Assignment

Objectives

The aim of this assignment is to suggest sources of online information useful for managing across cultures and why they are valuable.

Instructor Comments

The websites of Kwintessential and the Centre for Inter-Cultural Learning are gifts. Their scroll down features offer the curious a quick and fascinating means to summarize a nation's culture. The latter source is written for Canadian's from the perspective of the host culture with a comparison to that of Canada. Of interest is that this source is an important tool used to train Canadian diplomats and government representatives prior to heading off for extended stays overseas.

These descriptions are quite extensive but are also fairly new in this form. Surprisingly, free, easily accessible and well organized information of this nature is not that easy to find. Presented in this form, both of these information sources serve as excellent vehicles for making comparisons across cultures in a fairly user friendly fashion.

This assignment seeks to help you understand the answer to a broader concern and that is, "How can some publicly available online information sources help me understand different national cultures?" You should base your responses to the following questions on your analysis of a series of websites noted below.

• Country Etiquette Guides found on the Kwintessential.com website.
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/country-profiles.html and http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/etiquette/doing-business-in.html

• Country Insights found on Centre for Inter-Cultural Learning website.
http://www.intercultures.ca

For each of the questions below, compare and summarize in one-half page each, the responses for five countries.

Please answer the following questions.

• What is one important point associated with negotiations?
• What are some rules of thumb associated with meeting and greeting?
• How might a foreigner make a good first impression?
• What are some of the stereotypes associated with the culture of the country?

Hint: Please look closely at the questions and/or keywords used on the Kwintessential's Country Etiquette Guides and the Centre for Inter-Cultural Learning's Country Insights. You might find similarities with those of this assignment.

Please limit your response to this assignment to three single spaced, typed pages. Please cite your sources in the text and please reference them at the end of your assignment. Please end your write-up with one paragraph that summarizes what you think is the importance of this assignment.