Spring 2006 IMQ

Intercultural Management Quarterly Integrating Culture and Management in Global Organizations

Spring 2006 Edition Volume 7, Number 2

Inside this issue of IMQ...

National Film Industries: An Underutilized Tool for Cross-Cultural Understanding

by Cristina Trujillo Intercultural Communication: An Analysis of a Documentary Film Production in Samoa

by Patrick Besha Business Ethics from an Intercultural Perspective

by Brad David

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Intercultural Management Quarterly (IMQ) is a publication of the Intercultural Management Institute (IMI) at American University. IMQ is a forum for experts in the field of intercultural management to share their knowledge with a broad audience interested in intercultural issues. IMQ is produced with the active involvement of faculty, graduate students, and alumni of American University’s School of International Service.

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From the Editor Welcome to the Spring 2006 edition of Intercultural Management Quarterly. With this edition, we are pleased to bring you several interesting and thought-provoking articles. It is apparent that different types of media continue to play an important role across societies, no matter their geography, cultural heritage, or technological capacity. In two separate articles, Cristina Trujillo and Patrick Besha examine the role of film in two vastly different settings: Spain and Samoa.

“National Film Industries: An Underutilized Tool for Cross-Cultural Understanding” discusses the potential benefits of examining the cinema of a country in order to gain cross-cultural insights about that nation’s culture. As Cristina explains, the cross-cultural understanding and knowledge which can be discovered through the medium of film is multilayered, complex, and quite insightful. On the other hand, Patrick Besha’s article looks at the production of a film in Samoa by a crosscultural team as an example of the challenges inherent in working on a multicultural team and in producing culturally relevant media. From this example, a number of best practices for these types of work emerge.

Finally, Brad David’s article discusses the topic of business ethics from an intercultural perspective, a topic of near universal relevance. He examines contemporary examples of the gray area which comprises business ethics, and also discusses and critiques a number of proposed guidelines for effective intercultural business ethics.

On a more personal note, this will be the final edition of IMQ for which I will be serving as the Managing Editor. I have learned a great deal during my tenure here, and am grateful for the opportunity. I look forward to serving on the editorial review board and watching IMQ and the field of intercultural relations continue to grow and prosper.

Best wishes, Adam Mendelson

IMQ STAFF Publisher • Dr. Gary R. Weaver Managing Editor • Adam Mendelson Publication Manager • Anna Lee Contributing Writers Patrick Besha Brad David Cristina Trujillo

Editorial Review Board Dr. Gary R. Weaver, Dr. David Bachner, Sarah Crawford, Anna Lee, Annmarie McGillicuddy, Adam Mendelson, Darrel Onizuka, Sherry Zarabi

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CONTACT IMQ Contrasting and Dimensionalizing Cultures with Geert Hofstede and Gary Weaver August 8, 2006

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National FFilm ilm Industries: An Underutilized T ool for Cr oss-Cultural Tool Cross-Cultural Understanding

By Cristina Trujillo In an increasingly interconnected global society, audiovisual media are leading facilitators of the exchange and learning processes that occur between different peoples and societies. Film is an especially effective and popular method of communication and cultural exchange, and thus is an ideal gateway to increase cross-cultural understanding.

Cross-cultural training frequently utilizes training films to educate people involved in intercultural and international relations. Films can both teach appropriate behavior in a particular cultural context, and more importantly, create awareness about the importance of opening one’s mind to accept and respect other values and ways of life. While these are useful tools for giving people a better understanding of another culture and thus the preparation to ease themselves into operating in another cultural context, videos made specifically for training purposes do not provide insight into how to naturally immerse oneself into a specific culture. Rather, they often present contrived scenarios designed to address facets of a culture and teach adaptation techniques.

Often, if one does not soon put to use the specific skills taught in the video, this knowledge and these techniques could be quickly forgotten. Thus, I argue that a nation’s film industry—which provides a fuller and more multifaceted snapshot of the society—is an excellent way to learn about its culture.

