembali popular. Hal ini dapat dilihat dari banyak jumlah warung kopi yang muncul. Trend minum kopi dan warung kopi ini juga sampai ke Ambon. Warung kopi di Ambon juga merupakan simbol dari perdamaian, bahwa dalam warung kopi semua kelompok bebas berkumpul. Penelitian ini mengkaji komunikasi antar budaya yang terjadi dalam warung kopi di Ambon, serta bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan bagaimana aktor yang terlibat komunikasi menciptakan realitas sosialnya. Penelitian mengelaborasi teori CMM (Co-Ordinated Management of Meaning) dan menggunakan metode kualitatif, dengan pendekatan fenomenologi. Data penelitian diperoleh melalui wawancara mendalam dengan narasumber dan juga observasi serta kajian pustaka. Hasil dari penelitian menunjukkan akibat dari konflik warung kopi dibedakan berdasarkan wilayahnya, Islam dan Kristen, sehingga pengunjung juga menjadi terpisah antar kelompok. Komunikasi terjadi antar aktor dalam satu kelompok, baik antara pemilik dengan pengunjung yang sama-sama dalam kategori satu kelompok. Perbedaan komunikasi dapat terlihat secara verbal dan non-verbal.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Nuryanto

The research aimed to examine (1) the anxiety experienced by Pattani Students when they first mingled with Kembangarum residents, (2) the anxiety management used by Pattani Students, (3) the model of intercultural communication between Pattani students and Kembangarum residents. The type of the research used in this study is a case study. While the approach was qualitative approach. Data collection techniques used were in-depth interviews and participatory observation. The subject of the study is Pattani students and Kembangarum residents. The findings showed there was a cultural shock experienced by Pattani students when they first lived in Kembangarum. The cultural shock resulted in anxiety and uncertainty when they communicate with the locals. To overcome this anxiety, Pattani students used Gudykunst’s three anxiety management, those are the self-concept, motivation and, reaction to the locals. The communication model used by Pattani students was intercultural approaches by prioritizing dialectics and interpretation of community behavior.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Zhan Xu ◽  
Wei Wang

Abstract This paper investigates the Linguistic Landscape of Chinese restaurants in Hurstville, a Chinese-concentrated suburb in Sydney, Australia. It draws on Blommaert and Maly’s (2016) Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) and Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics (2003). Our data set consists of photographs, Google Street View archives, and ethnographic fieldwork, in particular in-depth interviews with restaurant owners. This paper adopts a diachronic perspective to compare the restaurant scape between 2009 and 2019 and presents an ELLA case study of a long-standing Chinese restaurant. It aims to unveil the temporal and spatial relationships between signs, agents, and place, that demonstrate how a social and historical perspective in Linguistic Landscape studies of diasporic communities can shed light on the changes in the broader social context.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacobus Cilliers ◽  
Shardul Oza

In this note, we leverage data from a nationwide survey conducted in 2019 in Ethiopia to shed light on what Ward Education Officers do, their understanding of their own role, and the constraints they face in executing their responsibilities. We interviewed 397 WEOs responsible for primary schools across 23 districts and six regions of Tanzania as part of a baseline survey conducted between February and May 2019. This note contributes to a growing literature on the activities, self-perceptions, and motivation of public sector officials in charge of “last mile” service delivery. For example, Aiyar and Bhattacharya (2016) use time-use diaries, in-depth interviews, and quantitative data to understand the views, attitudes, and activities of sub-district education sector officials, called block education officers, in India.


Author(s):  
Philippe D’Iribarne ◽  
Sylvie Chevrier ◽  
Alain Henry ◽  
Jean-Pierre Segal ◽  
Geneviève Tréguer-Felten

Working in multicultural teams can be a challenge since members do not share the same cultural references. How can they reach an agreement when decision-making does not mean the same things to participants? How can expatriates empower local staff when managers and employees do not have the same empowerment prerequisites in mind? A Franco-Swedish and a Franco-Malagasy case illustrate these misunderstandings, which are emblematic of the misperceptions that emerge in bi-national work contexts. Training in intercultural communication and awareness of cultural distances are not sufficient to overcome these misunderstandings. In addition, cultural misunderstandings are sometimes strategically constructed and often not even acknowledged as such. A better intercultural cooperation requires deciphering the participants’ universes of meaning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 1087-1096 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe J. Gladstone ◽  
Sandra C. Matz ◽  
Alain Lemaire

The automatic assessment of psychological traits from digital footprints allows researchers to study psychological traits at unprecedented scale and in settings of high ecological validity. In this research, we investigated whether spending records—a ubiquitous and universal form of digital footprint—can be used to infer psychological traits. We applied an ensemble machine-learning technique ( random-forest modeling) to a data set combining two million spending records from bank accounts with survey responses from the account holders ( N = 2,193). Our predictive accuracies were modest for the Big Five personality traits ( r = .15, corrected ρ = .21) but provided higher precision for specific traits, including materialism ( r = .33, corrected ρ = .42). We compared the predictive accuracy of these models with the predictive accuracy of alternative digital behaviors used in past research, including those observed on social media platforms, and we found that the predictive accuracies were relatively stable across socioeconomic groups and over time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-165
Author(s):  
Maya Staub ◽  
Guðbjörg Linda Rafnsdóttir

This article investigates how doctorate holders in Iceland make sense of time and utilize their own time management as an instrument in their career development and whether gender is a defining factor in this context. The project is based on 32 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants holding 5- to 20-year-old doctorate degrees in Iceland. These interviews were then analyzed using a phenomenological approach. The results indicate that the men generally felt a higher level of agency regarding their work–life balance and time management than did the women, who more often expressed difficulties finding a proper balance and expressed being more stressed about the often fragmented time they had to combine their career and family obligations successfully. The study provides a picture of how societal time norms among highly educated people are very gendered and how time is still inevitably linked to power. The contribution of this study to prior studies is that, even when comparing highly educated people among whom it is more likely to find a higher level of egalitarian attitudes, in a country where gender equality is assumed to be at a higher level than in many other countries, women still seem to experience time differently from men in terms of personal autonomy.


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