Intercultural Conflict Research Articles

Indicators on informal learning for active citizenship at school

The article is based on an international comparative study in seven European countries, in which informal learning for active citizenship at school was explored by means of in depth case studies. Active citizenship is being recognized as an important goal of education and school pedagogy in an increasing number of countries. After defining the key terms “informal learning at school” and “active citizenship” the conceptual framework on which the study was based is introduced. Next, the most important outcomes of the study are summarized, in terms of core issues that showed varied implementation across countries. These issues are further analyzed in terms of context, input, process and outcome factors, with a strong emphasis on the process factors. Living up to school rules, student participation in school decision making, intercultural conflict and reflective pedagogy were identified as key “process” dimensions, impacting on informal learning for active citizenship at school. In a final section these areas are tentatively worked out as a set of process indicators, applicable in future international comparative studies.

You Think I am Stupid? Face Needs in Intercultural Conflicts

Embedded in intercultural conflicts are identity or face-based goal issues (Rothman, 1997), which, when not effectively managed, may lead to unresolved conflicts. This study examined actual email interactions over a period of five months between an American visiting professor and an International Office staff member at a University in China. It showed three patterns of interaction that failed to manage each other’s face or identity needs and led to unresolved conflicts, hurt feelings, and ruined intercultural relationships. It suggested principles or lessons for effectively handling intercultural conflicts.

Liberation Psychological Implications for Pastoral Care of Korean Military Wives

Native Korean women frequently suffer poverty, sexual violence, and Confucian gender discrimination. Once in America Korean military wives also experience racial and sexual oppression, intercultural familial conflicts and violence, and identity crisis and lead to feelings of isolation and non-belonging, a sense of anomie. Korean American pastors tend to understate and oversimplify the complexity of psychological and spiritual suffering of Korean military wives and overemphasize individual faith development as a solution. Liberation psychology evolved from an awareness of similar dehumanizing realities. The context-based perspective of liberation psychology offers a model to interpret and assist in the psychological and spiritual healing of Korean military wives. The healing power of conscientization offered in Liberation psychology for oppressed individuals encourages self-awakening suggesting it as an ideal interventional model to help Korean military wives and would be a useful approach for Korean American pastors.

Corrigendum to “A Study of Inter-cultural Marital Conflict and Satisfaction in Taiwan” [International Journal of Intercultural Relations (2010) 354–362

Corrigendum to “A Study of Inter-cultural Marital Conflict and Satisfaction in Taiwan” [International Journal of Intercultural Relations (2010) 354–362

Conflict management among American and Chinese employees in multinational organizations in China

PurposeThis study aims to examine how American and Chinese employees of multinational organizations deal with conflict between them.Design/methodology/approachIn‐depth interviews were conducted with 42 employees from 28 multinational organizations operating in China. A constant comparative method was used to analyze the data.FindingsThe paper finds that both American and Chinese employees used various strategies to deal with conflict, such as integrating, insisting on one's own solution, compromising, yielding to authority, avoiding, passive resistance, dissolving the relationship, and a third‐party approach. In general, American participants were more likely to confront a conflict than Chinese participants. Findings of this study also indicate that differing motivations lead to the utilization of a common conflict management strategy.Research limitations/implicationsThe validity of this study might be compromised due to self‐reported responses. Future researchers need to further clarify definitions of conflict management styles and pay more attention to adaptation during the process of intercultural conflict resolution.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study will help practitioners become more cognizant of conflict behaviors in multinational organizations, and thus be able to prepare more effective strategies to manage conflict. Originality/value –This is one of few studies that examine conflict in multinational organizations from an intercultural perspective. This study is also one of few that utilize a qualitative approach to examine intercultural conflict management in a workplace.

