Exploring Culture: Exercises, Stories, and Synthetic Cultures

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Summary: Activities that support insights
Review: The intercultural field has long been aware of the insightful models pioneered by Geert Hofstede. His seminal research is to be found, now updated, in the 2nd edition of the weighty volume, Culture's Consequences (Sage Publications, 2001). Exploring Culture provides the long-awaited, user friendly introduction and extension of this work, which has become the boilerplate of western intercultural education and practice.

Reality-based cultural models plus experience are the key to effective management in a global economy. Now the authors of Exploring Culture provide both professionals and curious readers with a clear menu for cultural analysis along with a varied buffet of easy-to-digest information in the form or stories, examples, exercises and simulations that both nourish understanding and fortify intercultural competence.

These flash insights and tools invite us to both plumb and organize what we learn in our interactions with people different from ourselves. By introducing activities around what are called synthetic cultures, the authors invite us to identify and practice in safe, simulated circumstances, the various dynamics of cultural difference. With this work in our system, we will have embedded the clues that will lead us to be more perceptive and understanding of cultural difference, as well as choose better responses when we hit the playing field of everyday global reality.

No models, however well researched and designed, can replace experience. The sole caution we would give is not about the content or quality of this book. It would rather be about not letting "the tail wag the dog." The user must resist the temptation that the book's lucidity, despite its cautions, might offer to simplistically impose the model on reality, rather than use it to think through the richness and variations of what we lean and experience about those different from ourselves.

Definitely a book for trainers and educators in the diversity and intercultural fields, Exploring Culture allows us to recognize that, as the authors point out, "We all have the capacity to communicate with other people, however unlike ourselves they might be, and to learn to understand them."


Rating:
Summary: Exploring cultures
Review: This is a fantastic book which helps you understand a foreign culture in all its facets. It is extremely helpful and fun to read. A must for anybody who is interested in culture and communication.