The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research - Houston
page 9
To submit an articles of Intercultural Interest, please contact Andrea Brooks.
Generally speaking, the more you know and understand about people, the easier it is to get along with them.
For example, Camilla McGill said she has a friend who, in the course of a conversation, sometimes suddenly juts out her chin. McGill said that she thought it to be a display of arrogance. Said she felt the friend was displaying disrespect with her chin jutting.
However, McGill said she was relieved to learn that in the friend's native country and culture, when people wish to point at something they point with their chins.
Gosh, if a simple chin misunderstanding can cause tension, how many other traits or practices might be sources of potential friction when people of different cultures get together?
Which is a major reason why McGill has made it her business to learn and pass along, information about as many cultural differences as possible. She is president of the Houston chapter of SIETAR International, Letters in the name SIETAR stand for the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research.
Members of the nonprofit group include intercultural trainers who work in industry, teachers of English as a second language, university professors, linguists, embassy families and others who want to learn about communications between people of different cultures.
Houston boasts a rich cultural diversity and provides many learning and teaching opportunities for McGill She has collected examples of situations where a greater knowledge of social differences might have prevented difficulties.
One involved a small company in Houston that was owned by a man from South Asia. McGill said that he employed other South Asians as well as European-Americans.
She said that the company enjoyed success, and the operations department got really busy keeping up with demands for the product. So the president asked the European-American in charge of marketing to help out in operations.
The marketing fellow figured out a schedule so that he could work so many hours in operations and devote the remainder of his 40-hour week to keeping up his marketing obligations.
Well, no, the company president said. He didn't like the employee trying to divide duties in such a manner. So the marketing fellow went to work in operations and, from time to time, would interrupt his duties there and tell his coworkers he had to go make some marketing phone calls.
The co-workers complained to the boss, who complained to the marketing fellow but without offering him any solution as to how he could keep up with both duties. The marketing fellow wound up quitting the company, McGill said.
She saw the situation as a clash between a monochronic culture and a polychronic culture.
People who grow up in a monochronic society prefer to concentrate on doing one thing at a time, she said Which is why the marketing fellow wanted to schedule his duties with a block of time to perform each, separate from the other.
People from a polychronic society grow up doing many things at once - a bit of this, a piece of that eventually getting everything done, she said, but without focusing exclusively upon one task or one duty from start to finish.
Since a person absorbs his view about work from culture - learning it without realizing he is learning it and without realizing that other cultures have different views - he could have difficulty recognizing this as the source of a problem. So the company owner did not know how to explain to the marketing fellow how to do what he was being asked.
So many cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings in work or school situations, McGill said Another quick example: Teachers expect students to raise their hands and answer questions in class, but some cultures are not as achievement-oriented, with children who feel it is boastful and unseemly to demonstrate what they have learned in such a manner.
McGill and I talked on the phone for more than an hour, she faxed me about 20 pages of material and yet we barely scratched the surface of this underappreciated field of study.
As an indication of just how underappreciated and underrated it is, she said that experts in intercultural relations often hear the same sort of comment from company officials who want to set up a course for employees: You should be able to do this in one day-, why do you need a week?
Article written by Thom Marshall of the Houston Chronicle, his e-mail address is thom.marshall@chron.com.
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