<p>Vi strävar alltid efter att förstå det som sker i den värld vi lever i. Till vår hjälp har vi olika referenser och kunskaper som vi har lärt oss under våra liv. Dessa referenser och kunskaper förenklar och förklarar våra upplevelser och sätter in dem i ett sammanhang. Utan detta sammanhang blir enskilda händelser omöjliga att förstå och vi tvingas navigera oss fram med förbundna ögon. Kultur är ett av de verktyg vi människor använder för att förklara den verklighet vi lever i. Vi omges ständigt av en mängd olika kulturella kontexter med sina egna koder och sammanhang. För att kunna interagera med dessa kulturer måste vi ha en förståelse för vad kultur är och hur det påverkar våra handlingar och tankar. För en soldat eller officer som skall operera i en internationell miljö blir denna kunskap ännu viktigare, då det kulturella avståndet mellan människor tenderar att växa exponentiellt i förhållande till det geografiska avståndet. Detta är en av de viktigaste erfarenheter som man dragit under 2000-talets internationella konflikter. Till följd av detta så har institutioner över hela världen startat projekt i syfte att utveckla utbildningar och träningsprogram som skall öka förmågan att hantera kultur och kulturell problematik vid militära insatser. Denna uppsats huvudsyfte är att med hjälp av Brian A. Selmeskis 3C koncept undersöka hur den svenska Försvarsmakten och Försvarshögskolan hanterar kultur och kulturell problematik i sin utbildning. Målet med uppsatsen är att identifiera områden som kan utvecklas i syfte att utveckla Cross Cultural Competence.</p> / <p>We always try to make sense of the things that happens in the world we live in. To our help we have different references and knowledge that we have learned during our life. These references and knowledge simplifies and explains our experiences and put them in to context. Without this context single events becomes impossible to understand and we are forced to navigate with our eyes bound. Culture is one of the tools, we humans use to explain the reality we live in. We are constantly surrounded by a wide range of different cultural contexts with there own codes and conducts. To be able to interact with these cultures we must have a understanding for what culture is and how it affect our actions. For soldier or an officer that will operate in an international environment, this knowledge becomes even more important cause the cultural distance between people tend to grow exponentially in relations to the geographical distance. This is one of the most important experiences from the 21 st century’s international conflicts. As a result of this, institutions all over the world have started projects with the purpose to develop educations and training programs that will increase the ability to manage culture and cultural problems. This essays main purpose it to with the help of Brian A. Selmeskis 3C concept study how the Swedish Defence and the Swedish National Defence Collage handles culture and cultural problems in their education. The goal with the essay is to identify areas that can be developed with the purpose to evolve Cross Cultural Competence.<strong><em></em></strong></p>

Vi strävar alltid efter att förstå det som sker i den värld vi lever i. Till vår hjälp har vi olika referenser och kunskaper som vi har lärt oss under våra liv. Dessa referenser och kunskaper förenklar och förklarar våra upplevelser och sätter in dem i ett sammanhang. Utan detta sammanhang blir enskilda händelser omöjliga att förstå och vi tvingas navigera oss fram med förbundna ögon. Kultur är ett av de verktyg vi människor använder för att förklara den verklighet vi lever i. Vi omges ständigt av en mängd olika kulturella kontexter med sina egna koder och sammanhang. För att kunna interagera med dessa kulturer måste vi ha en förståelse för vad kultur är och hur det påverkar våra handlingar och tankar. För en soldat eller officer som skall operera i en internationell miljö blir denna kunskap ännu viktigare, då det kulturella avståndet mellan människor tenderar att växa exponentiellt i förhållande till det geografiska avståndet. Detta är en av de viktigaste erfarenheter som man dragit under 2000-talets internationella konflikter. Till följd av detta så har institutioner över hela världen startat projekt i syfte att utveckla utbildningar och träningsprogram som skall öka förmågan att hantera kultur och kulturell problematik vid militära insatser. Denna uppsats huvudsyfte är att med hjälp av Brian A. Selmeskis 3C koncept undersöka hur den svenska Försvarsmakten och Försvarshögskolan hanterar kultur och kulturell problematik i sin utbildning. Målet med uppsatsen är att identifiera områden som kan utvecklas i syfte att utveckla Cross Cultural Competence. / We always try to make sense of the things that happens in the world we live in. To our help we have different references and knowledge that we have learned during our life. These references and knowledge simplifies and explains our experiences and put them in to context. Without this context single events becomes impossible to understand and we are forced to navigate with our eyes bound. Culture is one of the tools, we humans use to explain the reality we live in. We are constantly surrounded by a wide range of different cultural contexts with there own codes and conducts. To be able to interact with these cultures we must have a understanding for what culture is and how it affect our actions. For soldier or an officer that will operate in an international environment, this knowledge becomes even more important cause the cultural distance between people tend to grow exponentially in relations to the geographical distance. This is one of the most important experiences from the 21 st century’s international conflicts. As a result of this, institutions all over the world have started projects with the purpose to develop educations and training programs that will increase the ability to manage culture and cultural problems. This essays main purpose it to with the help of Brian A. Selmeskis 3C concept study how the Swedish Defence and the Swedish National Defence Collage handles culture and cultural problems in their education. The goal with the essay is to identify areas that can be developed with the purpose to evolve Cross Cultural Competence.

