I am a business consultant who has conducted cross-cultural training programs for business managers being sent on expat packages (from various countries, to various countries). I have a psychology undergrad degree and I also minored in sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and German. I have an MBA, and I began a PhD at the University of London in “cross-cultural organizational behavior” (though I did not finish it). I also have lived and worked in 6 countries, for long or quite-short periods of time.

As a condition of being employed as a consultant for them, I was trained by one of the world’s largest cross-cultural training companies on how to educate ex-pats on these issues, but the training sessions that I led also utilized my other education and experiences, of course.

After a couple of years of practical work, I still see myself as a novice in this field, and I am interested in learning about how different fields approach cross-cultural training and research — psychology, sociology, anthropology, communications, political science, business, even religion (in terms of the surprisingly huge number of books written for missionaries on how to understand culture and live in other cultures). I’ve had to embark on studying this all on my own, because I haven’t been able to find a book or course syllabus that ties the whole thing together. It is hard to get a handle on, because every academic field is so frustratingly fragmented, self-promoting, disdainful of other approaches, and inward-looking.

I personally don’t involve ideas in my training sessions that seem to me to be untrue or based on misunderstandings or poor research, and of course my highest intention is to help the people I train to further their understanding of others, co-exist more comfortably, respect others more, and so on. I also don’t take the results of any one researcher/writer as “gospel” – there are a lot of possible cultural “dimensions” that make sense and provide “a-ha moments” or useful learnings, and many researchers have studied such aspects, not just Hofstede.

Therefore, I am wondering if it is possible for you to direct me to a copy of your article which you mentioned in your other blog post on this website – the article that you said was published in 2001 in a German intercultural training publication and which caused a stir in their professional community. If there is an English translation available, that would be great; although I studied German for quite a number of years, my knowledge is not at the level of reading a specialized article, though I could pull out my dictionary, fire up those neglected brain cells, and take a stab at it!

You wrote in this blog post, “Nor does the proliferation of “intercultural communication” trainings show any signs of abating, and Geert Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions” still rule the seas. We must confess that IC is an area that we particularly enjoyed lampooning….” Where was it that you “enjoyed lampooning” intercultural communication trainings – was it in your new book _Seeing Culture Everywhere_? I tried to “search inside” your new book on amazon.com, but “search inside” is not enabled for your book (it would be great if you could get the publisher to enable that!)

If the typical intercultural training program is not sufficiently research-based or theoretically-strong (and the typical one probably isn’t; I don’t know for sure, because I only am acquainted with the content of my own training sessions, and I’ve resisted joining SIETAR), I don’t think the answer is to end such trainings, but to make them more truthful, educational, useful.

Over and over again I have seen how the ideas that I teach people facilitate greater understanding, respect, and ability to navigate living in another region of the world. At the end of the sessions, the clients almost always tell me that beforehand they had had low expectations of what this kind of training would offer, but were surprised at how helpful and applicable-to-their-lives the program was.

Do you recommend an alternative for how business people and other such “ordinary” ex-pats (non-academics/non-fieldworkers) can be prepared for living and working in another culture? What do you think needs to be added to and deleted from such training programs?

To malign the field of intercultural training because some people do it badly, teach unsubstantiated ideas, or don’t have academic training in acceptable social science fields is like saying that acupuncture doesn’t work because homeopathy doesn’t work, and they are all a part of “alternative medicine,” so the whole thing is probably suspect. Now, I’m not saying that this is your position on intercultural training as a whole! Maybe you were just lampooning certain practitioners.

If I continue working in this field, I want to use my social science background and the best research and teaching techniques that every related academic subject has to offer.

I would sincerely welcome advice from anthropologists on how to do that!

(I don’t know if I may put an email address here or not. I can be reached at nantucketsunrise {at} hotmail {dot} com. I will also check back to see if any replies have been written here.)