THE IMPACT OF CULTURE

February 16th 2015

In my second class of intercultural manager, our teacher Heiko divided the class in two sections, the fists one was about the class by itself, we talked and discuss about the impact of culture, how the differences between people from different parts of the wold with different language, manners and behavior can gum up business and not only business we got a very interesting example about the Colombian Aviaca flight from Medellin to New York, that because a misunderstanding the plane crashes, there was not enough gas and the co-pilot, the pilot and the air traffic controller did not understand each other and this caused the crash. After have been talking about this misunderstanding we move deeper in terms of cultural identity that according to Jandt Idem is ''The identification with and acceptance into a group that has a shared system of symbols and meanings as well as norms for conduct''; Referring this I would like to highlight how the sensations and the perceptions in different cultures can interfere in negotiations and businesses and how culture´s influence on perceptions.

We can see this with an example that our teacher gave us: In the occidental culture there are six basic colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple), but in an African culture called Bassa, the organize those colors in two categories the Ziza that are the stronger colors and the Hui that are the weaker colors. 

After this, we saw some chocking images, this was an activity that we did and the reactions were amazing. The images were about the interpretation that people from different cultures give to this images, the first one was a dog with a sad face and the second one was a Chines cooker preparing some dogs to do a meal, this was very impressive because precisely is very different the interpretation according to the culture.
After this first part of the class we did an incredible activity, from my point of view one of the most interesting activity I've ever done.

The second image was about the perception and interpretation that cows have all around the world in some cultures we have them as the base of the alimentation (Protein), and in other cultures they are considered as a religious images.

The activity was basically the construction of a bridge, there were two parties, one The Derdians a community with manners and ways to behave, and the engineers guests that were invited to build the bridge, but with a totally different culture.

When the activity first begun everything was normal the engineers were planning the construction of the bridge but they do not know and do not realize that the Dorians were from other culture with other behavior 

- They couldn't speak in Spanish.

- They had to introduce themselves fist before talk with a Dorian.

- A man couldn't speak with a girl, and a girl couldn't speak with a woman.

- A man couldn't use pencils and a woman couldn't use scissors.

Those are some rules and part of the culture that the engineers had to respect and follow to have a good business and future relationship with this culture.

We can conclude with this activity that for a successful business in other cultures we have first to know the culture by itself, and if we don't get to know those manners and customs in deep we are going to fail in the business, for example the bridge couldn't be build because the lack of time and for instance the lack of communication.

QUESTION!!!

Can perception occur without sensation?
We can begin talking what are each of them.
The sensations are basically the process that is made when all the information that is received from outside arrives to the body and brain, and this process is passive because we do not have awareness of what has been brought to our body.
The perception is the active process that we do when receiving all that information from the outside, this process is made to organize and perceive what the environment is telling us through the senses.
These two concepts have a really strong relation and one without the another can not survive, this is because they exist to crate and identify all the meanings that a feeling can create on us.
Perception without sensation is a concept that is not valid, because the sensations are the firs stimuli that the body has and then this stimuli get processed to understand what is perceived. we can not have perceptions without a stimuli to process.

Bibliography:

- Schmidt, H. (Director) (2015, January 27). Communicating across Cultures. Lecture PowerPoint. Lecture conducted from EAFIT University, Medellin. 

-Sarah Mae Sincero (Jun 6, 2013). Sensation and Perception. Retrieved Feb 18, 2015 from 

Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/sensation-and-perception

COMMUNICATION ACROSS CULTURES

February 11th 2015

During my third class of intercultural manager, we discussed the importance of the communication between cultures and how difficult understanding it is, starting on the activity that we did in the last class (The Derdians) this activity was basically two teams, the first one was the engineers that had to plan the building of a bridge for the Derdian community, and the second one was the Derdians that had to build the bridge with the instructions of the engineers, this activity led us understand the barriers that sometimes people have communicating with a different culture that has different ways to think, completely different manners and norms.

In the class we analyzed all the points that the communication between cultures contain and how barriers in the intercultural communication can affect business across cultures and within it.

At the beginning, the teacher, Heiko Schmidt, pointed the basic model for communication created by David Berlo that is called The Process of Communication, this gave us an idea and a context in where the communication is based on.

The model show us that in every communication must be at least two sides, one the sender that encodes the message through a channel and the other the receiver that decodes the message and get what the sender is trying to communicate, this leads us to understand how cultures takes the misunderstandings; there is basically two ways to understand this: in low context and in high context, Schmidt, explain (and it was very funny) that in some countries or cultures the misunderstanding is because the receiver is fool and does not understand what has been said for example in Colombia, and in other countries the misunderstanding happens in the other way (in this case the fool is the sender)

Now that we are talking about the misunderstanding in communication lets move to the

QUESTION!!!

- Which cultures are in the low context and in the high context and what are the implications about this?

First of all we have to know what is exactly low context communication and high context communication and what are the main differences between them.

A low context culture is one where everything that we said is totally explained and there is not independence in what has been written.

A high context culture is one where everything that we said is not as much as explained as is written or spoken, this means that we have to pay more attention on other non-verbal communication.

The cultures that have low context communications are: Anglos, Germanics and Scandinavians.

The cultures that have high context communications are: Japanese, Arabs, French.

According to Brett Rutledge, world champion of public speaking and executive communication and specialist writes about communication "Japanese can find westerns to be offensively blunt. westerns can find Japanese to be secretive and devious. and French can feel that Germans insult their intelligence by explaining the obvious, while Germans can feel that French managers provide no directions"

With that said, we moved to the barriers in the intercultural communication. There are six aspects that make the communication across countries very difficult: "1) Assumption of similarities, 2) Language differences, 3) Nonverbal misinterpretations, 4) Preconceptions and stereotypes, 5) Tendency to evaluate, 6) High anxiety; These six aspects basically explain why is difficult to communicate with other cultures even if they speak the same language". (Schmidt, H.)

In other hand was very interesting the non-verbal communication because it is the 50% of the entire communication process also because is amazing how people with different culture and language can communicate with their own body or with symbols and signs, but this also has misunderstandings and is very interesting how little changes of personality, history and some Kilometers away, all this non verbal communication that a country has changed.

Bibliography

- Schmidt, H. (Director) (2015, January 27). Communicating across Cultures. Lecture PowerPoint. Lecture conducted from EAFIT University, Medellin. 

-Rutledge, B. (2011, August 21). Cultural Differences - High Context versus Low Context. Retrieved January 11, 2015, from http://thearticulateceo.typepad.com/my-blog/2011/08/cultural-differences-high-context-versus-low-context.html

https://gwynteatro.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/4-barriers-to-effective-communication-what-to-do-about-them-2/