Health and Ancestors: The Case of South Africa and Beyond

Ancestral belief is central to such an extent to the world view of many cultural groups in South Africa that it inevitably influences health matters. One thus cannot talk about health in South Africa without acknowledging the reality of ancestral belief. This paper explores the relationship between health and ancestors in the South African context, with various case studies presented to illustrate the experiential reality of this relationship and the significance of ritual practices in this regard. Pointing to both intra- and inter-cultural conflict in respect of these traditional practices, the paper concludes by emphasising the importance of promoting cross-cultural tolerance and respect for traditional beliefs and ritual practices among both adults and children.

Forms of written arguments: A comparison between Japan and the United States

Studying cultural differences in argument forms helps us understand the nature of communicative problems that inevitably arise in intercultural conflict and negotiation. Although a number of studies have been conducted in the past to examine cultural differences in arguments, we still do not have sufficient evidence to support that cultural groups actually differ in the manners in which they construct arguments. Given the situation, this study empirically examines whether and how cultural groups differ in forms of written arguments. Based on the theoretical framework of verbal communication styles proposed by Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey, this study employs two dimensions along which two cultural groups, Japan and the United States, are likely to differ: direct–indirect and elaborate–succinct. Five indicators of argument forms that represent values on either of the two dimensions are used to analyze differences in argument forms between the two cultural groups. A survey was conducted in Japan and the United States. A total of 329 responses from college students, including 239 from Japan and 90 from the United States, were analyzed to test the hypotheses offered in this study. Consistent with the hypotheses, results indicate that the arguments written by the Japanese respondents are significantly more indirect and succinct those written by the U.S. counterparts. The implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

Anti-essentialism in multicultural societies: facilitating multicultural discourse through tolerance of cultural pluralism

Approaching anti-essentialism from the perspective of multiculturalism this article reexamines the value of tolerance in dealing with inter-cultural conflicts and in facilitation of multicultural discourses. It asserts that tolerance can be a potentially useful practice in specific local contexts, but it is not an ideal in itself. The article questions the role of public administration in building tolerance for cultural diversity and argues that providing visible forms of public recognition of cultural practices could be one possible role for government agencies.

Intercultural problems in data analysis of national characters

This paper investigates the intercultural conflict in the data analysis of national characters and values. Statistics is contradictory between the mathematically universal deduction method and the data-based induction, the latter of which often depends on the national way of thinking. This is particularly critical in analysing national values. A group of mathematical statisticians in Japan developed a set of statistical theories (called the quantification theories) in the process of analysing the data of Japanese behaviours, characters and values. But international statistical communities ignored the quantification theories as deviated from the worldwide stream of mathematical statistics, while the majority of behavioural scientists in Japan supported the quantification theories as suitable to the analysis of Japanese data, frequently used them, and evolved them from mathematical statistics techniques to data science and further to a rather general philosophy of informatics. This paper uses the bibliometric method to analyse this Japanese-specific informatics.

“You See Your Culture Coming Out of the Ground Like a Power”: Uncanny Narratives in Time and Space on the Northwest Coast

In 2003, construction began on a graving dock that would bring marine projects to the Olympic Peninsula and provide family-wage jobs. It appeared to be a good fit for the city of Port Angeles, Washington, and its surrounding communities. Shortly after construction began, workers unearthed an approximately 2,700–year-old Coast Salish village and cemetery, claimed by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe as an ancestral site. Significantly, indigenous reports of being haunted by the spirits of their disturbed ancestors and nonnative desires to bury the past and move forward resulted in intercultural conflicts and misunderstandings. Such struggles speak to the contested nature of history and the deeply rooted concerns about the region's socioeconomic future following the decline of natural resource industries.

Mindfulness in Iran and the United States: Cross-Cultural Structural Complexity and Parallel Relationships with Psychological Adjustment

In theory, mindfulness has a role to play in resolving intercultural conflicts. This suggestion rests upon the relatively untested presumption that mindfulness operates similarly across cultures. In a test of this presumption, university students from two countries that are often in conflict at the governmental level, Iran (N = 723) and the United States (N = 900), responded to the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (Brown and Ryan Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84(4):822–848, 2003), along with an array of other psychological measures. This Mindfulness Scale displayed structural complexities in both societies, but a measurement invariant subscale was nevertheless identified. Similar cross-cultural evidence of concurrent validity was obtained in relationships with wide-ranging measures of adjustment. Nonsignificant linkages with Public Self-Consciousness and Self-Monitoring demonstrated discriminant validity in both societies. These data identified mindfulness as a cross-culturally similar psychological process that could plausibly have a role in resolving intercultural conflicts.

