The updated second edition of this popular resource offers practical advice for working with children and families of diverse heritage. With insight from their own racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, the chapter authors contribute wisdom about the influence of different cultures on people's beliefs, values, and behaviors. Their knowledge helps professionals learn how to embrace diversity in intervention services and foster respectful and effective interactions with people of many cultures. Widely used in preservice and in-service settings, Developing Cross-Cultural Competence is invaluable as a textbook in graduate and undergraduate courses in general and special education, social work, child development, psychology, family studies, and public health and ideal as a guide for human services professionals, home visitors, paraprofessionals, and program administrators who work with children with disabilities.

divdivCross-cultural competence is a skill that has become increasingly essential for the managers in multinational companies. For other business people, this kind of competence may spell the difference between surviving and perishing in the new global economy. This book focuses on the dilemmas of these managers and offers constructive advice on dealing with culture shock and turning it to business advantage. Opposing values can be understood as complementary and reconcilable, say Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars. A manager who concentrates on integrating rather than polarizing values will make much better business decisions. Furthermore, the authors show, wealth is actually created by reconciling values-in-conflict. Based on fourteen years of research involving nearly 50,000 managerial respondents and on the authors’ extensive experience in international business, the book compares American cultural values to those of more than forty other nations. It explores six culture-defining dimensions and their reverse images (universalism-particularism, individualism-communitarianism, specificity-diffusion, achieved status–ascribed status, inner direction–outer direction, and sequential time–synchronous time) and discusses them as alternative ways of coping with life’s—and business’s—exigencies. With humor, cartoons, and an array of business examples, the authors demonstrate how the reconciliation of cultural differences can cause whole organizations to grow healthier, wealthier, and wiser. /DIV/DIV

This book serves as a comprehensive, practical, and workshop-based program that facilitates change agents to help organizations and people develop cross cultural skills and global competence. It is grounded in the most rigorous and relevant theories, research, and learning methods and makes them easily accessible and fun to apply.

For HR directors, corporate trainers, college administrators, diversity trainers and study abroad educators, this book provides a cutting-edge framework and an innovative collection of ready-to-use tools and activities to help build cultural competence—from the basics of understanding core concepts of culture to the complex work of negotiating identity and resolving cultural differences.Building Cultural Competence presents the latest work in the intercultural field and provides step-by-step instructions for how to effectively work with the new models, frameworks, and exercises for building learners’ cultural competence. Featuring fresh activities and tools from experienced coaches, trainers, and facilitators from around the globe, this collection of over 50 easy-to-use activities and models has been used successfully worldwide in settings that range from Fortune 500 corporations to the World Bank, non-profits, and universities. Learn updates on classic models like the DIE (Description, Interpretation, Evaluation) framework and the U-Curve model of adjustment. Engage in new exercises to help build intercultural competence, using the practical step-by-step guidance on how to effectively facilitate these activities. Stay relevant and have positive impact with clients, organizations, and students with these well-organized, easy-to-implement, and high impact collection of frameworks, models, and activities.The new, research-based models work for developing cultural competence in any environment, and for designing effective cultural competence courses. Education abroad administrators will be able to use these activities in their pre- departure orientations for students going abroad. Corporate human resource professionals will find these activities invaluable in cultural competence building programs.

This volume contains contributions from 24 internationally known scholars covering a broad spectrum of interests in cross-cultural theory and research. This breadth is reflected in the diversity of the topics covered in the volume, which include theoretical approaches to cross-cultural research, the dimensions of national cultures and their measurement, ecological and economic foundations of culture, cognitive, perceptual and emotional manifestations of culture, and bicultural and intercultural processes. In addition to the individual chapters, the volume contains a dialog among 14 experts in the field on a number of issues of concern in cross-cultural research, including the relation of psychological studies of culture to national development and national policies, the relationship between macro structures of a society and shared cognitions, the integration of structural and process models into a coherent theory of culture, how personal experiences and cultural traditions give rise to intra-cultural variation, whether culture can be validly measured by self-reports, the new challenges that confront cultural psychology, and whether psychology should strive to eliminate culture as an explanatory variable.

Cross-cultural management is a crucial challenge for the successful development of international business, yet it is often badly understood and poorly implemented. Misunderstandings arise as culture affects both individuals and organizations, yet attempts to understand, explain and interpret these differences have often been hidden between a welter of conflicting theories and paradigms. This book is a much-needed guide to the theory and practice of cross-cultural management. It focuses on four key areas: the language connection the global connection the management connection the multimedia connection. Using an innovative approach combining theory, tool-kits and applications, it takes a fresh look at this complex topic, investigating the recognition of cross-cultural differences, accounting for them in managerial communications, and bridging them in a variety of negotiations, interactions and collaborative projects.

This open access book explores cultural competence in the higher education sector from multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives. It addresses cultural competence in terms of leadership and the role of the higher education sector in cultural competence policy and practice. Drawing on lessons learned, current research and emerging evidence, the book examines various innovative approaches and strategies that incorporate Indigenous knowledge and practices into the development and implementation of cultural competence, and considers the most effective approaches for supporting cultural competence in the higher education sector. This book will appeal to researchers, scholars, policy-makers, practitioners and general readers interested in cultural competence policy and practice.