are national groups with many chapters at schools throughout the country.

Their names are Greek letters such as Alpha Delta Phi. These groups have

been much criticized for being cruel and prejudiced because membership is

limited and selective. A student must be invited to join. There is often

great competition among freshmen and sophomores who want to join. Those who

seek membership must go through rush (a period when prospective members

visit different houses to meet and be evaluated by current members). The

whole experience can be very painful if a student goes through rush and

then is not asked to pledge (become a trial member of) any of the houses he

or she has visited. Sororities and fraternities also tend to limit

membership to one particular racial and religious group, thereby depriving

its members of the wonderful opportunity that college offers for broadening

social contacts. However, these groups do help students find friends of

similar backgrounds; thus, they help combat loneliness for those away from

home.

Student life at American universities is chaotic during the first week

of each quarter or semester. Registering for classes, becoming familiar

with the buildings on campus, buying books, adding and dropping classes,

and paying fees are confusing for everyone. During this busy period there

is little time for students to anticipate what they will later encounter in

the classroom.

International students, accustomed to their countries' educational

expectations, must adapt to new classroom norms in a foreign college or

university. Whereas in one country prayer may be acceptable in a classroom,

in another it may be forbidden. In some classrooms around the world

students must humbly obey their teacher's commands and remain absolutely

silent during a class period. In others, students may talk, eat, and smoke

during lectures as well as criticize a teacher's methods or contradict his

or her statements. It is not always easy to understand a new educational

system.

Diversity in Education

There is considerable variety in university classrooms in the United

States. Because of diverse teaching methods and non-standardized curricula,

no two courses are identical. Undergraduate courses are considerably

different from graduate courses. The classroom atmosphere in expensive,

private universities may differ from that in community colleges which are

free and open to everyone. State-funded universities have different

requirements and expectations than do parochial colleges. Nevertheless,

there are shared features in American college and university classrooms

despite the diversity of educational institutions of higher learning.

The differences between cultures are leaded to misunderstandings in

many points.

3. FACTORS INFLUENSING VALUES

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A GUIDE TO MEN OF ACTION

Anyone who has traveled abroad or dealt at all extensively with non-

Americans learns that punctuality is variously interpreted. It is one thing

to recognize this with the mind; to adjust to a different kind of

appointment time is quite another.

In Latin America, you should expect to spend hours waiting in outer

offices. If you bring your American interpretation of what constitutes

punctuality to a Latin-American office, you will fray your temper and

elevate your blood pressure. For a forty-five-minute wait is not unusual

-no more unusual than a five minute wait would be in the United States. No

insult is intended, no arbitrary pecking order is being established. If, in

the United States, you would not be outraged by a five-minute wait, you

should not be outraged by the Latin-American's forty-five-minute delay in

seeing you. The time pie is differently cut, that's all.

Further, the Latin American doesn't usually schedule individual

appointments to the exclusion of other appointments. The informal Clock of

his upbringing ticks more slowly and he rather enjoys seeing several people

on different matters at the same time. The three-ring circus atmosphere

which results, if interpreted in the American's scale of time and

propriety, seems to signal him to go away, to tell him that h~ is not being

properly treated, to indicate that his dignity is under attack. Not so. The

clock on the wall may look the same but it tells a different sort of time.

The cultural error may be compounded by' a further miscalculation. In

the United States, a consistently tardy man is likely to be considered

undependable, and by our cultural clock this is a reasonable conclusion.

For you to judge a Latin American by your scale of time values is to risk a

major error.

Suppose you have waited forty-five minutes and there is a man in his

office, by some miracle alone in the room with you. Do you now get down to

business and stop "wasting time"?

If you are not forewarned by experience or a friendly advisor, you may

try to do this. And it would usually be a mistake. For, in the American

culture, discussion is a means to an end: the deal. You try to make your

point quickly, efficiently, neatly. If your purpose is to arrange some

major affairs, your instinct is probably to settle the major issues first,

leave the details for later, possibly for the technical people to work out.

For the Latin American, the discussion is a part of the spice of life.

Just as he tends not to be overly concerned about reserving you your

specific segment of time, he tends not as rigidly to separate business from

non-business. He runs it all together and wants to make something of a

social event out of what you, in your .culture, regard as strictly

business.

The Latin American is not alone in this. The Greek businessman, partly

for the same and partly for different reasons, does not lean toward the

"hit-and-run" school of business behavior, either. The Greek businessman

adds to the social element, however, a feeling about what length of

discussion time constitutes go09 faith. In America, we show good faith by

ignoring the details. "Let's agree on the main points. The details will

take care of themselves."

Not so the Greek. He signifies good will and good faith by what may

seem to you an interminable discussion which includes every conceivable

detail. Otherwise, you see, he cannot help but feel that the other man

might be trying to pull the wool over his eyes. Our habit, in what we feel

to be our relaxed and friendly way, of postponing details until later

smacks the Greek between the eyes as a maneuver to flank him. Even if you

can somehow convince him that this is not the case, the meeting must still

go on a certain indefinite-but, by our standards, long-time or he will feel

disquieted.

The American desire to get down to business and on with other things

works to our disadvantage in other parts of the world, too; and not only in

business. The head of a large, successful Japanese firm commented: "You

Americans have a terrible weakness. We Japanese know about it and exploit

it every chance we get. You are impatient. We have learned that if we just

make you wait long enough, you'll agree to anything."

Whether this is literally true or not, the Japanese executive

singled out a trait of American culture which most of us share and which,

one may assume from the newspapers, the Russians have not overlooked,

either.

