Doing business internationally requires understanding not only other languages, but even more so the business practices and cultures of other countries. In the case of Brazilians working with Americans, a fundamental difference for all parties to understand is that Brazilian business culture is based on developing personal relationships between business partners, while American businesspeople often prefer to get down to hard "facts and figures" quickly, with fewer personal preliminaries. Negotiating such differences is crucial to creating successful business relationships between the two countries, and this book is designed to help businesspeople do just that.
Brazilians Working With Americans presents ten short case studies that effectively illustrate many of the cultural factors that come into play when North American business professionals work in Brazil. The authors summarize each case and the aspects of culture it involves, and American and Brazilian executives comment on the cultural differences highlighted by that case. A list of topics and questions for discussion also help draw out the lessons of each business situation. To make the book equally useful to Brazilians and Americans (whether businesspeople or language students), the entire text is presented in both English and Portuguese. In addition, Apple QuickTime movies of the executives' comments, which allow viewers to see and hear native speakers of both languages, are available on the Internet at www.laits.utexas.edu/orkelm/casos/intro.html.
H. L. Goodall’s ground-breaking study of what people do with symbols and what symbols do to people explores the lives led by people in organizations. His narratives take on the form of six detective mysteries in which the narrator figures into the plot of the intrigue and then works out its essential patterns.
In the first mystery, "Notes on a Cultural Evolution: The Remaking of a Software Company," Goodall looks at the transition of a Huntsville regional office of a Boston-based computer software company where the lives and social dramas of the participants reflect the current state of high technology. The second essay and perhaps the most insightful, "The Way the World Ends: Inside Star Wars," penetrates the various defenses of the Star Wars command office in Huntsville to discover its secrets and surprises. Goodall shows how media, technology, fear of relationships, and symbolic images of the future unite into the day-to-day operations of people who believe they are responsible for the outer limits of our nation’s defense.
"Lost in Space: The Layers of Illusion Called Adult Space Camp" illustrates how a supposedly innocent theme park invites participation in rituals and ceremonies designed to influence a future generation of taxpayers. In "Articles of Faith," Goodall enters a super mall in Huntsville, noting how shopping centers provide consumers with far more than places to purchase goods and services. "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" finds Goodall back in an academic environment, at a conference of communication scholars, where he demonstrates the difficult task of translating cultural understandings from one context to another. "The Consultant as Organizational Detective" offers the sobering message that real-life mysteries may surprise even the most accomplished sleuth. A concluding chapter, "Notes on Method," and a new autobiographical afterword round out Goodall’s penetrating look at our symbol-making culture.
Public trust in corporations plummeted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when “Lehman Brothers” and “General Motors” became dirty words for many Americans. In Corporate Dreams, James Hoopes argues that Americans still place too much faith in corporations and, especially, in the idea of “values-based leadership” favored by most CEOs. The danger of corporations, he suggests, lies not just in their economic power, but also in how their confused and undemocratic values are infecting Americans’ visions of good governance.
Corporate Dreams proposes that Americans need to radically rethink their relationships with big business and the government. Rather than buying into the corporate notion of “values-based leadership,” we should view corporate leaders with the same healthy suspicion that our democratic political tradition teaches us to view our political leaders. Unfortunately, the trend is moving the other way. Corporate notions of leadership are invading our democratic political culture when it should be the reverse.
To diagnose the cause and find a cure for our toxic attachment to corporate models of leadership, Hoopes goes back to the root of the problem, offering a comprehensive history of corporate culture inAmerica, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Recession. Combining a historian’s careful eye with an insider’s perspective on the business world, this provocative volume tracks changes in government economic policy, changes in public attitudes toward big business, and changes in how corporate executives view themselves.
Whether examining the rise of Leadership Development programs or recounting JFK’s Pyrrhic victory over U.S. Steel, Hoopes tells a compelling story of how America lost its way, ceding authority to the policies and values of corporate culture. But he also shows us how it’s not too late to return to our democratic ideals—and that it’s not too late to restore the American dream.
A report from the Woodstock Theological Center that distills conversations among the business, government, and academic communities to offer an evaluation and recommendations for creating and maintaining an ethical climate in a business corporation.
In this intriguing ethnography, Ellen Fuller investigates how issues of gender and identity as they relate to authority are addressed in a globalizing corporate culture. Going Global goes behind the office politics, turf wars and day-to-day workings of a transnational American company in Japan in the late 1990s as employees try to establish a comfortable place within the company.
Fuller looks at how relationships among Asians and between Asians and Americans are tested as individuals are promoted to positions of power and authority. Is there pressure for the Japanese to be more “American” to get ahead in business? Do female employees have to subscribe to certain stereotypes to be promoted or respected? How these American and Japanese workers assess one another raises important questions about international business management and human resources.
Organisational Anthropology, newly published in paperback, is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations. The book focuses on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of the organisation's members.
The contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more ‘classical’ anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer. These include the ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of resources and competition between organisations.
Organisational Anthropology brings together and highlights crucial aspects of doing anthropology in contemporary complex settings, and will have wide appeal to students, researchers and academics in anthropology and organisation studies.
A job is no longer something we "do," but instead something we "are." As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday.
In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power-biopower-where "life itself" is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes--from our consumer tastes, "downtime," and sexuality--into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor.
Fleming then suggests that the corporation turns to communal life-what he calls "the common"-in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape.
The key to professional success in Brazil is understanding Brazilians. But how do you understand an unfamiliar culture? Seasoned cross-cultural trainers Orlando R. Kelm and David A. Victor use Victor’s groundbreaking approach of evaluating a culture’s language, environment, social organization, context, authority, nonverbal communication, and time conception to provide a framework for understanding Brazilians and show effective strategies to overcome these communication barriers. The method, referred to as the LESCANT approach makes you the expert evaluator of the culture and helps you easily navigate hurdles that can challenge business relationships.
Each chapter of The Seven Keys to Communicating in Brazil employs memorable anecdotes, business cases on each topic from business professionals, and photographs to address key topics. The authors demonstrate how to evaluate the cultural differences between Brazil and North America and include examples of common communication mistakes. Engaging and accessible, the book helps North Americans master the nuances of the Brazilian language and achieve a real experience of the Brasil dos brasileiros.
An urgent reality check for America’s blinkered fixation on STEM education.
We live in an era of STEM obsession. Not only do tech companies dominate American enterprise and economic growth while complaining of STEM shortages, but we also need scientific solutions to impending crises. As a society, we have poured enormous resources—including billions of dollars—into cultivating young minds for well-paid STEM careers. Yet despite it all, we are facing a worker exodus, with as many as 70% of STEM graduates opting out of STEM work. Sociologist John D. Skrentny investigates why, and the answer, he shows, is simple: the failure of STEM jobs.
Wasted Education reveals how STEM work drives away bright graduates as a result of “burn and churn” management practices, lack of job security, constant training for a neverending stream of new—and often socially harmful—technologies, and the exclusion of women, people of color, and older workers. Wasted Education shows that if we have any hope of improving the return on our STEM education investments, we have to change the way we’re treating the workers on whom our future depends.
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