This first section, in analyzing the fundamental issues that affect the above activities in any relevant organization, sets up the methodological and conceptual basis for the rest of the text, despite the fact that it doesn’t go into great depth with issues in management per se.  Overall, it presents the need for greater awareness among those dealing with colleagues, employees, managers, etc. of the sometimes quite opposed assumptions about such things as valued social behaviors, organizational structures and criteria for success that people from different cultures can bring to their business interactions, as well as the complexity involved in reaching understandings about these assumptions.

Usefully, Cross-Cultural Management includes sections on the then-current state of research into dominant patterns of difference and similarity for relevant value systems around the world.  The studies discussed are primarily those that have surveyed participants from a number of countries in order to identify and distinguish common criteria that Thomas, among others working on issues in cross-cultural management, believes managers can use to perhaps better assess how they should structure their expectations of work-related behavior in cross-cultural environments.  These criteria include valuations of individuality/collectivity, acceptance of hierarchical differences in power, desires for stability and harmony, emotional openness, in-group/out-group dynamics, egalitarianism, adaptability in favor of preserving one’s environment over one’s own desires, orientations towards the past, present or future, and sources of social status based on ascription or achievement, among others.

The studies that Thomas cites inherently tend to simplify complex social patterns into concise terms, creating stereotypes that could be useful guidelines for social expectations only if one also takes into account the fact that any given individual from a stereotyped society may not actually fit into the tendencies so described.  If a manager does not take these stereotypes as completely accurate, and is flexible when figuring out how to appropriately incorporate knowledge of a foreign culture into specific, real-life situations, then these studies and Thomas’ presentation of them could be beneficial for the appropriate audiences.

More importantly still, this section of the text raises potential questions that managers can and should ask themselves when in relevant situations.  By highlighting a number of the ways in which cultures are similar and diverse, and indicating some of the ways in which these variations manifest in practice, Thomas repeatedly points to the fact that different social groups, whether divided by nationality or by other criteria, will come to any interaction with their own set of expectations and value systems, and that being open to determining what those may be is significantly more productive than relying on prior assumptions.

Indeed, the structure of this book even reflects this method, as the early chapters do not assume that the reader has a strong grasp of what crucial terms like “culture,” “globalization,” and “management” mean, and how they relate to each other.  In providing an introduction to what these concepts mean, why they are relevant, how they are studied, what some of their tangible effects are on organizations, and how managers should be aware of their variations around the world, Thomas effectively provides an example of the way in which managers can approach their own interactions with a step-by-step method that seeks to avoid assumptions about people’s backgrounds and provides a common ground on which to build a productive conversation – with the more specific analyses of cross-cultural management practices found later in this book being the intended conversation.  In some ways, this is in and of itself a method probably based on American tendencies, given the greater inclination in this culture to emphasize the right of people to participate in activities democratically, as well as the common valuation given to handling problems directly and in a linear fashion.  Does this mean that if this book had been written by Japanese scholars, would they have taken the same data and interpreted it in a noticeably different fashion; say, recommending more situational and indirect methods of determining how to communicate across cultural differences?

Additionally, the section of this text that I have read so far has reinforced for me the impression that UNESCO’s approach to World Heritage Sites, which fundamentally require cross-cultural management because of the international nature of the United Nations, the World Heritage Sites and their more localized management agencies, does not take into account enough of these differences among cultures despite their guiding principles of celebrating these differences.

For one, it assumes that a people would want to preserve a Site in a particular state and to have it managed according to the values commonly promoted in “western” cultures.  One of these values is the idea that individual achievements should be celebrated for their singular worth, rather than just focusing on the status of the culture as a whole, while a related one would be the degree to which less traditionally powerful stakeholders should have the right to participate in decisions about the future of their historic sites.  I also would not be surprised if many of the organizations that work on World Heritage Sites around the globe, given their common derivation from European or American preservation history and socio-political value systems, face misunderstandings in their work around the Sites due to insufficient awareness or practice of the points Thomas makes later in his book.

At this point, I am sure I need to learn more about both the current practices and the recommendations made by authors like Thomas in order to properly critique how these World Heritage-related organizations deal with their own variations on cross-cultural management, and I look forward to doing so.

Let’s wrap this up.

