ORGANISATIONS, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE

Before you travel or do business abroad you should check carefully on local customs, cultures and communication and remember that people do things differently just as people within your own culture have different attitudes and customs.

The need to understand cultural differences is obvious today. Each of us is exposed to people from other cultures on a regular basis, in the workplace, in our social activities, traveling abroad or even within our families.

The purpose of the essay is to discuss what culture is, the main causes for cross-cultural misunderstandings, and the attitudes and skills that we need to communicate cross-culturally in any situation.

What is culture?

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called the way of life for an entire society. As such, it includes also codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, games and norms of behavior. (Findley and Rothney, 2006). Of course this definition doesn't exhaust the many uses of the term "culture." In our days we can find more than 164 definitions of it. (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952).

1. Adler, N.J., 1997. International dimensions of organizational behavior. 3rd ed. Cincinnati, OH: Shout-Western College Publishing.

2. Argyle, Michael, 1998. Bodily Communication, 2nd ed., Methuen & Co. Ltd.

3. Encina, Gregorio Billikopf. Cultural Differences? Or, are we really that different?, 2007. The University of California Press.

4. Findley, Carther Vaughn and John Alexander Rothney, 2006. Twentieth-century World. 6th ed.

5. Iivonen, Diane H. Sonnenwald, Maria Parma & Evelyn Poole-Kober, 1998. Analyzing and Understanding Cultural Differences: Experiences from Education in Library and Information Studies. Amsterdam: 64th IFLA General Conference (August 16 - 21, 1998).

6. Kelsey, D., 2008. Culture As A Barrier To Communication. The University of Toledo (Ohio) Press.

7. Kroeber, A. L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.

8. Reed, J.S., 1986. Southern Folk, Plain & Fancy: Native White Social Types. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press.

Примечаний нет.