There are several advantages to examining a nation’s film industry in order to learn more about that nation’s culture and society. Films are engaging, and even when fictional, can often educate audiences about the culture and important sociopolitical aspects of the film’s country of origin. Different audiences also benefit from these films in their own way, depending on a person’s familiarity with the country and particular interest in its culture. For example, a student returning from a study abroad program in Argentina will come away with different cultural insights after watching an Argentine film than a businessperson preparing for a trip to that

country. Furthermore, as going to a movie is more enjoyable (and memorable) for most than watching a training video, it is often easier to retain the film’s messages about the society and its culture. Interactions between film characters are usually not specifically scripted with educational goals in mind, and thus the educational value is presented in a much more natural context than in training videos. This is not to say that training films have no value; on the contrary, the succinct information they convey is explicit and understandable.

However, the products of a national film industry must also be considered as useful tools when trying to understand another culture as they are popular forms of national expression and consumption.

My research on the cultural and sociopolitical aspects of contemporary popular film in Spain illustrates my point. I examined several popular films—defined as those that were nominated for a Goya award (Spain’s equivalent to the Oscar awards) for Best Picture or were amongst the top ten Spanish-language grossing films for the year, or that fell in both of these categories—from 1998 to 2004. I analyzed the role of several recurring themes in these films in order to determine to what degree they express a consciousness about cultural and sociopolitical issues, and how they discuss these issues. Although the films are commercial in nature, this does not exclude them from making important observations and statements about Spanish society. Film in Spain plays a significant role in shaping and reflecting the culture. As Spain is an extremely diverse nation, culturally and otherwise, Spanish filmmakers often engage the themes of their films in a way that brings people across the nation together, creating a shared sense of what it means to be Spanish in the modern world. For the purposes of this article, I will discuss two aspects of Spanish culture that can be observed through popular cinema, bar culture and stereotypical Andalusian culture.

Bar culture plays an integral role in dayto-day life in Spanish society. By watching Spanish films, the viewer gains an ap-

preciation of the centrality of bar culture in the country and an understanding of the values that inform its importance. In Spain, bars are places where people come together to socialize during the day and at night. This practice is influenced by the importance given to fostering and maintaining interpersonal relationships. While many people in the United States eat lunch over a half hour period at their desks, lunches in Spain are a two to three hour affair, with at least two courses and plenty of friendly conversation, sometimes followed by business. These lunches frequently take place at neighborhood restaurant bars. After work and on the weekends, it is common to gather at these same bars to enjoy tapas, drinks, and the company of friends and family. Thus, bars have become an essential part of Spanish sociocultural activities.

Spanish films showcase the importance of bar culture by using bars as central locations for plot development and pivotal events. Two popular and very different 2002 films, El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed) and Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) feature bars as the places where the main male characters come together to talk. These men talk about the problems in their lives—whether they are girl troubles or unemployment— and find comfort and support in one another. The conversations that take place and the revelations that surface in these bars lead to the films’ development and are the cornerstone of their commentaries.

For example, the bar scenes in Los lunes al sol trace the hardships that confront the bonds of friendship when unemployment and the ensuing feelings of selfdoubt and resentment take hold of a group of men. This not only highlights how important bar culture is in providing a safe haven and place to maintain vital relationships, but also gives voice to the rising problem of unemployment in Spain and the portions of the population most susceptible to feeling its effects.

While the popularity of bars is one stereotype about Spain that holds true, most Continued on page 7

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Intercultural Communication: An Analysis of a Documentary Film Production in Samoa

By Patrick Besha Between 2000-2004, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the independent Pacific island country of Samoa. In cooperation with the National University of Samoa, the Samoan Ministry of Health and the United Nations Development Program, I led a team of media professionals in the production of a national public health campaign, based on a series of educational videos.

