The aim of this study is to create an increased intercultural understanding by studying how the Gambian teachers interpret and handle situations that from a Swedish perspective could be called bullying. A qualitative method have been used were the materials have been gathered through unstructed observations and interviewes with teachers in the Gambia as well as formalized conversations with other school staff. The data has been collected in different schools in the Gambia during the winter of 2013. Four different theories are used to analyse the result. These are the sociocultural perspective, cultural framework, the postcolonial perspective and the frame factor theory. The result shows that the Gambian teachers have a hard time to describe and define the term bullying. They interpret the concept bullying as corporal punishment and that it is a question about abusive behaviour from an adult towards a child. There is also one teacher that speaks about bullying as something that can occur between pupils as well, but this is a rare opinion. It is obvious that the overloaded classrooms are a big obstacle for the Gambian teachers when it comes to create a positive learning experience were the pupils show mutal respect for each other. There is a risk that teachers are missing a lot of things that are going on behind their backs. There are no written documents on how to work with or prevent bullying. There is one document about corporal punishment and it does only exist in governmental schools.

This research was conducted from an anthropology narrative approach and based on semistructured conversation interviews with four Thai women who owned their own businesses and therefore were in a leadership position. The purpose was to get a picture of women leadership in the working life in Thailand. Focus was to find characteristics in their leadership, in the way they became leaders, their forces, how they thought of their leadership and which attitudes they met from society. This was analysed using the theory from Hofstede with five dimensions on cultures and also from democratic and authoritarian leadership. The result showed both similarities and differences. Similarities, such as the respondents being strong, hard working women running a family business and mostly using a democratic leadership and were forced to stand by themselves at the same time as they cared a lot about relations. It appeared that the Thai society was changing; there the women got a more prominent role in the working life, which embodied a more feminine culture with smaller power distances.

One of our interests, as future teachers, is which role different educational strategies and methods have in the everyday teaching and how that contributes to pupil’s social and cognitive development. Every pedagogical system and culture is time bound. Pedagogical ideas used in prevailing schools are changing continuously because of social and economic changes and are always influenced by the actual social, political and economic ideology in respective country. The purpose of this qualitative study is to find out how education is taking part and how it is outlined in three schools in Kenya. We are interested in teachers’ and pupils’ opinion and reflections about the existing education, everyday teaching and the role school plays in the Kenyan society. Based on our interviews and observation we have made we can state that the education in Kenya is more behaviouristic and collectivistic focusing on fact knowledge and because of the widespread use of rewards and punishments and the role of the teacher as a model, a mediator of knowledge and an authority for the pupils. Besides the dominant behaviouristic pedagogy, we have even seen some elements of cognitive and interaction pedagogy.

<p>This research was conducted from an anthropology narrative approach and based on semistructured conversation interviews with four Thai women who owned their own businesses and therefore were in a leadership position. The purpose was to get a picture of women leadership in the working life in Thailand. Focus was to find characteristics in their leadership, in the way they became leaders, their forces, how they thought of their leadership and which attitudes they met from society. This was analysed using the theory from Hofstede with five dimensions on cultures and also from democratic and authoritarian leadership. The result showed both similarities and differences. Similarities, such as the respondents being strong, hard working women running a family business and mostly using a democratic leadership and were forced to stand by themselves at the same time as they cared a lot about relations. It appeared that the Thai society was changing; there the women got a more prominent role in the working life, which embodied a more feminine culture with smaller power distances.</p>

<p>One of our interests, as future teachers, is which role different educational strategies and</p><p>methods have in the everyday teaching and how that contributes to pupil’s social and</p><p>cognitive development. Every pedagogical system and culture is time bound. Pedagogical</p><p>ideas used in prevailing schools are changing continuously because of social and economic</p><p>changes and are always influenced by the actual social, political and economic ideology in</p><p>respective country.</p><p>The purpose of this qualitative study is to find out how education is taking part and how it is</p><p>outlined in three schools in Kenya. We are interested in teachers’ and pupils’ opinion and</p><p>reflections about the existing education, everyday teaching and the role school plays in the</p><p>Kenyan society.</p><p>Based on our interviews and observation we have made we can state that the education in</p><p>Kenya is more behaviouristic and collectivistic focusing on fact knowledge and because of</p><p>the widespread use of rewards and punishments and the role of the teacher as a model, a</p><p>mediator of knowledge and an authority for the pupils. Besides the dominant behaviouristic</p><p>pedagogy, we have even seen some elements of cognitive and interaction pedagogy.</p>

