Cultural Norms and Expectations Within the Hospitality Industry

The business environment differs across nations and throughout industries. The hospitality industry is no different; one managerial approach that functions well in one nation might not be necessarily applicable in another. This suggests that to successfully manage across different countries it is vital that managers acquire the necessary skills to effectively manage employees and guests with different backgrounds and expectations. Hence, the objectives of this chapter are to define and discuss culture and cross-culture management, explain the importance of understanding multicultural perspectives, and discuss the managerial approaches of managing workforce diversity and cultural diversity.

A Cross-Culture Study of the Opportunities and Challenges of International Students Attending Schools of Business at Western Universities and Higher Education Colleges: “Now, I Have Sufficient Self-Confidence to Seek Advice, and Act on It”

International students attending schools of business at Western universities encounter various interrelated academic, language, cultural and socio-emotional challenges that impact their educational performance and success in their respective study programs, thus, shape their future professional prospects. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, develop a better understanding of the cultural and socio-emotional experiences of international Middle Eastern students attending American, British, and Australian universities in 2018, 2019, and early 2020. Secondly, find ways in which American, British, and Australian higher education providers can enhance their efforts in meeting the cultural and social-emotional needs of their international Middle Eastern students. Thirdly, discuss the academic and language experiences of international Middle Eastern students attending schools of business at Western universities in the above mentioned three countries. To this end, case studies have been designed for this purpose, where data is collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews. Accordingly, this study is guided by a series of research questions, as opposed to hypothesis testing. The participants involved in this study are all full-time international Middle Eastern students (n=90), undertaking their programs of study at both the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels at higher education institutions/providers in the three major world leaders in international education.

Islamic Indonesian EFL students’ responses on English-speaking countries

EFL students learn English within the notion of English as an international language. The gap in this research is to study the learning of English as a language to the study of the culture of the English-speaking countries. This gap emerged after cross-culture understanding was taught in a one-semester course at an Islamic state university in Indonesia. Phenomenology is the theory used in this research, within the qualitative research approach and descriptive statistics. 110 respondents were given the questionnaires, with open-ended questions asking four interrelated questions about the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia as the three English-speaking countries. The respondents’ answers in the questionnaire were analysed by using codes, or themes, that later on show the frequency of each theme. The answers were categorized according to the themes and the percentage based on frequency. Thus, the findings of this research highlighted that Indonesian Muslim students have certain themes when looking at English-speaking countries, such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Australia when they learn English as a foreign language.

Globolocalization versus Russophony: the search for an alternative to hybridity and cross-cultural situation

The relevance of the research topic is due to social contradictions caused by the proliferation of glovolocalization, transculturation and translocality projects in the global culture, associated with the active implementation of the manipulative practices of adaptation of linguistic and cultural locuses to the global market. Hybridity as a basic property of postmodernity requires the interpretation of these projects on the basis of new methodological premises: philosophy of media, structuralism and poststructuralism, critical theory. The neoliberal hehemony lays in the basis of these projects an imaginary tolerant cross-cultural phenomenon, which often makes it difficult to identify the deepest paradoxes of their repressiveness. The central project of cross-culture today is glocalism. The aim of the research is to carry out a comparative analysis of global localization and Russophony as alternative (pragmatic and ethical) ways of resolving hybrid conflicts between cultures and finding ways of dialogue at the global (world) and local (Russian) levels. As a result of the analysis of materials on glocalization, the author comes to the conclusion about the existence of a number of legitimate contradictions in glocalism, the main ones of which are: the contradiction between capital and labor, time and space; the contradiction between ethical universalism and the economic particularism of the market; the contradiction between the imaginary freedom of horizontal communication and the asymmetric governing structure of organized haos; the contradiction between transnational companies and the state, which risks losing its national and civilizational subjectivity; the contradiction between the promises to the regions from transnational companies and the real possibilities of the regions; double codes in relation to protest movements in globalist and anti-globalist regions. As an alternative to glocalization in relation to Russia and a number of other countries, including Ukraine, we propose a solidarity project of Russophony as a mechanism of linguistic solidarization of cultural subjects on civilizational, cultural and symbolic grounds.

