Culture Shock Culture

WHAT IS CULTURE SHOCK AND HOW IT CAN BE HANDLE?

Definition of the topic:

The first to identify the term of “culture shock” was the anthropologist Kalvero Oberg in 1960 and he defined it as “the anxiety that results from losing all the familiar signs and symbols of social intercourses which include words, gestures, facial expressions, customs, or norms acquired unconsciously in the course of growing up”.

In the last century, this topic is acquiring importance because, thanks to the fast improvement of technology and the rapid increase of interconnected global network, the bounders of nations are becoming more and more undefined (Freidman, 2006) and people, in particular workers, are facilitated to travel from the home country to the host one

Several studies, in the past 20 years, have demonstrate the very low attention towards this topic by the side of the companies.

Because of this and because of the important role that expatriates assume, it is crucial for the company’s foreign strategy to implement the so-called ‘cross cultural training’ that can be defined as “any procedure intended to increase an individual’s ability to cope and work in a foreign environment” (Forster, 2000). It is demonstrated that it has a positive impact on the individual capacity to ‘adjust’ him or herself to the cross cultural situation (Black J., Mendenhall M.,

Moreover, it will be analysed the effectiveness of cross cultural training through going deeply into the different cases and identify possible trends about the development of this technique in the future.

I decided to choose this topic because, according to my opinion, the awareness of different culture is important not only to international business but also to the society as a whole. Try to understand each other culture is a very good start point to build up some agreements, not only from an economic point of view.

A lot of students and a lot of workers, thanks to the fast growing process of globalization, can travel and can work abroad more often than in the past. And this leads, of course, to a ‘meeting of culture’ that, most of the time, do not have only positive consequences. Also from my experience as a student, I could have the possibility to pay a closer attention to this