In creating the videos, our task was to present the utility of proper hygiene and personal health to school children throughout the nation. While drafting a culturally relevant story was essential, it quickly became apparent that the real intercultural communication challenges would come in the filmmaking process. In many ways, from brainstorming ideas, creating a budget, shooting the film, editing it together, and finally distributing it nationally, the process itself informed the creative content and the type of videos made.

Throughout the four-month project, two main areas of intercultural contention became apparent: management of our team and production of the creative material. In the first site several key factors influenced team management: age, nationality, experience, and financial philosophy. In the second site, the Samoan and Western cultural differences fundamentally affected our production. In some ways, the management problems our team encountered were directly linked to our production problems. In other ways, the problems were based on intercultural differences, and the quality of management was irrelevant. Management: Division of Power, Position, and Cultural Boundaries A clearly articulated division of power among the filmmaking crew was essential. In traditional Samoan society, one’s age is the primary indicator of status. Old men and women are accorded tremendous respect and were often addressed with honorifics (lou afioga – ‘your highness’). At chief meetings, the oldest men speak freely and criticism of their opinions is often muted. Our production group was no different. The eldest were accorded the most respect, regard-

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less of their professional position. Thus, a young man in the position of director was regarded with confusion as a result of his contradictory status.

Foreigners are also granted a high position in society. They are treated as guests and their opinions are often respected, even if they are regarded as not Samoan and thus unlikely to be relevant.

Thus, young educated Westerners again inhabit a contradictory position in the social hierarchy. People are torn between dismissing one’s youthful stature and respecting one’s professional knowledge.

The primary dilemma became whether a foreigner with contradictory status should remain outside of the culture (thereby decreasing his power but not upsetting cultural norms) or seek to interact closely with the culture (thereby increasing his power but potentially upsetting cultural norms).

In our production, it was much more effective to exist within the cultural boundaries and to find ways to navigate this space. This often entails achieving fluency in the local language, customs, and norms and developing relationships. Using one’s cultural fluency to forge alliances and compromises with elders or finding a culturally-sensitive solution to a problem may allow a youthful foreigner to exert power well beyond age-based limitations.

In one example of this method, our team engineered a budget compromise after competing philosophies of money nearly forced us to shut down. The Samoan method of budgeting was very focused on immediate, discernable needs of family, friends, and village. Money was best spent tending to the needs of those helping the production, rather than future external costs like distribution. The American mindset (which I represented) was much more analytical and accepting of future abstract needs such as securing legal rights to music and purchasing software.

At first, I allowed the Samoan way to guide our production. Movie-making was a new experience for most of our team, so it was best not to introduce too much confusion into the process.

In a matter of a few weeks, our budget

had been exceeded and we courted disaster. The answer was apparent: our budgeting method was inefficient. Our production team had gained two more paid employees whose chief qualification was their shared village with the supervisor. Some of our money woes were simply due to cultural sensitivity. Before we arranged to shoot at a local school, we met with the principal. He informed us that in exchange for his permission, we would present the school with a feast. We bought cases of soft drinks, cartons of chicken dishes, a huge cake, and pounds of candy for the children. In Samoa, the gift of food is a widely practiced custom and is necessary to gain trust and friendship. Many such transactions are not tainted by labels of corruption because they are transacted with food, the exchange of which is singularly considered an act of love and kindness. A further drain on our budget occurred when members of our team insisted that we use the university’s preferred professional tailors to make our costumes.

When I loudly disagreed with this budget philosophy, I was scolded for my cultural insensitivity. “This is the Samoan way, there is no other way!” my Samoan team said. If we continued operating in this fashion, we would be bankrupt and the production would not finish. If we adopted a stricter budget, I risked a mutiny of team members whose help I needed.

Finally, a culturally- and fiscally-sound solution was devised that would minimize hurt feelings and maximize cultural sensitivity. First, the extra workers we had hired would be let go. Second, we would continue to provide some food to the schools that served as our locations, but we would replace excessive food with technical help, such as fixing their computer labs. Third, we would ask that in exchange, the schools provide some young men to help the production. Fourth, we would use talented local seamstresses to build all of our costumes, instead of expensive city tailors.