Review of Michalinos Zembylas: The Politics of Trauma in Education

For years now, I have been teaching a graduate course that examines complexities of witnessing past and present social suffering and trauma through literature, media, and the arts. Reading Michalinos Zembylas’ book, The Politics of Trauma in Education (2008), I am excited. Here is a text I can readily employ in my class that will do justice to the issues and tensions of this subject matter. For me, the experience of reading this book is like accessing the fine-tuning button on my radio. I imagine that a keen but still rather uninformed reader can move from static to clarity about key insights from the field and the full challenges and possibilities for educational engagements with trauma. A reader like me, who has been engaged with these issues for almost two decades, has the opportunity to refine his/her understanding and receive important new wisdom. With this book I am reminded of all we need to take into account and engage with when we teach. I am inspired and energized. The book invites readers to consider the psycho-social, political, and ethical dimensions of traumatic events and their implications for educational theory and practice. It particularly emphasizes the historical and political roles and registers of affect in hopes of creating greater awareness of how affectively charged investments can alternately divide and bring us closer to each other. Zembylas argues for a communal translation of trauma into a ‘‘critical emotional praxis’’ grounded in the interrogation of paradigms of thought that govern and perpetuate intercultural conflict (p. 2). Such praxis, he believes, can orient us to new means for overturning historical grammars of oppression. The praxis, he elaborates, then, constitutes a work of mourning that introduces and strengthens alternate, more just and compassionate ways of relating to each other as individuals, communities, and nations.

Narrated Sámi Sieidis. Heritage and Ownership in Ambiguous Border Zones

This article analyses different individuals' actions in relation to Sami sacrificial stones (sieidis) as they appear in narratives, missionary reports, and research; and relate them to discussions on heritage politics and the establishment of cultural ownership, In the long historical perspective, ownership to such cultural heritage sites can be understood both as sites of intercultural conflict leading to destruction or plunder, and as sites of ethnic revival leading to claims of repatriation and heritage status. But the sites and the narratives connected to them can also be understood as reports from a cultural border zone, where new cultural meanings are being developed all the time. Setting the stones in motion have changed their (de)localized meanings, and changing contextualizations have continued to generate new interpretations.

Youth Civic Action: Going Green, Going Global

Effective and sustainable solutions to contemporary environmental challenges, such as climate change, poverty, and intercultural conflict, will depend, in part, on the involvement and innovation of youth. To meet these challenges in an increasingly global world, youth need new connections, skills, and opportunities for civic engagement that transcend their local communities and national borders. In this article, we highlight the need for both internationalizing and greening approaches to youth development and describe results from a program that is aimed to do just that. Jane Goodall’s Global Youth Summit (GYS) was designed to foster connections and to empower youth toward environmental and humanitarian activism at local and global levels. Youth and emerging adults from 28 countries participated in a week of environmental and humanitarian education, service, and action planning. Participants completing pre- and post-summit measures (N = 74) showed gains on measures of community service self-efficacy and e...

TRUST AND CULTURE

Large populations can gain from economies of scale but lose internal trust due to diluted information. This creates an optimal group size. However, trusting strangers who claim to be members invites outsiders to disguise as insiders and abuse extended trust. Thus, if cultural diversity can raise the imitation cost it can promote cooperation. Even so, however, scale economies are lost when the population subdivides and the cultural boundaries may have to be enforced to prevent assimilation. The model is consistent with norms against inter-cultural marriage and episodic boundary-reinforcing conflict where formal institutions for contract enforcement are weak.

