The cultural literacy of graduate management students

Abstract

T he acrimonious debate over multiculturalism in education has not yet begun to directly affect graduate business educators. Our undergraduate university curricula, some charge, have been and still are little more than arenas for political indoctrination that discriminate in subtle but powerful ways along lines of race, class, and gender (see Ravitch 1990, Searle 1990, Sullivan 1990, Hacker 1990, and Stanfield 1985). Political correctness has become a watchword for some, a code word for others. For multiculturalists, any expression of sentiment for the traditional curriculum, or for educational programs that teach Western cultural ideas, must be immediately exposed as ideological. For those who see Western culture and politics as heterogeneous, self-critical, and tolerably self-correcting, multiculturalist attacks are thinly veiled versions of Marxist ideology. Traditionalists argue that the politicization of education threatens to balkanize our campuses and make intercultural, interracial dialogue all but impossible. Whether or not the current multiculturalism debates are a passing fad, management educators would do well to reflect on the implications of this debate for their tasks. Indeed, multiculturalism in the university is connected to cultural phenomena. As we all know, most managers face pluralistic customer and employee populations. Customers and employees from varied cultural backgrounds create complex challenges to effective communication--particularly in today's global economy. Competitiveness often depends on an adequate understanding of cultural value differences. As Philip West has argued (1989), Pacific Rim competitors know even more about American culture than do American businesspeople. This knowledge provides considerable advantage in predicting how Americans will think and behave. Despite the growing social and political tensions facing U.S. business, we know of no empirical research focusing on the broad range of cultural knowledge management students need to respond to the social environment. E.D. Hirsch's cultural literacy project (1983, 1987) has called our attention to the serious lack of cultural knowledge among U.S. students. Hirsch and his collaborators used current general circulation newspapers, books, and magazines as their sources. They selected information items that writers did not define, because these items are assumed to be part of the common knowledge readers share with the writer. Consequently, the level of knowledge assumed by Hirsch is far less than that needed for an adequate understanding of Western culture, much less non-Western cultures. The cultural literacy project aimed to define minimal functional literacy for our current social and cultural environment and selected cultural literacy items empirically--on the basis of contemporary use. Hirsch's efforts have been aimed at primary education. Only one published report has assessed cultural literacy among professional students. In 1988, Charles King reported that a class of fourth-year medical students at the University of Kansas College of Health Sciences correctly identified only 30.7 percent of 100 basic cultural literacy items. Our study presents briefly the resuits of an expanded and more detailed version