Management of Intercultural Relations in an Intercultural Organization

The chapter aims to reflect on the management of intercultural organizational relations. It explains the transition of homogenous organizations into the culturally heterogeneous organization and compares multiculturalism with cross-culturalism in its ability to harmonize the principles of cultural diversity with universal ethical principles. It explores the process of creation of a third culture to foster understanding and acceptance among diverse teams. It attempts to establish the impact of intercultural interactions/relations on the effectiveness of a diverse team of individuals interacting in concert to achieve common goals. The work also underpins some analysis of the creation, development, and management of organizational intercultural capital. Finally, the emergence of the model of strategic management of an intercultural organization focused on learning and training for proper operationalization and implementation is proposed, and some challenges that could antagonize the teams are looked into and proposals are formulated.

The literature/science boundary in sociological articles: Using fiction to discover patterns in co-authorship, author gender, and citation rank

Sociology has been described as a ‘third culture’ between science and literature. The distinctions between different orientations in sociological writing have been studied primarily through their non-textual manifestations (publication genres or venues, methodologies used, scientometric indicators, etc.). Our knowledge of how the science–literature boundary relates to the rhetorical composition of sociological texts therefore remains limited. We mixed a bespoke corpus of Czech sociological articles with a corpus of Czech short fiction to straightforwardly account for the relationship between sociology and literature. Unsupervised classification based on the distribution of most frequent verbs yielded two categories of sociological articles. Each cluster exhibited significant association with non-textual variables. Articles less similar to literature were associated with higher rates of co-authorship, citation counts, and number of women as first authors. Both clusters also displayed clear semantic differences. The signal from literary works increased variance in the textual feature space and subsequent pseudo-experimental validation confirmed its indispensability for the discovery of the association between the rhetorical pattern of verbs usage and non-textual variables related to sociological articles.

ATCKs as expatriates: Turnover intention and adjustment examined

Purpose: Adult third-culture kids (ATCKs), or adults who were living abroad in expatriated families during childhood, have been theorised to possess resources to meet the increased stressors and demands of overseas assignments due to their higher cross-cultural competency, adjustment, and security in risk-taking. This research sought to compare the turnover intention of ATCKs with that of adults with mono-cultural backgrounds, in expatriate roles, and to see whether this experience provides incremental predictive validity for turnover intention over and above demographic and adjustment factors.Design: This research used a quantitative, cross-sectional design implemented through an online questionnaire (n = 206).Findings: Results reported that ATCKs showed significantly higher levels of turnover intention than those with mono-cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, this background predicted an additional 3.3% of variance in turnover intentions above that of various adjustment indices.Originality: This research provides initial evidence to dispute the claim that adults who are expatriated in childhood are more likely to be retained in traditional expatriate work and suggests future research to investigate leveraging ATCK skills in alternative expatriate contexts.Practical implications: These results may allow international organisations to better understand the potential benefits of ATCK employment as expatriates and their role in a global environment in need of increased retention and mobility.

Building empathy through a comparative study of popular cultures in Caracas, Venezuela, and Albany, United States

During our six-week Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) module (Oct.-Nov. 2019), 58 students jointly developed task-based projects on expressions of popular culture in Albany (USA) and Caracas (Venezuela). In teams of seven to eight participants, learners from both countries reflected on variations of popular culture through assignments to be resolved in teams that included summaries and critical assessments of readings, contextualization of theoretical concepts, the drafting of a joint video script, and finally creation of a ten-minute video that focused on popular expressions in both cities. All learners were native, fluent, or near-native speakers of Spanish. We experienced the topic of popular culture to be exceptionally well poised to help students engage with each other from the beginning, represent everyday realities and build empathy and transcultural understanding through written reflections and joint creative final projects in the form of documentaries that included slices of life from the two different realities. The small-scale, everyday popular cultural productions allowed for a connection beyond cultural divides, helped students discover novel terrain within their own contexts, and vice versa, find common ground in the new context, thus fostering empathy toward transcultural awareness and equitable collaboration. In their exchange students actively created a shared ‘third’ culture of collaboration.