Fifth, I would accept no salary, thereby setting an example of frugality. By operating within the cultural boundaries, these solutions elegantly solved our budget problems and reaffirmed our commitments Continued on page 5

Samoa...

Continued from page 4 to culture and village development.

Production:Different Cultural Values and Ways of Storytelling In the course of writing our scripts, differing cultural values concerning public health and storytelling became enormous obstacles to our success. As we produced a health awareness video series, what health practices should be advocated?

Traditional Samoan or modern Western?

Similarly, as we produced stories for school children living in both rural and urban settings, what kind of stories should be told?

Samoan or Western? In some cases, the answer was simple while in others it reached to the very core of a traditional culture clashing with modernity. In all cases, the most effective method of resolving questions of cultural appropriateness was to survey public attitudes.

One health video concerned hair lice, a common problem found among local children. At the earliest stage, our screenwriting team was perplexed by whether we should advocate Western medicinal treatments or traditional Samoan treatments. To shed some light on this, we surveyed the public. We asked the most common healthcare providers such as grandmothers, mothers, village nurses, and medical professionals their opinions. They noted that while the problem of hair lice was found in many different children, it was commonly found in children living in traditional wooden Samoan housing in rural areas, rather than the concrete dwellings of the city. Clearly, our target audience was rural. Of treatments available, the Western chemical treatment was nearly 100% effective, and the Samoan lemonjuice treatment was perhaps half as effective. Furthermore, the Samoan treatment involved some fairly unhygienic practices such as picking the lice from hair and crushing it between one’s teeth to ensure it did not spread. Importantly, they said there was minimal availability of Western treatments in the rural areas. We ultimately decided to present both options, but focus on the use of the traditional Samoan treatment, as it used the appropriate available technology and was culturally relevant.

A final intercultural problem concerned the method and content of our storytelling.

Our third video was fictional and was based on a story that I wrote about a little boy that refuses to wash until one night he is visited by an evil ghost and a beautiful fairy, and then upon waking realizes the value of hygiene. The story was reminiscent of a Dickens novel and countless Western fairy tales. Mythical stories, however, are deeply cultural and are often not interculturally understood. Samoan stories differ from Western stories in many ways.

Fairies at night in a Western story usually portend good, but in a Samoan story they are almost universally regarded as evil.

Also, animals such as octopi and bats may be lucky creatures in Samoa but they are usually portrayed darkly in the West.

At last, our final problem was so deeply rooted that it had provoked conflict in the earliest stages of development. Short on time and funds, we faced a dilemma before the script was even written. We could use my Western-style story and hope it would translate, or we could hire a writer and try to draft a Samoan-style story. Naturally, I felt the Western fairy tale was universally enjoyable – Hollywood owed its global success to this ideal. My production team was not so sure. Once again, our scriptwriters and I ventured out to gauge the public’s reaction. We found that older people did not grasp the story and felt that any apparition in the night was necessarily a bad thing. Middle-aged people did not seem to understand the underlying meanings behind the evil ghost’s warnings, the good fairy’s lessons, and the little boy’s redemption. Our key audience of children, however, immediately grasped the idea and several said they were excited to see the finished movie.

A key decision was made to keep the story’s basic structure and characters, but to introduce as many Samoan elements as possible. Thus, the “evil ghost” became a messy monster (Samoans dislike an untidy home), the “good fairy” became a forest nymph dressed in green leaves and flowers. The boy participated in the usual Samoan boy’s play, such as refusing to bathe with soap under the water pipe and instead swimming in muddy waterfalls.

Ultimately, every story is embedded with the author’s perspective, cultural symbols,

and history. The benefit of mythical stories is that after hundreds of years, they have lost much of their social context, leaving only the most basic contours of a universal human story. Our task was to build the Samoan social context around the core of a Western fairy tale. Thus, cultural adaptation involved presenting the basic principles, themes, and instructions in a way palatable to a foreign audience. Cultural adaptation also required that we make a culturally specific analysis of our story’s appropriateness.1 Fortunately, the videos were well-received by the general public.