Business Correspondence: Main Rules and the Specifics of Translation

The article discusses the issue of business correspondence, its rules and etiquette, which is highly important in modern world as a great number or e-mails and business letters are sent and received every day throughout the world. So, the ability to correspond in business sphere is a crucial skill for the employees of multinational companies as well as for those who communicate internationally in different fields. It also concerns the cross-cultural aspect of organizing and translating business letters taking into consideration the key role of international communication due to the growing globalization of our society, and a lot of attention is paid to the national differences and peculiarities we may face while establishing contacts with foreign colleagues and partners. It analyses numerous studies and articles written by linguists, interpreters as well as by business coaches who, basing on their research and experience give advice and suggest solutions to different challenges we may face in this sphere. The article focuses on the different issues, such as the language and style, the structure and layout, the peculiarities and difficulties of translation, the things which should be avoided and are inappropriate in business letters. A lot of advice with numerous examples are given in order to avoid misinterpreting when it comes to cross-culture communication as well as embarrassing mistakes and those mistakes, which may have serious professional consequences. The article focuses six different problematic areas in business letter translation. These include: lexical-semantic problems; grammar; syntax; rhetoric; and pragmatic and cultural problems. The information must be interesting and useful for those who deals with business communication on international level as well as career coaches and business consultants in order to provide them with advice appropriately and help to improve and systemize necessary knowledge and skills to handle business correspondence successfully.

Cultural Implications in Basic Color Terms “Black” and “White” in Chinese and English

Color is a kind of human perception towards the objective world. In intercultural communications, the English people and the Chinese people are different in many aspects, and their perceptions of various color symbols are not the same. Color words in English and Chinese languages have rich connotations and play a very important role in both cultural manifestations and ethnic customs. This article discusses the Chinese and English symbolic meanings of the two color words, “black” and “white” in Chinese and English cultures. By comparing and contrasting these two words’ differences in the two cultures, we can deepen understanding of the two cultures, overcoming the conflicts and promoting Chinese and English cross-culture exchanges and communications.

Focus Groups as a Questionnaire Pretest for Surveys in Cross-Cultural and Cross-National Comparative Research

As a research method, focus groups have methodological advantages for understanding the views and behavior of group members or for understanding the social system as a whole, since it covers the interaction between people, groups, and the interpersonal environment quite well that widely recognized in the social sciences. These advantages are introduced in the context of mixed-methods, including conducting a survey together with focus groups as a pretest questionnaire in a comparative perspective in cross-national and cross-culture research. Focus groups provide to reach construct equivalence and elaborate an appropriate context-oriented language for questionnaire questions. Using the focus groups in this way can be an effective approach to overcoming the initial limited ability of surveys to valid measure more complex socially constructed concepts, the meaning of which can vary significantly from one group to another, especially from a comparative perspective in cross-national and cross-culture research. Using focus groups, data is collected in a more natural way, that is, more close to the real world, while the generalization is ensured by a detailed description of specific conditions, participants, and research environment. In addition, the discussion group is a miniature thinking society, and unlike dyadic interviews or surveys, focus group discussions give participants the opportunity to express their opinions, discuss their views and opinions with other participants, listen to other peoples opinions, disagree or to develop thoughts by reasoning out loud - this is similar to what happens in real life. This increased awareness about the described advantages of the approach for cross-cultural and cross-national comparative research likely contributes to its more active employ.

An evaluation Model of College English Teaching Comprehension Ability from the Perspective of Cross Culture

Due to the poor systematicness and serious homogenization of the existing evaluation models, the personalization and differentiation of the cross-cultural level are not obvious, which further affects the accuracy of the output results of the evaluation model. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a cross-cultural perspective of college English teaching comprehension ability evaluation model. From the six dimensions of knowledge and skills, teaching design, resource development, teaching implementation, teaching evaluation, reflection and development, this paper selects evaluation indicators, designs clustering algorithm, and outputs the clustering results of evaluation indicators. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to assign weights to the clustering results, and an evaluation model of English teaching comprehension ability is constructed. The experimental results show that the model has certain advantages in accuracy and recall rate, F1 value is 6.15 and 9.33 higher than the existing model, which shows that the model has good evaluation accuracy and improves the evaluation results.