CULTURAL DISTORTION AND HARMONISATION ON INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: THE PANACEA FOR SUCCESS

The purpose of this paper was to study and unravel the implications of cultural distortion on businesses, gains and gradual harmonization of culture across national boundaries globally. Despite the national and political boundaries around the world, the activities involving cross-border operations have always persisted, but have had a dramatic growth since the Second World War. Successful business operations globally depend largely on the understanding of the cultural differences of countries which enormously have the tendencies of affecting the degree of business relationship. It is very obvious that every institution across nations of the world is deeply attached to societies with diverse cultures such as language difference, different tradition of trust, individualists and collectivists tendencies which globalization concept intends to harmonise and be accepted by the local market around the world. As a consequence, it is very imperative to strive for gradual harmonization of culture. This however implies making suitable changes on the differences among national norms, traditions, values, beliefs and rituals of different nations in order to achieve uniformity. KEY WORDS: Culture, Cultural Distortion, Cultural Harmonization, Globalization

Twitter Based Digital Social Movement Pattern to Fight COVID-19

Twitter has become a tool for people to trigger a social change, like what is happening right now during COVID-19 outbreaks. Most people are using social media platforms to express their perspectives. For the first time, this research aimed to analyze the pattern of a social movement that happened during COVID-19 Outbreaks by analyzing the Twitter dataset contains 23,476 tweets worldwide with the #COVID19 hashtag which was obtained from 02 March to 09 April 2020. Social Network Analysis tools are used to understand the pattern of movement. This research concluded that if the Government and Mainstream Media Twitter account triggered the conversation in the social media platform, followed by the activists and celebrities who engage in conversation between their followers, an ordinary person spread the point of view of the Government and Mainstream Media across their conversation network. The COVID-19 hashtag successfully engaged 10 protest clusters, which pushed the people to fight against COVID-19 in their countries, mostly targeting the government-related account. The digital social movement pattern is relatively different from the traditional social movement, even it has the same steps, which emerge, coalesce, bureaucratise, and the movement itself, but it takes place in the Digital Public Sphere without any social or political boundaries. The digital social movement forced the government to implement a better policy to fight the COVID-19 Pandemic, including to close the national border to prevent unnecessary effects of International Migration.

Green Infrastructure Entities- A Study of Indian and International Cities

Cities are places for humans and countless other species. With increasing city limits, urbanization has meddled with the life of several organisms; creating an unhealthy balance. A green city is planned by scrutiny of the impact of development on the environment and mankind. This not only assures a better future but also connects people to nature. This paper highlights approaches towards the creation of liveable cities, segregated into three categories – Greens, Water, and Sustainability. Further divisions of these categories are done based on green infrastructure techniques prevalent across the globe today. The purpose is to refurbish the underdeveloped regions into smart cities through sustainable infrastructure; which will provide a good quality of life, better environmental impact, etc. The paper aims to analyze and compare case examples for each parameter through the medium of national (Indian) and international case studies. The comparison stresses the fact that India, as a developing nation, can implement these methods in its cities. The paper also deduces that there are cases where Indian cities can be an inspiration to the world. Degeneration of nature knows no political boundaries. Thus, every country has a legitimate stake in environmental practices and must pledge to create greener cities.

Toponym-assisted map georeferencing: Evaluating the use of toponyms for the digitization of map collections

A great deal of information is contained within archival maps—ranging from historic political boundaries, to mineral resources, to the locations of cultural landmarks. There are many ongoing efforts to preserve and digitize historic maps so that the information contained within them can be stored and analyzed efficiently. A major barrier to such map digitizing efforts is that the geographic location of each map is typically unknown and must be determined through an often slow and manual process known as georeferencing. To mitigate the time costs associated with the georeferencing process, this paper introduces a fully automated method based on map toponym (place name) labels. It is the first study to demonstrate these methods across a wide range of both simulated and real-world maps. We find that toponym-based georeferencing is sufficiently accurate to be used for data extraction purposes in nearly half of all cases. We make our implementation available to the wider research community through fully open-source replication code, as well as an online georeferencing tool, and highlight areas of improvement for future research. It is hoped that the practical implications of this research will allow for larger and more efficient processing and digitizing of map information for researchers, institutions, and the general public.