SOOOOOO CLOOOOOOOSE

The first section, “Eye Lust,” deals again with optics. Virilio warns that as ophthalmology becomes more and more invasive, we will face a sudden “mechanization of vision” (94) that will unify the planet (hinting again here at the global/local disparity that he’s brought up so often) and rob us of our “freedom of perception” (96). His specific fear is this:

[A]re we about to lose our status as eyewitnesses of tangible reality once and for all, to the benefit of technical substitutes, prostheses for all seasons which will make of us the ‘visually challenged’, living off sight handouts, afflicted with a kind of paradoxical blindness due to overexposure of the visible and to the development of sightless vision machines, hooked up to the ‘indirect light’ of optoelectronics that now completes the ‘direct optics’ of sunlight or electricity? (91)

Heady stuff!

The next section, “From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion,” transfers the fear of technology from the eye to the body. Virilio believes that the potential for technology to satisfy sexual desires from great distances has resulted in a boom in single-parent households, and that this “will go on to provoke an even more radical gap between men and women, thereby directly threatening the future of sexual reproduction” (106). His specific fear, this time, is this:

To prefer the virtual being – at some remove – to the real being – close-up – is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to a substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh-and-blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else. (103-04)

Personally, I was particularly entertained by his assertion that “the cybernetics of future sex hotlines will shortly make redundant the male and female of a totally disqualified human race, to the advantage of the sex machines of media masturbation” (109). Virilio is writing before the domination of the Internet by pornography — what might he say today?

The final section is “Escape Velocity,” in which Virilio retreads many of the points he has made throughout Open Sky, including trajectivity, local/global time, time-light, DataSuits, and a host of other fears and concerns. He makes much of “glocalization,” defined as “the very latest centrality of real time that is nothing more than this ‘superconductive medium’ offering no resistance to the electrodynamics of telematic impulses” (135). He also talks a lot about astronauts. I liked this quote from early in the section:

…time is the accident to end all accidents, for we associate it with night and day and their component parts and similarly with feelings and their absence, motion and rest, deeming any accident in these to be called Time. (120)

Wow! Whoa! For more information about technological paranoia, please pick up a copy of Paul Virilio’s Open Sky or visit your local Amish community. It has been a pleasure writing for you all over the last several months, and I hope you manage to attain pleasant and meaningful lives.

Discussion questions:
1) Is Virilio right? If he is, is that bad? Can we do anything to stop the flow of technology? Should we?
2) What should I ask for as a graduation gift?

Those with power to influence have to be careful with that privilege. While academics and other individuals may have had the ability to realize Koolhaas’s flawed research and reporting methods, others may not have been that quick to dismiss his so-called findings. Instead, they may have been swayed by his clearly biased portrayals of the city of Lagos. What is also extremely alarming about Koolhaas’s approach to Lagos is how he views the city, primarily planning within the city and how he feels about the role of planning as a whole. As mentioned in the reading, Koolhaas has faith in planning, but also “fetishizes everything unplanned” (11). How then can his contradictory nature be upheld as a respected opinion? For social and economic conditions to be addressed, appropriate planning responses need to be considered to improve conditions.

It is difficult to follow his reasoning without any conclusive data and research into the real conditions of the site. He provides very surface level and selective insight of the area rather than going into any deep analysis of the city. Furthermore, his idea of a “new ‘universal’ theory of modernism, wherein the future of cities will have, “‘a combination of the rigid and the free,’” is completely misguided and an example of where theory does not translate to practice and real-world conditions (11). It is more to actually provide insight on future potential conditions, outlining the long-term sustainability of a community and the future issues they might face, rather than to make an ambiguous blanket statement that does not provide any real outlook of the future or even any sense of the current conditions of the site.

Image:

Getty Images. Photo. Businessweek.com 22 Apr. 2013. <http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/03/0304_difficult_cities/2.htm>.

From this reading I learned that place may be used as a medium in art, and that when choosing to display an art piece, it is also important to note the location in which it will be displayed, and how the place may affect the way the art piece is viewed. I also learned that places are strongly influenced not only by its geographical location, but by the people who have been in the place, and how those people present such place to others. This also brought me to question the influence mass media has had on the perception of various places throughout the world. Finally, I also learned that fictional places can seem very real in today’s society, for technological advances allows for virtual places that though are not physically present, they seem to be incorporated into our daily lives so much that many have been desensitized from its artificiality.

I did not find anything in this chapter that disagreed with. I found most insights and arguments presented to be formed logically, and found that the theme of place in art can be viewed in many ways that aren’t necessarily correct or incorrect, for place is very much viewed through every person according to their own experiences and knowledge.