The traditional approach to the study of consumer behaviour is to regard them as isolated islands of preferences, needs, motives, and goals; however, this approach neglects the impact of others on consumers judgments and preferences. For this reason, the theme of this thesis is the connected customer. Chapter 2 and 3 provides a theoretical and empirical treatment of a situation often encountered in households: how do an individuals private risk preferences translate into preferences over risk when making decisions on behalf of a group of people in which the decision-maker is a member? It is hypothesized that the decision-makers degree of altruism and perception of the group members risk preferences are the driving forces in the relation between private and social risk preferences. The results suggest that social preferences can be characterized as a mixture of individuals private risk preferences and the beliefs-private risk differential. Chapter 4 looks at individuals information processing strategy under conditions of low and high cultural salience. Recent findings suggest that consumers in both individualist and collectivist cultures use a dual processing approacha heuristic versus a systematic processing strategywhen assessing product alternatives. However, collectivist members tend to rely more on consensus information than attribute. This chapter examines whether priming individuals on their cultural identity will make them to switch processing strategy toward consensus information and hence become more similar to collectivist members. The results largely support this prediction. / Marketing

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In today’s globalized society with intense interaction between and among cultures, cross cultural understanding is becoming of crucial importance for successful communication. Whenever there is communication among people from different cultures, disagreement, argument and interpersonal conflict may occur. For this reason, the study of cultural differences in conflict resolution is of great value to society at large. Yet, the number of studies that have examined conflict resolution approaches across cultures is insufficient. This study sought to contribute to this area of research by investigating conflict resolution strategies employed by US and Taiwanese college students in academic contexts and the motives underlying participants’ preferences for certain strategies. The US and Taiwanese samples were chosen as representative of two different cultures, individualistic and collectivistic, respectively. Specifically, 15 US college students and 15 Taiwanese college students were selected from a US college campus. The Taiwanese group included students who have spent less than one year in the United States. The instrument consisted of a written questionnaire with four conflict scenarios and an audio-recorded interview with six randomly selected participants from both groups. The data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, Discriminant Function Analysis and content analysis. Both the descriptive and the Discriminant Function analyses showed that the US college students were significantly associated with the use of direct or avoidance conflict resolution approaches, while the Taiwanese college students showed a significantly higher inclination towards an indirect approach often involving a third party. The qualitative results revealed that the motives underlying the participants’ responses stemmed from both cultural and personal factors, such as individualistic and collectivistic values as well as family and religious background.

Word of Mouth (WOM) is an ancient concept that has been around since the uprising of markets. However, due to the increased internet usage a new form of WOM has emerged called Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM). The concept of eWOM takes form when consumers communicate with each other or a company online. Consumers can communicate by sharing positive and negative comments about the experiences they have had with companies and products. These comments have a positive or negative effect on consumer satisfaction and a company's reputation. Due to this it is important for companies to communicate with their consumers online across various platforms. Companies can communicate with their consumers by responding to comments. An industry that frequently responds to consumers eWOM is the hotel industry. Hotel guests often write reviews and comments online that managers in the hotel industry respond to. However, hotels have visitors from all around the world and consumers from different cultures tend to engage in eWOM in different ways. This is important for hotels to be aware of. Hence, the purpose of this study is to gain a more profound understanding on how managers in the hotel industry respond to eWOM posted on social media and review sites by consumers from different cultures.   This study is a case study where two hotels located in northern Sweden have been interviewed. The interviewees of the two hotels are managers with a lot of experience of the hotel industry. The findings of the case study suggest that hotels respond to consumers' positive and negative eWOM. Positive comments are usually responded to with a personalized and appreciative response to increase consumer satisfaction. Negative comments are responded to by addressing the issue in order to make up for service failure. The study also found that hotels do not pay much attention to cultural differences and the reason for this is because most of the hotel’s consumers are from individualistic cultures.

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