Intercultural Collaboration

Intercultural Collaboration by Design introduces a framework for collaborating across cultures and learning to use multicultural perspectives to address pressing global issues. This handbook helps people work, learn, and teach across cultures. Through the activities highlighted in this book, virtual and intercultural teams will find a practical route for initiating and sustaining productive work across disciplinary and social barriers. Teams can craft a plan to achieve their goals by selecting the activities that best meet their needs and interests. First-person anecdotes from the authors demonstrate how the activities encourage teams to embrace diverse perspectives in order to create innovative solutions. With over 30 hands-on activities, this book will be of great interest to diverse teams from a variety of disciplines who want to enhance intercultural learning and co-working. Whether in the classroom or workplace, the activities are appropriate for a variety of collaboration contexts, without a need for background in art or design.

This book presents 29 revised invited and selected lectures given by top-researchers at the First International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, IWIC 2007, held in Kyoto, Japan. This state-of-the-art survey increases mutual understanding in our multicultural world by featuring collaboration support, social psychological analyses of intercultural interaction, and case studies from field workers.

This book is the first to bring together research material from different communities, Computer Science and especially Artificial Intelligence, and Social Sciences, e.g. Anthropology, Social Psychology, Political Science that present ideas and viewpoints, methods and models on inter-cultural collaboration and negotiation. With increasing globalization of business and science, cultural differences of the parties are an important factor that affects the process and outcomes of collaborative and self-interested interactions. The social science literature on culture as well as human collaboration and negotiation is vast. Most of this literature is devoted to work within the same culture. Artificial intelligence researchers, on the other hand, have developed computational models of cooperation, conflict resolution and negotiation, but paying almost no attention to identifying and modeling cultural factors. In recent years, we have witnessed a great increase in interest in understanding inter-cultural interactions. This has led to increased interest of social scientists and computational scientists in theoretical and experimental analysis of inter-cultural exchanges, modeling and support. Currently, these communities are largely unconnected. There is a great need to bring them together to share research work and experiences, discuss ideas and forge interdisciplinary collaborative relations. This book will be of interest to researchers from AI/computer science and social/behavioral sciences fields, such as psychology, sociology, communications, organizational science.

Offers qualitative studies of collaboration processes conducted in globalising companies based in Denmark and with subsidiaries in Asia. It addresses the specific contexts of collaboration and studies how people with different cultural backgrounds work together, both face-to-face and in the virtual workplace.

This guidebook brings together the knowledge, insight and experience gained by the participants of an international telecollaborative language learning project entitled Moderating Intercultural Collaboration and Language Learning (MICaLL). Telecollaboration is understood here as a shared teaching and learning experience between distanced partners that is facilitated through the use of Internet technology; an area of growing interest for many teachers. The book first provides a theoretical outline of suitable pedagogical practices for this type of joint effort and then moves into the more practical aspects of designing, setting up, implementing and evaluating telecollaborative projects. The guidebook considers relevant questions and issues which often come up when teachers without previous experience in telecollaboration undertake this type of enterprise. Through the realistic advice and practical examples provided, the reader will be motivated to engage in telecollaborative language learning projects with their own pupils.

Offers qualitative studies of collaboration processes conducted in globalising companies based in Denmark and with subsidiaries in Asia. It addresses the specific contexts of collaboration and studies how people with different cultural backgrounds work together, both face-to-face and in the virtual workplace.

As many organizations expand, it becomes increasingly important to implement collaboration and leadership practices that help ensure their overall success. Being able to work and lead effectively in diverse settings can greatly benefit individual employees and the organization as a whole. Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Leadership in Modern Organizations provides an interdisciplinary analysis of how organizations can responsibly embrace complex problem-solving and creative decision making. Providing essential practical tools and critical guidelines, this publication is a necessary reference source benefiting business professionals, managers, researchers, and students interested in leadership and collaboration strategies and their application to various disciplines such as human resources management, professional development, organizational development, and education.

Cross-cultural knowledge management, an elusive yet consequential phenomenon, is becoming an increasingly essential factor in organizational practice and policy in the era of globalization. In order to overcome culturally shaped blind spots in conducting research in different settings, this volume highlights how the structuring of roles, interests, and power among different organizational elements, such as teams, departments, and management hierarchies (each comprised of members from different intellectual and professional backgrounds), generates various paradoxes and tensions that bring into play a set of dynamics that have an impact on learning processes. In this context, such questions often arise: How is knowledge shared in the multicultural organization? What problems and issues emerge? How do different mentalities affect people’s responses to new knowledge and new ideas? How can knowledge-sharing processes be improved? Under which conditions do ideas generated by units or groups of different cultural traditions have a chance of being heard and implemented? Such questions translate into an investigation of potential managerial dilemmas that occur when different but equally valid choices create tensions in decision making. The authors draw from experiences working with a wide variety of organizations, and insights from such fields as sociology and psychology, to shed new light on the dynamics of knowledge management in the multicultural enterprise. In so doing, they help to identify both obstacles to successful communication and opportunities to inspire creativity and foster collaboration. The authors note that in order to enable organizations to transfer knowledge effectively, mechanisms for dispute settlement, mediation of cultural conflict, and enforcing agreements need to be in place.