This long-awaited new textbook will be of enormous value to students and teachers in cross-cultural and social psychology. The key strength of Understanding Social Psychology Across Cultures: Living and Working in a Changing World is how it illustrates the ways in which culture shapes psychological process across a wide range of social contexts. It also effectively examines the strengths and limitations of the key theories, methods and instruments used in cross-cultural research.
“I wrote this book because I believe that there is a serious gap in what has been written and communicated about cross-cultural management and what people actually struggle with on the ground.”—From the Introduction What does it mean to be a global worker and a true “citizen of the world” today? It goes beyond merely acknowledging cultural differences. In reality, it means you are able to adapt your behavior to conform to new cultural contexts without losing your authentic self in the process. Not only is this difficult, it’s a frightening prospect for most people and something completely outside their comfort zone. But managing and communicating with people from other cultures is an essential skill today. Most of us collaborate with teams across borders and cultures on a regular basis, whether we spend our time in the office or out on the road. What’s needed now is a critical new skill, something author Andy Molinsky calls global dexterity. In this book Molinsky offers the tools needed to simultaneously adapt behavior to new cultural contexts while staying authentic and grounded in your own natural style. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, and consulting with managers and executives around the world, this book reveals an approach to adapting while feeling comfortable—an essential skill that enables you to switch behaviors and overcome the emotional and psychological challenges of doing so. From identifying and overcoming challenges to integrating what you learn into your everyday environment, Molinsky provides a guidebook—and mentoring—to raise your confidence and your profile. Practical, engaging, and refreshing, Global Dexterity will help you reach across cultures—and succeed in today’s global business environment.
How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.
"Points out the necessity of changing [cultural] narratives if real values-transformation is to take place. This is an important work." --Peter Riddell, London Bible College
Nothing lasts forever. This common experience is the source of much anxiety but also hope. The concept of impermanence or continuous change opens up a range of timely questions and discussions that speak to globally shared experiences of transformation and concerns for the future. Impermanence engages with an emergent body of social theory emphasizing flux and transformation, and brings this into a dialogue with other traditions of thought and practice, notably Buddhism that has sustained a long-lasting and sophisticated meditation on impermanence. In cases drawn from all over the world, this volume investigates the significance of impermanence in such diverse contexts as social death, atheism, alcoholism, migration, ritual, fashion, oncology, museums, cultural heritage and art. The authors draw on a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, Buddhist studies, cultural geography and museology. This volume also includes numerous photographs, artworks and poems that evocatively communicate notions and experiences of impermanence.
C. S. Lewis compared the task of ethical inquiry to sailing a fleet of ships; the primary task is avoiding collisions. When introducing cultural change, such collisions are inevitable. Bruce Bradshaw provides expert instruction for navigating these cultural clashes. Bradshaw contends that lasting change comes only through altering the stories by which people live. The Bible is the metanarrative whose altering theme of redemption forms a transcultural ethical basis. Aspects of God's redemption story can change how local cultures think and behave toward the environment, religions, government, gender identities, economics, science, and technology. However, effective change takes place only in a context of reconciliation, Christian community, and mutual learning. A must read for anyone engaged in or preparing for cross-cultural ministry, relief, or development work. The book is also relevant to students of ethics, philosophy, and theology. Numerous real-life examples illustrate the inevitable tensions that occur when cultures and narratives collide.
Prosperous families around the world face unexpected challenges as they encounter the modern global environment. It is natural for the wealth-creating generation to cherish the cultural roots that led to their success, advocating for the family's heritage. But, as subsequent generations are educated and trained in faraway lands and diverse cultures, new influences enter the family. The resulting conflicts can bring significant stress to the family and risk to the family enterprise, especially at times of generational transition. Cross Cultures: How Global Families Negotiate Change Across Generations outlines the latest insights from two internationally-renowned family business consultants, Dennis Jaffe PhD and James Grubman PhD. It explains the practical, commonsense strategies that families in each culture (and their advisors) can use to resolve the differences threatening the fabric of the family. Building on Dr. Grubman's first book, Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations, and Dr. Jaffe's 100 Year Family Enterprise Research project for Wise Counsel Research Associates, Cross Cultures outlines the current sociological research identifying three fundamental cultural styles around the world. It then provides insight into how families can overcome their cross-cultural stresses using proven negotiation techniques. Cross Cultures is a ground-breaking explanation of culture, its hidden dimensions, and the important new ways in which families must think, communicate, and solve problems together.
This book offers interdisciplinary, multicultural, and international perspectives on the interrelation between culture, innovation, change and creative forces. Its wide-ranging contributions present theoretical and empirical approaches and with reference to different domains across disciplines including psychology, education, social sciences, humanities, and engineering. The authors demonstrate how urgent social, environmental, technological, and economic challenges can benefit from individual, and community creativity to effect change. In this volume, “culture” refers to sociocultural differences, educational culture, media culture, organizational culture, technological culture, ethnic differences within a culture, and digital culture. Its contributors offer fresh insights on how creativity, innovation, and change can propel us forward and offer hope for the future across these many different forms of culture. They offer both granular studies of creativity and innovation at work in particular contexts and macro-level discussion on how they affect organizational culture, the culture of a discipline and society at large. This cross-cultural analysis of creativity, innovation and approaches to change will particularly appeal to practitioners and researchers in the fields of psychology, organizational behavior and education.
Contemporary trends such as increased one-parent families, high divorce rates, second marriages and homosexual partnerships have all contributed to variations in the traditional family structure. But to what degree has the function of the family changed and how have these changes affected family roles in cultures throughout the world? This book attempts to answer these questions through a psychological study of families in thirty nations, carefully selected to present a diverse cultural mix. The study utilises both cross-cultural and indigenous perspectives to analyse variables including family networks, family roles, emotional bonds, personality traits, self-construal, and 'family portraits' in which the authors address common core themes of the family as they apply to their native countries. From the introductory history of the study of the family to the concluding indigenous psychological analysis of the family, this book is a source for students and researchers in psychology, sociology and anthropology.
Is falling in love the same the world over? What makes a 'happy marriage' in different cultures? How does our society influence us in the way we raise our children? Is modern life incompatible with intimacy? In this innovative new text, Robin Goodwin challenges many of the established views on relationships by considering how different cultures view different relationships (love, marriage, friendship, the family, sexual relations). By discussing fundamental differences in values between cultures, alongside other key influences such as social class and education, he explores why these differences occur, and how different political and historical events have challenged existing patterns of relationships. Finally, drawing on research from all parts of the world, he considers how we can use this knowledge to help different communities across the globe cope with their most pressing relational challenges. Dr Robin Goodwin is Reader in Psychology in the Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University, London. He publishes widely on relationships and culture, and lectures about his work across the world.