The Mapping of Center and Periphery, and the Geography of Otherness

Some literatures, like Canadian literature, may be considered minor because Canada is not a major power. But in reality, Canadian literature and other literatures, large or small, are part of a cultural history that is not merely local or even national, but international. The territories of culture and literature in literal or metaphorical terms shift over time. Using a comparative method, this article examines texts—such as The Saga of Eric the Red and works by Columbus, Verrazzano, Jeannette C. Armstrong, Marie Annharte Baker and Carrie Best—to demonstrate the shifting boundaries of time and space and to explore the connections between cultures and literatures in Canada, Europe and the Atlantic and international worlds as part of a longstanding globalization. The article demonstrates that the hybridity resulting from cross-cultural contact and colonization typically blurs the distinction between center and periphery, revealing the historical fluidity of the political boundaries on which the concepts of national and world literatures are based. In doing so, it focuses on how North America, particularly Canada, and the historical process of its discovery, settlement, and colonization have connected this region to other parts of the world.

GIS-based approach for evaluating a community intrinsic resilience index

Community resilience refers to the degree to which a community can survive and recover following a disaster. While resilience itself is well understood, decisions that would enhance resilience are interdependent and involve various stakeholders. There are indices for evaluating community resilience, but these have the shortcoming that they compare between political entities, such as counties. Therefore, one cannot ascertain that a county is truly resilient. In addition, natural disasters depend on the landscape and thus have no relation to the political boundaries. Our metric aims to capture the information into a Community Intrinsic Resilience Index (CIRI), which embodies the resilience level of four critical sectors: transportation, energy, health and socio-economic. As a case study, we computed CIRI for the counties within New Jersey. Results showed that within NJ, CIRI ranged from 63 to 80%. A post-disaster CIRI, following a scenario of flooding, revealed that two coastal counties would have low CIRI values due to the reduction in the road area and/or the GDP (local economy shut down) to below minimum values. We believe that our platform would further advance the efforts to fill the gap between resilience research and applications and would help decision and policy makers to integrate resilience within the planning and design phases of disaster management.

The Impact of Cultural and Translational Studies on Modern Comparative Literature Studies

Modern comparative literature with globalization phenomenon extends linguistic and political boundaries, even for conserving and revitalizing languages particularly minor languages with cultural and ethnic exchanges. Such this emergence of comparative literature might return from contemporary translational and cultural studies as crucial and effective factors in the study of comparative literature. The role, relationship, and impact of translation and cultural studies on modern comparative literature are explored via a descriptive analysis. Translational and cultural studies in current comparative literature studies facilitate the relevant studies and they play a supplementary role for literary study. This study confirms a significant relationship exists among contemporary translational, cultural, and literary works intangibly and inevitably that helps to study comparative literary works. The findings report cultural and translational studies can be fruity informing literary studies, new writing styles besides intercultural conversation; nevertheless, scholars of comparative literature have argued that their discipline has been significantly subsumed and substituted by translation studies. The results indicate contemporary translation and cultural studies have paved the way for comparative literature researchers to achieve cultural knowledge and to strengthen the culture with developing national literature.

Transnational Spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

This essay maps the unmapped nuances of transnational/cultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s debut novel, The Circle of Reason (1986; 2008) which underscores the inter-territorial itinerary of Alu, the protagonist, who after being accused of being a terrorist, runs from Lalpukur, near Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Goa to Al-Ghazira, a fictional gulf-state and finally to Algeria. The novel, Bildungsroman in nature and thematic treatment, poignantly deals with James Clifford’s idea of ‘assimilation’ (of) / ‘travelling’ cultures, geo-political boundaries and hybridization of language. The rationale of the paper is to deconstruct the binaries—tradition and modernity; oriental and occidental cultures; and emigration and immigration, which are, to me, the themes of the narrative of the novel. Ghosh has dexterously intertwined the cultural matrix of different spaces in the novel to show how in this age of mobility, open economy and transnational migration, transcultural awareness is all to value. This essay also traces the trajectory of mobility in the age of fluidity and underpins patterns of movement which affect cultural orientations, sensibilities, and, consequentially, creative expressions.

Survival and Autonomy

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and World War I shattered the social fabric of Ottoman Europe and led to a radical revision of the region’s political boundaries. How did experiences of successive traumas—expulsions, famine, disease, massacres, and new occupation regimes—shape Muslims’ understandings of the European project and their experiences within it? This chapter analyzes this catastrophic era from diverse Muslim perspectives. It reveals how many Muslims found legal promises of political equality and rights ambiguous and intangible, and instead sought to define their own terms of political belonging. They wanted autonomy, confessional sovereignty, and the protection of Islamic institutions and property.