An artist that interested me is Alfredo Jaar. This is because I understand and appreciate his piece Geography=War. This is because though I was raised in America, I was born in Mexico, and was raised very differently from most of my peers. I was personally affected by the poverty my parents endured as children. This was a determining factor in my present day location, and the person I have become.

An artist I felt indifferent about was Thomas Demand. This is because I do not fully comprehend the meaning behind his method of work. I understand his work has its viewers question the artificiality of different places, but I do not understand why he does this over and over again. I feel like I am not fully comprehending what seems to me as being a lack of variety. I also believe this may also be due to the small amount of work I’ve seen by Thomas Demand. I hope to be exposed to more of his work in the future to hopefully gain a greater appreciation for his painstaking method of work.

The Hussain article says that we should not value freedom of speech when incidents like the Danish Mohammad cartoon arise because freedom of speech can be taken too far and offend people.  Just because someone has the right to say something, does not mean that they should say it.

The images of cartoon Mohammad and the falling WTC victim contrast heavily, primarily because one is real while the other is not.  A cartoon is deliberately made while a photograph captures something that a viewer witnesses.  The artist behind the photograph of the falling man is not responsible for his death, but the artist behind the cartoon is responsible for depicting Mohammad in an offensive way.  The cartoon Mohammad is a caricature of a Muslim man and stereotypes them as suicide bombers.  The photo of the WTC man, on the other hand, is done with a more serious attitude.  The minimalistic nature and unexaggerated qualities of the photo do not poke fun.

First, Godlewski addresses academia in “Alien and Distant: Rem Koolhaas on Film in Lagos, Nigeria,” where he criticizes two documentary films produced by starchitect Rem Koolhaas in his research studio in Lagos, Nigeria. Godlewski finds five recurring themes in both Mutations and Under Siege (2002) and Lagos Wide and Close (2004). He accuses Koolhaas of false novelty, in which he presents Lagos as this unstudied site underrepresented in other historical disciplines. Koolhaas’ films are also dehistoricized and depoliticized, taken out of context of history and current African politics. The documentaries are also exoticized, failing to compare it to “normal” Western cities, and institutional frameworks are further reinforced because Koolhaas ironically fails to address these controversial frameworks. Therefore, the research studio is unsuccessful because “how” the research is collected was not convincing enough to address how space is produced and contested in Lagos.

Like how Koolhass presents Lagos, megacity projects in current Philippines are being advertised in a similar way.  Shatkin calls this shift in the Philippines’ housing market as an unprecedented privatization of urban and regional planning. Also, Shatkin names this “bypass implant urbanism,” rooted in plantation-based economy, where he provides an example of the Ayala Alabang megaproject where the government along with large developers, work in a private public partnerships to help transform the region. They, in some way share the qualities of exoticizing the place, which often comes hand in hand with dehistoricizing and depoliticizing the area. Just like how Paris Hilton’s ad for a large project in Manila, developers sell their projects without any deeper context, only to create an image of luxury for buyers, ignoring the roots of this massive housing privatization shift. In comparison, Rem Koolhaas, a starchitect, uses his movies not to really dig deeper into the urban theories of Lagos, but rather promote him and his practice as an all-around architect and this concept of a research studio.

In relation to the two previous articles, Havaradus and Aquino analyze a more grassroots initiative, dealing with the expansion of these cities in “Toward Innovative, Liveable, and Prosperous Asian Megacities.”  The Gawad Kalinga, “to give care,” community development model has a high rate of success in mobilizing donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries to help solve Philippine’s homelessness and poverty. The model consists of empowered communities, holistic and integrated approach, building relationships and nurturing meaningful partnerships, and a strong credible brand. Ironically, even these grassroots approaches argue for a strong credible brand in order to make their initiatives in the community work and to attract beneficiaries. With the globalization of the world markets, it seems that everything that wishes to be sold or attract attention must be marketed.  Koolhaas’ two documentaries and Manila’s mass housing projects are no exception to this globalized marketing concept, which sometimes results in sacrificing historical and contextual value.

This book had the most detail, I would say on its studies of caste cultures in India, which was useful for the fact that the caste system feels the more foreign of those discussed in this book to an American like me.  However, this emphasis did make some sections of the text come across as unbalanced and wanting more cross-cultural comparison in order to improve upon the contextualization of the discussion.  Additionally, given that I have a bit more experience with East Asian culture in my own life, have primarily lived in America, and thought about the material comparing East Asia and the West in The Geography of Thought last week*, I valued the level of detail included in this text on Indian caste structures, and yet would still like a better understanding of how these structures affect cognitive processes and regular interactions among people living within this system.