The medical profession in recent decades has made culture and cross-cultural competence an issue for patient – physician relationships. Many in the profession attribute the necessity of cross-cultural competence to increased diversity, globalization, and health disparities; however, a historical analysis of medicine indicates that culture’s relevancy for health care and outcome is not new. The rise of clinics, which can be traced to 17th century France, the professionalization of physicians in 18th century U.S., and the civil rights movement of the 20th century illustrate that medicine, throughout its history, has grappled with culture and health. While medicine has a history of discussing cultural issues, the profession has not defined culture cogently. Medicine’s ambivalence in defining culture raises questions about how effectively medical educators prepare residents to be cross-culturally competent. Some medical educators have expressed that many didactic and experiential efforts result in stereotyping patients. Definitions of culture and their impact on stereotyping patients are the central problems of this study. Specifically, this study hypothesized that cultural beliefs impact ones willingness to accept stereotypes. Thus, this study sought to learn how faculty members and residents define culture. Faculty members also were compared to residents to glean the impact of cross-cultural education. This study used an explanatory mixed method design where quantitative and qualitative methods work complementarily to examine a complex construct like culture. A valid and reliable survey provided quantitative data to compare the two groups, while open-ended questions and interviews with faculty members provided context. The statistical results reveal that faculty members and residents share a philosophy of culture; however, when the two groups’ definitions are contextualized, they have many different beliefs. Differences also emerged with respect to predictability; cultural beliefs predict stereotyping among residents, but not faculty members. Faculty members attribute these differences to experiences, while residents believe that they do not learn about culture during their professional education.

This study discusses the experiences of international students studying in English-medium business programmes in three countries: the United Kingdom, Germany and Taiwan. The purpose of this comparative study is to investigate how the students’ identity is constituted in the multicultural business classroom and on the multi-cultural campus, the role in this of cultural components of the curriculum in international business programmes, the ways in which the wider student experience operates in such multi-cultural settings and the implications of each of these facets for teachers and institutional managers. Inter-/cross-cultural competence is held to be a vital skill that business graduates should be equipped with in order to be capable of working in an increasingly diverse global village, and it is believed that such competence can be developed through frequent communication and negotiation with people from other cultures. Sojourners in this study attempted to negotiate new identities in the multicultural learning environment in the alien context in ways that were strongly influenced by individuals’ biographical and life experiences. There were several influential factors in these sojourners’ processes of learning and transition, including: interpersonal and intrapersonal factors; motivations for studying abroad; the nature of the learning environment they encountered; and the settings in which these interactions took place. Holliday’s (1994) “small cultures” theory and Wegner’s (1998) “communities of practice” are concepts used to help explain sojourners’ experiences in terms of where and with whom they interacted, and how this influenced their perception of the learning experience in the international contexts. The three institutes were selected through the purposive sampling method, with pre-set criteria such as the percentage of courses taught in participants’ second or foreign language(s) and the percentage of international students in the student population of the university. The sample of twenty-two student participants was obtained by using opportunistic sampling and snowball sampling methods. The qualitative data set comprised 18 individual interviews, 3 group interviews and 40 diary entries. Data analysis took the form of typological analysis (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993) by dividing the overall data set into categories or groups based on predetermined typologies. One of the main findings of this study is that international students experienced high levels of isolation and marginalisation, which affected their academic confidence and social involvement. The universities concerned were aggressively recruiting international students and making efforts to internationalise curricula, yet the academic and social support on offer was perceived as narrow and very marginalised.

