Cultural Norms and Expectations Within the Hospitality Industry

The business environment differs across nations and throughout industries. The hospitality industry is no different; one managerial approach that functions well in one nation might not be necessarily applicable in another. This suggests that to successfully manage across different countries it is vital that managers acquire the necessary skills to effectively manage employees and guests with different backgrounds and expectations. Hence, the objectives of this chapter are to define and discuss culture and cross-culture management, explain the importance of understanding multicultural perspectives, and discuss the managerial approaches of managing workforce diversity and cultural diversity.

Mentorship, Sponsorship, and Professional Networking

Creating an ecosystem of mentorship and sponsorship requires institutional commitment and the collaboration of faculty and administrators from diverse backgrounds. From 2012 to 2018, the UC Davis ADVANCE Mentorship and Networking Initiative (MNI) partnered with the campus leadership to implement several programs and activities to support mentorship, sponsorship, and professional networking for STEM women faculty across career levels. During this award period, pilot programs aimed to provide strong mentorship for newly recruited faculty, including scholars affiliated with the Center for Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) as well as mid-career faculty, with the intention of scaling efforts across campus units. MNI committee projects included piloting “Launch Mentoring Committees” for 43 new faculty, support for faculty-led “New Faculty Network” monthly networking mixers, implementation of the Associate Professor Network listserv, annual co-hosting of the Fall Welcome for Women Faculty, and development of the ADVANCE Scholar Award Distinguished Lecture and Networking Reception. Though all MNI programs and activities were well-received, both faculty mentors and mentees evaluated the Launch Mentoring Committees especially positively. This program emerged as a recommended best practice for engaging new faculty and building a sense of community that crosses disciplinary and intersectional boundaries.

Seeing Self: The CAMPOS Model

Building an inclusive community that diversifies the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is a daunting task, all the more so given the low numbers of Latinas and other underrepresented minority groups (URM) who enter academic STEM disciplines. This chapter takes an in-depth look at one of the novel ADVANCE initiatives—the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS). The center fosters sustainable institutional transformation by collaborating with traditional campus committees to recruit, retain, and promote excellent faculty committed to inclusion while also engaging the broader UC Davis STEM community. Its core mission is to support the discovery of knowledge though multicultural perspectives. CAMPOS creates an environment that is diversity-driven, mentorship-grounded, and career-success-focused. It recognizes the barriers that URM STEM scientists endure within academia and seeks to mitigate those barriers, highlighting the accomplishments of CAMPOS faculty scholars and making URM STEM scientists visible role models. The center is committed to transforming STEM by developing the leadership skills needed to sustain institutional transformation in laboratories, departments, and universities locally, nationally, and globally. The CAMPOS model can be replicated at other universities seeking to change the face of STEM.

A cross-national analysis of cultural representations in English textbooks used in China and Germany

Culture learning is complicated in teaching English as an international language (EIL), given the global contexts in which English is being used for various purposes. This study aims to examine cultural representations in four series of high school English language textbooks distributed in China and Germany. It categorized cultures into four cultural types and four cultural elements within each type of culture in order to question the breadth and depth of cultural representations. The findings indicate that China’s English textbooks seem to balance among different cultures, but they still present factual knowledge and static information. The underlying value orientations are therefore underestimated. Germany’s English textbooks encompass the majority of contents about the target culture and put the emphasis on students' multicultural perspectives, communicative competence and intercultural skills. Thus, target cultures dominate cultural contents and source cultures are rare in Germany’s textbooks. Lastly, the findings are discussed and some recommendations for textbook writers and English teachers are suggested.

Ethical implications of digital infrastructures for pluralistic perspectives

It is important to design digital infrastructure that can better accommodate multicultural and pluralistic views from its foundations. It is insufficient to look at only the responses and influences of culture on technology without considering how the technology can be adapted in anticipation of, and to support, pluralistic multicultural perspectives in its original design. This goes beyond the simple act of supporting multiple languages and interfaces, but should include the ability of digital and data infrastructure to capture and accommodate pluralistic views, supporting multiple perspectives in the representation and processing of the data itself. In this work, we look at how rethinking the representation of data can allow us to more directly tackle domains that are typically hampered due to intercultural differences, and their inevitable losses in translation, particularly losses of valuable information like context and intention. When we refer to a loss of context and intention, we are referring to the loss of semantic information when practices such as referencing and citation are hard-coded to a particular set of cultural norms. We show that it is possible to expand the way in which we track referential data to capture richer semantic information regarding the contexts and intentions of the creators of this data, and thereby better serve the varied needs of those who consume, study, and refer to such data. We demonstrate this concept through a prototype system for a multicultural digital infrastructure, which we have named MultiVerse, and discuss its ethical implications from the perspectives of ‘multistability’, Intercultural Information Ethics framework, and poststructuralism.

Black skin, White theorists: Remembering hidden Black early childhood scholars

As US schools become increasingly diverse, the population of teachers who serve them remains predominantly homogeneous. Teacher preparation programs must prepare pre-service teachers to draw from multicultural perspectives or multiple ways of knowing if they truly intend to cultivate effective culturally responsive educators. This article presents a clarion call for the remembering of hidden Black intellectual thoughts on early childhood, while reconceptualizing and expanding conceptions of foundational educational theorists in the field. The findings demonstrate that both the teacher educator and students developed and enhanced their cultural competence and critical consciousness.

Current Educational Practices from Multicultural Perspectives in Oromia Secondary Schools: Opportunities and Challenges

The purpose of this study is to examine the current educational practices from multicultural perspective in secondary schools of Eastern Wollega Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. To realize this, survey method was adopted to collect data from 5 experts, 10 principals, 51 teachers, and 102 students. The students were select randomly by using simple random sampling techniques while experts, principals, and teachers were selected by the availability sampling method. Questionnaires and interviews were used for data collections. The collected data were analyzed by frequencies, percentages, and narration of words. The findings revealed that respondents were highly aware of multicultural education. However, it was not implemented into educational practices. Furthermore, lack of skills, knowledge, negative attitude, and discrimination based on prejudices, ethnocentrism, politics, and religion were the main challenges. The study confirmed that establishing clubs could boost multicultural education awareness and positive attitude. It could also raise the students, teachers, and the society’s awareness about multicultural education. Teachers should encourage students in practicing tolerance and respecting differences. Furthermore, school principals and Oromia Education Bureau should create different mechanisms for nurturing multicultural education and creating a means to minimize discrimination. Finally, the study indicates the need for preparing teachers, students, and the school community to build unity within diversity and tolerance in the schools.