Moreover, this has made me curious for how people coming from a lifetime of experience in any one of these systems can learn to productively communicate with people from another one of these cultural environments, as there would clearly be many chances for false assumptions and miscommunications among groups whose expectations of how people should interact have such varied foundations from each other.  For example, how do those who come from caste-aware environments deal with the lack of caste-related data available when interacting with Americans?  In practice, does this discrepancy in social metadata affect the way organizations that are trying to involve both local Indian and foreign (such as American or European) stakeholders in a project or business-venture treat those clients/employees, and to what extent should it do so?  Or Indian and Chinese, or all three at once?  I expect that the assumptions that the various groups bring to such interactions will affect their reactions to the behavior of those with whom they are working, but I don’t have a good sense, not having actively worked in a comparable context myself, how specifically those differences would manifest in those combinations, or what would be appropriate ways to manage such interactions.  I hope that my reading for the subsequent week, Cross-Cultural Management, will help me understand how to place the information I have gained through my reading the last two weeks into a more practical and applied context.

On related notes, this text’s analysis of these various social groups and their typical value systems raised some other questions for me, as I tried to imagine how this material would apply to my areas of interest in practice.  Would the great emphasis placed throughout society on supernatural forces in India, as outlined in Clan, Caste and Club and as I previously learned about when helping a Middlebury professor with her book on devotional practices to Krishna in Vrindaban and Jaipur, lead preservation efforts run by Westerners to have greater ease at incorporating local interests and involvement at religious sites, in contrast to sites with secular significance?  In what contexts in India are the values of Western preservationists even easily comprehensible to non-Western educated locals, given that many elements of preservation and heritage focused organizations derive from American and European individualist, Christian, primarily Protestant traditions that have highly contrasting values and assumptions from those of Hindu India?

I imagine that the assumption in America about individuals and their voluntarily-joined organizations being able to change any conditions that they do not like (including the gradual degradation of a historic structure that is no longer used) to be quite foreign to many who grew up with the assumption that one is born into a caste because of long-term karma and the wills of gods, and that such conditions are only in a small number of ways changeable in one’s lifetime, usually for the worse.  Is this actually one of the areas in which such attempts by American and European organizations are completely misguided, or is there a productive and respectful way to share such values while working with the local culture, instead of forcibly and ineffectually imposing Western views upon it?  Given that caste is something into which one is born, but is not something that involves strong clan ties, as in China, nor is it a system with emphasized stories about inherited connections to past social groups, is there a variation on the concept of “heritage” with indigenous Indian societies?  How do people there understand what Westerners mean when they come in and talk about preserving heritage?  Is it more common for this European-and-American grown symbol system to be understood in China, as a result of the greater emphasis there than in either India or the West on continuity with and respect for significant history?

I know that such concepts can be quite variable from group to group, even within the same broader society, let alone from America to India or China, and I expect that the contrasting worldviews that this text highlights would further distance from each other the assumptions that people trying to work with World Heritage Sites outside the West encounter in themselves and others when seeking to apply UNESCO’s ideals in practice.

*The context of the several comments like this that I make throughout this review is that I originally wrote this in late February, a week after reading The Geography of Thought and writing the previously posted review on that book.

There are a plethora of accepted rules and standards acknowledged and accepted  for internet usage among children, teens, and adults alike, but who is that gets to decide these? And when did our freedom of speech become limited  because of a computer?

Internet regulation is a growing concern among users and government alike. Yes, as American’s we are protected under freedom of speech, but how much can you say before it is too far and offensive or even putting others in danger? Should anyone be able to tell us it is too far, or too much? Sociable Blog lists ten reasons the government should not have the right to regulate the internet, and after reading them, I really got to thinking, maybe they are right…

Here’s just a few..

1. To protect the first amendment

2. Encouraging entrepreneurial activity

3. Facilitating Innovation

4. Complications of Regulating Legitimate Sites Under Sweeping Legislation

5. “Offensive” is arbitrary

The internet is used for more things then just communication. It is a livelihood for some, a means of researching for others. Why should someone have the right to censor or take away information just because they think it is wrong? What if what you were taught is wrong is different from the next person, and the next. Based on different beliefs, the internet could be shut down completely if we were going off of what ” offends people”. Freedom is freedom. No one should be able to take that from us.