The rapid rate of globalisation is changing the face of the business environment. Not only do managers have to deal with challenges such as multiple time zones and geographically divergent locations, but they must also increasingly operate in culturally diverse environments and work with employees from various cultural backgrounds. The importance of culture in the workplace is often neglected, and this may have a negative impact on the overall success of organisations. Cultural Intelligence is a facet of intelligence that describes the success with which individuals such as managers are able to deal with people from different cultural backgrounds. By exploring the degree of Cultural Intelligence of a management corps, it is possible to address the training needs in a given organisation in order to optimise the performance and productivity of a team. It was apparent that, because Cultural Intelligence as a concept is a relatively new and unexplored notion, there was an urgent need for further exploration in this field. The purpose of this study was therefore to compare two groups of managers, one from South Africa and one from the Netherlands, in terms of their levels of Cultural Intelligence and to explore the generalisability of a Cultural Intelligence measurement instrument across cultures. The Cultural Intelligence Questionnaire was administered to the two groups under review and the results were subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA), chi-square testing and independent t-tests. Various iterations of the exploratory factor analysis indicated that the primary components of Cultural Intelligence, namely Motivation, Behaviour and Cognition, were present in both groups. Independent t-tests showed that there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of their levels of Cultural Intelligence. Both groups had high scores on Factor 1: Cultural Identity (related to the behavioural component of Cultural Intelligence) and Factor 3: Willingness to Learn about Different Cultures (related to the meta-cognitive component of Cultural Intelligence), and both groups had moderately high scores on Factor 2: Adaptability to a Multi-Cultural Setting (related to the motivational component of Cultural Intelligence). A high level of reliability for the instrument was established for both groups with a Cronbach alpha of 0.85 for the sample from the Netherlands and a Cronbach alpha of 0.75 for the South African sample. Exploratory factor analysis yielded similar factor loadings for 22 of the 24 items that were included in the final factor analysis. The exploratory research conducted in this study has contributed to the refinement and expansion of Cultural Intelligence theory. The instrument that was used for assessment can be a useful tool in selecting and developing managers to work with multi-cultural groups. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Human Resource Management / MCom / Unrestricted

As more Swedish companies are turning towards China, a common challenge when establishing sustainable business relationships with Chinese companies is the requirement to spend a lot of time locally, as the Chinese business culture usually focuses on building a personal relationship before the business relationship. This study will focus on the Swedish perspective on how to cope with these challenges from a geographical distance, as the authors seek to facilitate Swedish business in China. Through a qualitative research by interviewing eight Swedish managers, the authors found that there are different perceived challenges if the business relationship was established on site versus established from a distance. This study shows that for managers who lacks the resources to establish the business relationship on site, there is a lack of trust, respect and potential misunderstandings. These challenges can be overcomed by using a distributor or an agent for a fee. For the managers that possessed the resources to establish the relationship on site, other challenges appeared such as Guanxi and cross-cultural competence, but by paying attention to these challenges the managers could achieve trust, respect and avoid misunderstandings. These managers also needed an occasional local presence in order to manage the business relationship, which was due to Guanxi and that China is a high-context culture.

Cette recherche doctorale vise à faire la lumière sur un paradoxe : alors que l'impact des différences culturelles sur les relations de travail est reconnu, la Gestion des Ressources Humaines n'utilise pas tous les leviers dont elle dispose pour aider ses managers à être performants dans les situations interculturelles. Notre travail s'appuie sur l'étude d'un cas unique, celui de Renault où 74 entretiens semi-directifs ont été menés dans une démarche qualitative. Les résultats mettent au jour une vision restrictive de la compétence interculturelle, qui assimile cette compétence à l'expatriation et à ceux qui l'ont vécue. Ces représentations ancrées dans l'histoire de l'internationalisation de l'entreprise influencent les pratiques de GRH et ne correspondent plus tout à fait à la réalité interculturelle de l'entreprise. En effet, notre étude révèle que, suivant la combinaison de ses dimensions, cette compétence donne lieu à une diversité de profils interculturels plus ou moins adaptés à des contextes interculturels variés. Notre contribution théorique consiste donc en une relecture du concept propre à nourrir des pratiques de GRH visant à améliorer l'adéquation entre besoins et ressources en compétences. Dans une logique nouvelle, nous proposons de renoncer à l'évaluation des compétences des individus et de concentrer l'analyse sur l'identification systématique des besoins. Notre contribution managériale porte sur la proposition de pratiques de GRH, dont des variables d'analyse de la complexité interculturelle des contextes. La relecture du concept de compétence interculturelle que nous défendons dans cette recherche peut être proposée à toute entreprise multinationale. / This doctoral research intends to understand a paradox: while the impact of cultural differences on business relationships are well known, the HR function does not equip the managers with the tools necessary to deal adequately with cross-cultural situations. This work is based on a case study conducted at Renault through 74 qualitative interviews. The results show a restrictive understanding of the intercultural competence (ICC) which is equated with expatriation, acquired "automatically," by those assigned to work overseas. It follows that the HR practices based on these beliefs, inherited from an era of rapid international expansion for Renault, no longer correspond to today's cross-cultural reality. Indeed, our findings suggest that, the ICC dimensions combine in multiple ways, resulting in managerial profiles which are more or less adapted according to the professional context. Our main theoretical contribution is the review of the concept of ICC, allowing the HR function to more effectively match competencies to the needs of a given situation. This new approach proposes abandoning individuals' competency assessment to concentrate on a systematic identification of the needs. Secondly, we aim to provide adapted practices for use within the HR function.

