The definitive guide to understanding Arab culture for three decades. For nearly three decades, diplomats, students, business people and governments have relied on Dr. Margaret Nydell's seminal work as the essential guide to comprehending an immensely varied culture. Covering all aspects of Arab life, from religion and society to social norms and communication styles, this all-encompassing guide reveals what the often misunderstood Arab culture is really like. Each chapter, including the examples, all statistics and charts, and each country overview has been extensively updated to reflect current events. This candid and readable guide for non-specialists promotes understanding between modern-day Arabs and Westerners without pushing a political agenda. It beautifully captures the contrasts and characteristics of a great, largely misunderstood civilization and brings them vividly to life. This highly anticipated sixth edition features completely new material in the following sections: Introduction: "Patterns of Change," Chapter 5, "Men and Women" - changes in women's rights Chapter 11, "Islamic Fundamentalism," and the inclusion of ISIS Chapter 12, "Anti-Americanism," including implications for Europe Chapter 13, "Arabs and Muslims in the West" Chapters 14, 15, and 16, "Arab Countries"
NEW 6TH EDITION NOW AVAILABLE This Fifth Editon of the highly successful guide to arab society - published in line with the Arab Spring. The perfect introduction to contemporary Arab culture for those who want to understand today's headlines and the complex events playing out on the world stage. From the rise of fundamentalism to the historically uneasy relationship between the Arab World and the West, Margaret Nydell has expanded her highly respected book to bring today's complex issues into clearer focus. Understanding Arabs introduces the elements of Arab culture and Islam in an even-handed, unbiased style. The book covers such topics as beliefs and values; religion and society; the role of the family; friends and strangers; men and women; social formalities and etiquette; and communication styles.
Margaret Nydell introduces elements of Arab culture and Islam in an evenhanded, unbiased style and covers topics such as beliefs and values, religion and society, the role of the family, social formalities and etiquette and communication styles.
This edited volume strives to support leaders in successfully leading their teams, projects and organizations across borders in an increasingly boundaryless world. From both an academic’s and a practitioner’s perspective, the book focuses on international leaders and their potential to be or become enablers of international success, for and within their respective organizations. The authors are a curated selection of established experts, seasoned leaders, and new voices showcasing novel research, best practices, and business cases. The contributions are assigned to three sections, corresponding to the three core challenges of international leadership: Leading international organizations, leading international teams, and (self)leadership with intercultural excellence. An additional section is dedicated to case studies, exhibiting these challenges in practice. The Foundation of the Swiss Society for Organization and Management (SGO) as well as Innosuisse – Swiss Innovation Agency supported the creation of this book.
Among the surfeit of narratives about Arabs that have been published in recent years, surprisingly little has been reported on Arabs in America -- an increasingly relevant issue. This book is the most powerful approach imaginable: it is the story of the last forty-plus years of American history, told through the eyes of Arab Americans. It begins in 1963, before major federal legislative changes seismically transformed the course of American immigration forever. Each chapter describes an event in U.S. history -- which may already be familiar to us -- and invites us to live that moment in time in the skin of one Arab American. The chapters follow a timeline from 1963 to the present, and the characters live in every corner of this country. These are dramatic narratives, describing the very human experiences of love, friendship, family, courage, hate, and success. There are the timeless tales of an immigrant community becoming American, the nostalgia for home, the alienation from a society sometimes as intolerant as its laws are generous. A Country Called Amreeka's snapshots allow us the complexity of its characters' lives with an impassioned narrative normally found in fiction. Read separately, the chapters are entertaining and harrowing vignettes; read together, they add a new tile to the mosaic of our history. We meet fellow Americans of all creeds and colors, among them the Alabama football player who navigates the stringent racial mores of segregated Birmingham, where a church bombing wakes a nation to the need to make America a truly more equal place; the young wife from Ramallah -- now living in Baltimore -- who had to abandon her beautiful home and is now asked by a well-meaning American, "How do you like living in an apartment after living in a tent?"; the Detroit toughs and the potsmoking suburban teenagers, who in different decades become politicized and serious about their heritage despite their own wills; the homosexual man afraid to be gay in the Arab world and afraid to be Arab in America; the two formidable women who wind up working for opposing campaigns in the 2000 presidential election; the Marine fighting in Iraq who meets villagers who ask him, "What are you, an Arab, doing here?" We glimpse how America sees Arabs as much as how Arabs see America. We revisit the 1973 oil embargo that initiated the American perception of all Arabs as oil-rich sheikhs; the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis that heralded the arrival of Middle Eastern Islam in the American consciousness; bombings across three decades in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and New York City that bring terrorism to American soil; and both wars in Iraq that have posed Arabs as the enemies of America. In a post-9/11 world, Arabic names are everywhere in America, but our eyes glaze over them; we sometimes don't know how to pronounce them or understand whence they come. A Country Called Amreeka gives us the faces behind those names and tells the story of a community it has become essential for us to understand. We can't afford to be oblivious.