Conflict style and cultural understanding among teachers in the western United States: Exploring relationships

Abstract Competent teachers are competent communicators who are able to build and sustain interpersonal relationships across culture and across conflict. The following study was designed to validate and extend prior research [Mahon, J. A. (2003). Intercultural sensitivity development of practicing teachers. Dissertation Abstracts International, 64 (7), 2353A (UMI No. 3097199); Mahon, J. A. (2006). Under the invisibility cloak? Teacher understanding of cultural difference. Intercultural Education, 17 (4), 391–407] that showed a majority of teachers had ethnocentric levels of intercultural sensitivity (ICS) as measured by the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) [Intercultural Communication Institute (ICI). (1999a). The intercultural development inventory . Portland, Oregon: Intercultural Communication Institute]. Qualitative data also suggested teachers with less sophisticated understandings of culture avoided intercultural conflict situations. The following research drew upon a sample of 88 teachers in the United States to examine possible relationships between ICS as measured by the IDI, and conflict style as measured by the Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Inventory (TKI) [Consulting Psychologies Press (CPP). (2002). Thomas – Kilmann Conflict Inventory . Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologies Press]. Results indicated the majority of teachers have ethnocentric understandings of culture, and preferred the Compromising conflict style, followed very closely by Avoiding and Accommodating. Further analyses revealed that degree of cooperativeness predicted levels of the dependent variable of ICS. Certain demographic variables shown to be important in prior ICS research were found to predict levels of the dependent variables.

Social change, intercultural conflict, and marital dynamics in a chinese marriage in brief concurrent individual and couple therapy

Abstract“There is beginning and ending. There is cause and consequence in everything. Knowing what comes first and what comes later is close to Tao.” Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Comparative Analysis of the Perception of School Violence in Teachers, Pupils, and Families

The main aim of the present study is to analyze the opinion of pupils, families and teachers in four European countries (Spain, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic) on the prevalence of violent behavior and other problematic aspects related to coexistence in schools, and on the way in which individuals are personally affected by them. For this purpose, a single instrument was used. From the results obtained it emerges, first of all, that there are significant differences depending on who is analyzing the school problems. Generally, families perceive the problems analyzed as less common and feel less affected by them personally. Hungary was considered to be the country with the lowest levels of school violence. Pupils indicate their concern about the high levels of lack of motivation or boredom, whilst teachers are more preoccupied about the serious problems of coexistence, due in particular to the presence or use of weapons and drugs and to intercultural conflicts.

Interculturality, Conflicts and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives

Interculturality reveals, in its tensions and relationship with religion, many aspects that need to be theorized. On the one hand, the studies on international relations analyse interreligious conflicts in the context of power conflicts and regional or international geopolitical imbalances. On the other hand, studies of interculturalism are centred on phenomena such as migrations, education, health and interethnic contexts. The author develops the hypothesis that current interreligious conflicts are, almost without exception, intercultural conflicts, and they must be approached as such. The analysis of the relationships between religion and culture reveals that religions can only exist and express themselves through local cultures. All definitions of religions have cultural connotations. Two cases of religion, conflicts and interculturality in South America provide a starting-point for a more theoretical reflection. In a global world in which cultural factors are increasingly important, the symbolic-religious component is an enormous factor in the struggle for power and in its intercultural syncretisms and conflicts.

Globalization and diversity: Contributions from intercultural research

Abstract This special issue features six articles that address some of the perils and opportunities rendered by globalization. A description of the theme, globalization and diversity, is offered, followed by a brief overview of the six differing perspectives on the theme represented in this issue. The focal issues examined in the featured articles range from the macro-level issues of global acculturative pressure on traditional cultures and their identities and meso-level responses of organizations and local communities to such pressure, to micro-level issues of psychological dislocation and intercultural conflict intensified by increasing ethnic diversity in global urban centers, international exchange programs designed to help facilitate intercultural engagement and global aptitude among college students, and the emerging phenomenon of individual identity transformation beyond the perimeters of a single culture. Together, the six articles are offered as a cross-disciplinary effort in search of a broader understanding of the complex and all-encompassing process of globalization and varied human responses to it.