This thesis contributes to our understanding of cognitive interoperability by explor-ing barriers, facilitators, and contextual factors to create a framework. With the ad-vent of the cognitive domain in warfighting, the adversary pursuit of military strate-gic advantage through cognitive science demands that we seize the initiative and seek cognitive superiority with allies and partners. Prior research acknowledges the importance of human interoperability but is limited to singular studies at the opera-tional and national level. This thesis shifts focus to the military strategic and multi-national level to uncover cognitive and cultural inhibitors and enablers of cognitive interoperability. The empirical data is drawn from a distinct case study that examines senior military officers during a combined exercise. The analysis explores compe-tencies that foster strategic empathy and collective intentionality with identity and human connectivity as major catalysts. Individuals are agents who collectively con-struct cognitive interoperability, setting conditions for cognitive dominance in future military competition.

The 'flattening of the world', using Thomas Friedman's phraseology, is driving corporations to increasingly use collaborative engineering processes and global teams to operate on a global scale. Globalization of the traditional university engineering curriculum is necessary to help students prepare to work in a global environment. More scalable and economically sustainable program types are needed to enable the majority of students to obtain a globalized education. The purpose of this research was to determine how effectively a global team- and project-based computer aided engineering course provided learning opportunities that enabled students to develop elements of global competence in comparison to existing engineering study abroad programs. To accomplish this, research was necessary to identify, aggregate, and validate a comprehensive set of global competencies for engineering students. From a review of the literature and subsequent analysis, a set of twenty-three global competencies with an associated conceptual model was developed to group the competencies by contextual topics. Two surveys were then developed and distributed separately to academic and industry professionals, each of which groups largely confirmed that it was important for engineering students to develop these global competencies. Next, the traditional ME 471 class was restructured into a Global ME 471 course. A pilot program was conducted from which lessons learned were incorporated into the global course. Selected global competencies were included as new learning outcomes. Course learning materials, labs, and lectures were also updated to reflect the new course emphasis. A survey was developed to be sent to BYU engineering study abroad students and the Global ME 471 course during 2010. A statistical analysis of responses was used to identify significant differences between the response groups. In addition to the global competencies which were identified and validated, global collaborative project-based courses such as Global ME 471 were shown to be effective in enabling students to learn and develop selected global competencies. Study abroad programs and the Global ME 471 course were seen both to be complementary in their emphasis and supportive of global engineering. In addition, global collaborative project-based courses were shown to play an important part of a globalized engineering curriculum.

本研究探究在進行跨國商務溝通時，所應具備職能為何，藉由文獻探討、訪 談、專家會議和問卷調查等方式確立國際商務溝通職能模型，並且針對一真實課 程進行評鑑工具的發展和驗證，以瞭解工具和課程的有效性。 根據研究的結果，確立了台灣人才在全球舞台上的國際商務溝通職能包含三 個層次、九個構面，即為基礎、加分和目標三層次，敏感度、同理心、積極性、 彈性、商業專業能力、運用語言能力、傳遞訊息能力、傾聽能力、和建立共識等 九個構面，並且根據這九個構面發展出每一構面的行為指標。而評鑑工具的發展 上，經過信度、效度和鑑別度的分析，確認評鑑工具的有效性。而後進行課程有 效性分析，發現課程的介入確實顯著提昇學生的職能展現。 本研究所建構的職能模型和評鑑工具皆通過考驗和證實，最後研究者提供在 教育訓練、評鑑和未來研究的建議。 / The purpose of this study is to explore what is the necessary competency for international business communication and use them to develop the assessment tool. Through literature review, expert interviews, expert panel and questionnaire survey, the study builds the international business competency model and assessment tool to offer a structure helping Taiwanese talents to go on the world stage smoothly. According to the result, there are three levels and nine dimensions in the international business competency for Taiwanese. It includes “must have”, “nice to have” and “goal” levels, which contain sensitivity, sympathy, aggressiveness, flexibility, business profession ability, language using ability, message delivering ability, listening and achieving consensus. Moreover, the research also develops behavior indicators for each dimension. In the part of assessment tool, the efficacy is confirmed by reliability, validity and discrimination analysis. The international business communication competency model and assessment tool are all confirmed the efficacy. In the end, the researcher provides the suggestions for training, assessment and follow-up academic studies.