By acquaintance time we mean how long you must know a man be fore

you are willing to do business with him.

In the United States, if we know that a salesman represents a well

known, reputable company, and if we need his product, he may walk away from

the first meeting with an order in his pocket. A few minutes conversation

to decide matters of price, delivery, payment, model of product-nothing

more is involved. In Central America, local custom does not permit a

salesman to land in town, call on the customer and walk away with an order,

no matter how badly your prospect wants and needs your product. It is

traditional there that you must see your man at least three times before

you can discuss the nature of your business.

Does this mean that the South American businessman does not recognize

the merits of one product over another? Of course it doesn't. It is just

that the weight of tradition presses him to do business within a circle of

friends. If a product he needs is not available within his circle, he does

not go outside it so much as he enlarges the circle itself to include a new

friend who can supply the want. Apart from his cultural need to "feel

right" about a new relationship, there is the logic of his business system.

One of the realities of his life is that it is dangerous to enter into

business with someone over whom you have no more than formal, legal

"control." In the past decades, his legal system has not always been as

firm as ours and he has learned through experience that he needs the

sanctions implicit in the informal system of friendship.

Visiting time involves the question of who sets the time for a visit.

George Coelho, a social psychologist from India, gives an illustrative

case. A U.S. businessman received this invitation from an Indian

businessman: "Won't you and your family come and see us? Come any time."

Several weeks later, the Indian repeated the invitation in the same words.

Each time the American replied that he would certainly like to drop in-but

he never did. The reason is obvious in terms of our culture. Here "come any

time" is just an expression of friendliness. You are not really expected to

show up unless your host proposes a specific time. In India, on the

contrary, the words are meant literally-that the host is putting himself at

the disposal of his guest and really expects him to come. It is the essence

of politeness to leave it to the guest to set a time at his convenience. If

the guest never comes, the Indian naturally assumes that he does not want

to come. Such a misunderstanding can lead to a serious rift between men who

are trying to do business with each other.

Time schedules present Americans with another problem in many parts of

the world. Without schedules, deadlines, priorities, and timetables, we

tend to feel that our country could not run at all. Not only are they

essential to getting work done, but they also play an important role in the

informal communication process. Deadlines indicate priorities and

priorities signal the relative importance of people and the processes they

control. These are all so much a part of our lives that a day hardly passes

without some reference to them. "I have to be there by 6: 30." "If I don't

have these plans out by 5:00 they'll be useless." "I told J. B. I'd be

finished by noon tomorrow and now he tells me to drop everything and get

hot on the McDermott account. What do I do now?"

In our system, there are severe penalties for not completing work on

time and important rewards for holding to schedules. One's integrity and

reputation are at stake.

You can imagine the fundamental conflicts that arise when we attempt

to do business with people who are just as strongly oriented away from time

schedules as we are toward them.

The Middle Eastern peoples are a case in point. Not only is our idea

of time schedules no part of Arab life but the mere mention of a dead line

to an' Arab is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. In his culture,

your emphasis on a deadline has the emotional effect on him that his

backing you into a corner and threatening you with a club would have on

you.

One effect of this conflict of unconscious habit patterns is that

hundreds of American-owned radio sets are lying on the shelves of Arab

radio repair shops, untouched. The Americans made the serious cross-

cultural error of asking to have the repair completed by a certain time.

How do you cope with this? How does the Arab get another Arab to do

anything? Every culture has its own ways of bringing pressure to get

results. The usual Arab way is one which Americans avoid as "bad manners."

It is needling.

An Arab businessman whose car broke down explained it this way:

First, I go to the garage and tell the mechanic what is wrong with my

car. I wouldn't want to give him the idea that I didn't know. After that, I

leave the car and walk around the block. When I come back to the garage, I

ask him if he has started to work yet. On my way home from lunch I stop in

and ask him how things are going. When I go back to the office I stop by

again. In the evening, I return and peer over his shoulder for a while. If

I didn't keep this up, he'd be off working on someone else's car.

If you haven't been needled by an Arab, you just haven't been needled.

A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING

We say that there is a time and place for everything, but compared to

other countries and cultures we give very little emphasis to place

distinctions. Business is almost a universal value with us; it can be

discussed almost anywhere, except perhaps in church. One can even talk

business on the church steps going to and from the service. Politics is

only slightly more restricted in the places appropriate for its discussion.

In other parts of the world, there are decided place restrictions on

the discussion of business and politics. The American who is not conscious

of the unwritten laws will offend if he abides by his own rather than by

the local rules.

In India, you should not talk business when visiting a man's home. If

you do, you prejudice your chances of ever working out a satisfactory

business relationship.

In Latin America, although university students take an active interest

in politics, tradition decrees that a politician should avoid political

subjects when speaking on university grounds. A Latin American politician

commented to. anthropologist Allan Holmberg that neither he nor his fellow

politicians would have dared attempt a political speech on the grounds of

the University of San Marcos in Peru-as did Vice-President Nixon.

To complicate matters further, the student body of San Marcos,

anticipating the visit, had voted that Mr. Nixon would not be welcome. The

University Rector had issued no invitation, presumably because he expected

what did, in fact, happen.

As a final touch, Mr. Nixon's interpreter was a man in full military

uniform. In Latin American countries, some of which had recently overthrown

military dictators, the symbolism of the military uniform could hardly

contribute to a cordial atmosphere. Latin Americans need no reminder that

the United States is a great military power.

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10