I enjoyed reading this article and found some of the phrases that were used very comforting, such as Edutopia and NCLB Hangover.  I liked reading that we need to stop looking at students as test scores and instead find students’ jewels, those skills and traits that cause them to stand out as individuals.  This caused me to have an Eden-like vision of meeting with students 1-on-1 at the beginning of the year to learn more about who they are and what skills they would like to build on.  My vision had a lot of similarities to an advertiser-client focus meeting: “So, how can we help to make your company more grand?”

I was at once inspired and then quickly left feeling naive and gullible.  I’m quite torn, the epitome of riding the fence between wanting to nurture students “where they are at” and wanting to slap them with a healthy dose of reality to get them to work, feeling like kids are coddled too much these days.  In this ambivalence, I think it comes down to what a student puts forward.  I always wait for them to make the first move.  I can’t even describe what this first move looks like: a question in class or in private, a raised hand with an answer, a comment about the reading.  These are signs that a student isn’t after grades but is after their own knowledge.  They want to learn more, to know more.  I have little patience for students that ask, “what can I do to get my grade up?” or “is there any extra credit I can do?”  Had they made different decisions throughout the year, they wouldn’t be in this position.  Of course, this is all based on student performance over an extended period of time.

With that being said, I think it is good for students to be aware of their strengths because these areas are where confidence is cultivated and it’s this confidence that causes kids to feel safe to try out new things (i.e. to learn new things).  If a student doesn’t feel they are good at anything, they’re not going to bother looking around to see if there’s anything else they could be good at.  In this vein, I like the list of strategies and activities listed in this article.  And I like calling the information obtained “Positive Data.”  Using this information to differentiate instruction could be a nightmare, however, with 25-35 students in each class and 130-150 total students.  If only school could evolve from the structured approach that it is into a free-learning independent study facility with teacher advisors.  But I digress…

Of course, I’d much prefer my students engaged and invested in the learning than getting all the “right answers.” … all good teachers feel this way but it’s as obvious as saying, I wish I could get paid for doing nothing.  No teacher, no good teacher, values test scores.  But, this isn’t about us or the students, it’s about the desperate politicians that need something concrete to justify the decisions they make.  And no politician is going to take a teacher’s word for it when there are tests available to use, especially when that teacher’s evaluation is tied to student “learning.”

How can we as writing teachers use the crosswalk document to support a process writing approach to instruction and assessment in the common core emphasized modes of writing–narrative, informative, or argumentative?

To answer this question, we must first be sure we are aware of what a process writing approach to instruction even is.  We are very familiar with the product approach to instruction: “Here is a writing assignment that you must complete so we may wholly judge you on what you create.”  While there be a few variations of this, that is essentially the product approach – all that is cared about is what the student produces.  The process approach, on the other hand, allows the teacher to be more interested in what the student is doing and learning, rather than what they are ending up with.  In the process approach, students are able to find their own way through the writing maze.  Maybe they brainstorm, maybe they don’t.  Maybe they edit as they write or decide to revise seven times before they feel satisfied with what they have written.  They are exploring their own writing styles as a professional writer would.  The answer isn’t important but the discovery of what works for each kid is invaluable to their future successes as actual writers.  Students need to find their own process to feel ownership and importance in what they write.

As for the writing traits, thus far, they have been used (primarily) as a finish line check list: do you have this? check. did you do this? check.  Even I only think about the traits as an end-result tool.  I used the traits at the very beginning of the school year to teach students the various areas that are looked at in their writing.  But, I did this so they would understand the completed rubrics I would be handing back to them in a few weeks.  I wanted them to understand the areas of their writing I was referring to.  So even though I kicked off my writing instruction with the six traits, I didn’t use them as guiding tools throughout the writing process.  Mostly, because it didn’t occur to me that I could.  The crosswalk document makes this connection obvious for us based on the verbs it uses.  Let me explain…

The six traits rubric uses only “to be” verbs: is, are, is not, are not.  It is worded like a snapshot asking how something exists at that exact moment.  In contrast, the crosswalk language uses true action words; action, which means it can start and stop, like in a process.  Some of these words are: creates, uses, distinguishes, introduces, etc.  If something is in process, it means that it exists over a stretch of time, it is observed over a stretch of time.  In this way, the crosswalk document lends itself perfectly, almost as an obvious answer, to a writing process approach to writing instruction within the common core standards.  What’s more, the crosswalk document addresses the three emphasized modes of writing within the common core: narrative, informative, and argumentative; leaving the guesswork out of how to bend the six traits for each mode of writing.

In short, this crosswalk document is an obvious answer to “how do we grade common core writing?” and it should be as invaluable to the teacher as a found writing process is to the student.