This guide is designed for Westerners planning to visit, live or work in the Maghreb and the Middle East. The author has great experience of Arab culture and describes the patterns of change that have influenced the Arab world in recent times. She also analyzes basic Arab values religious beliefs and self-perceptions.
In cross cultural settings, the author suggests it is not enough to know that behavior differs across cultures, but also how differences in values drive behaviors. To truly understand the differences among cultures, one must understand their origins, how they emerged on the world stage, the various economic, political, physical, social, and religious forces that shaped them. This is a unique book in that it traces the antecedents of people's behavior and shows readers why cultures differ and includes suggestions for adjusting to these differences. Engrossing and revealing, Scarborough's book will be essential for corporate management and others involved in international commerce, but also for their counterparts in the public sector, who also understand why it is necessary to get along with people from other cultures in the pursuit of mutually beneficial goals. Scarborough says, There may be no greater, more significant void in the knowledge of educated adults than cross-cultural understanding. My book advances that understanding by explaining the reasons why behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and values differ across specific cultures. Its premise is that people who interact with others with different cultural backgrounds, whether in international or culturally diverse domestic settings, are much better prepared if they understand the reasons why people act, talk, think and feel as they do. Instead of being left with just lessons on behavior, to be learned by rote, readers will be able to rely on a substantive understanding of the cultures and societies in which they find themselves, as well as their own good common sense, and in this way work more productively and harmoniously with their counterparts abroad.
To gain comparative insights into middle-class Americans’ child-related values and practices, Grove’s How Other Children Learn examines children’s learning and parents’ parenting in five traditional societies. Such societies are those have not been affected by “modern” – urban, industrial – values and ways of life. They are found in small villages and camps where people engage daily with their natural surroundings and have little or no experience of formal classroom instruction. The five societies are the Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, the Quechua of highland Peru, the Navajo of the U.S. Southwest, the village Arabs of the Levant, and the Hindu villagers of India. Each society has its own chapter, which overviews that society’s background and context, then probes adults’ mindsets and strategies regarding children’s learning and socialization for adulthood. The book concludes with two summary chapters that draw broadly on anthropologists’ findings about many traditional societies and offer examples from the five societies discussed earlier. The first reveals why children in traditional societies willingly carry out family responsibilities and suggests how American parents can attain similar outcomes. The second contrasts our middle-class patterns of child-rearing with traditional societies’ ways of enabling children to learn and grow into contributing family and community members.
For the first time in history, large numbers of people from the world’s major non-Christian religions are following Jesus as Lord. Surprisingly for many Western Christians, they are choosing to do so within the religious communities of their birth and outside of institutional Christianity. How does this work, and how should we respond to these movements? This long-awaited anthology brings together some of the best writings on the topic of insider movements. Diverse voices explore this phenomenon from the perspectives of Scripture, history, theology, missiology, and the experience and identity of insider believers. Those who are unfamiliar with the subject will find this book a crucial guide to a complex conversation. Students and instructors of mission will find it useful as a reader and reference volume. Field workers and agencies will discover in these chapters welcome starting points for dialogue and clearer communication. The first book to provide a comprehensive survey of the topic of insider movements, Understanding Insider Movements is an indispensable companion for those who want to glimpse the creative, unexpected, boundary-crossing ways God is at work among the peoples of the world in their diverse religious communities.
This book explores the extent to which self-praise is acceptable in both offline and online contexts, across different genres, platforms, and cultural backgrounds. The data analyzed encompass both naturally occurring (daily conversation as well as institutional talk) and elicited (experiments and interviews) types, and are explored at both quantitative and qualitative levels to offer a relatively systematic and comprehensive inquiry into self-praise as social (inter)action. Contributors to this book not only draw on traditional politeness theories but are also informed by social psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, CMC, and (multimodal) discourse analysis. They are inspired by pragmatics but also go beyond to ground their studies within locally situated cultural contexts, most of which are under-presented in the current academic world. Their efforts substantiate the fact that self-praise is most worthy of intensive analytic attention. This book appeals to students and researchers in the field and contributes to the way communication is facilitated through different ways of deploying linguistic and interactional resources.