They were sent to every school in the country and broadcast nationally on evening television. In one village I visited, dozens of children were gathered around the television, singing the “Good Fairy’s Way to be Healthy” song and cheering the little boy on. The story had reached our target audience.

The production of intercultural communication is fraught with conflict during the management of the production team and the production of communication. Management difficulties may result from cultural differences concerning age, nationality and financial philosophy. Ultimately, compromises must be brokered in order for the project to be successful. During the production of communication it is important that practitioners first identify their audience including their socio-economic status, age, and customs, so a targeted message can be crafted. Practitioners may overcome other obstacles, but if the story itself cannot be understood by the audience, the production cannot be regarded as successful. When properly managed, the benefits of intercultural communication, such as utilizing the best ideas from two cultures, greatly outweigh the potential pitfalls.

References 1

Keith Morical and Benhong Tsai, “Adapting Training for other Cultures,” Training and Development (Vol. 46, Issue 4).

Patrick Besha is currently a Boren fellow studying in Sichuan, China.

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Business Ethics from an Intercultural Perspective

By Brad David Corporations are not just multinational, they are multicultural. But crossing cultures for business can be a complex endeavor. Ethics – what is considered right or wrong in a particular society – present a potential but frequent dilemma for companies that do business abroad.

Ethical or non-ethical behavior in one country may mean something entirely different in another context. A few examples include corruption or bribery, nepotism, and harassment. These may be clear violations in an American commercial setting, but are often seen very differently elsewhere. Bribes, for example, may be viewed as necessary to set government services into motion in another country. Underpaid government officials or police gendarmes sometimes use bribes to supplement their insufficient income; in other words, one could rationalize such payments as legitimate fees for services rendered.

In Japan, gift-giving is a part of the culturally-accepted norms and values in business. In the U.S., this might be considered corruption, but “most experienced businesspeople… would agree that doing business in Japan would be virtually impossible without adopting the practice.”1 Lockheed breached standard business etiquette by “giving $12.5 million in bribes and commissions in connection with the sale of $430 million” worth of planes to a Japanese company in the 1970s.2 The Japanese Prime Minister was implicated in the well-known scandal and was forced to resign.

Hiring practices that are considered nepotism, or conflict-of-interest, in the U.S. may be best business practices in another country. For many societies, keeping the family together is more important than maintaining equal opportunity standards or creating a diverse workforce. A local business manager in another country simply may believe that hiring a relative is the best way to ensure quality labor.

Harassment guidelines may seem very clear to managers in the United States, but going abroad can blur the distinctions between what is appropriate or not. Imagine the audacity of an American company doing business in Saudi Arabia in the follow-

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ing case. “[In 1993, a] large U.S. computer-products company…introduced a course on sexual harassment in its Saudi Arabian facility. Under the banner of global consistency, instructors used the same approach to train Saudi Arabian managers that they had used with U.S. managers: the participants were asked to discuss a case in which a manager makes sexually explicit remarks to a new female employee over drinks in a bar. The instructors failed to consider how the exercise would work in a culture with strict conventions governing relationships between men and women.

As a result, the training sessions were ludicrous. They baffled and offended the Saudi participants, and the message to avoid coercion and sexual discrimination [was] lost.”3 The breach of cultural etiquette in the previous example may seem blatant, but how well do managers know the content that is in their training programs? The example demonstrates the necessity for managers to intentionally tailor specific training programs to fit the cultural context in which they operate.

Businesses sometimes have to make tough ethical decisions when encountering multiple cultural contexts. Thomas Donaldson, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on business ethics. He agrees that most decisions are not black and white, but fall into a gray area in between.4 Somewhere between “cultural relativism” and “ethical imperialism” managers have to carefully negotiate these differences in a “moral free space.”5 Many companies and international organizations have enacted global codes of conduct to set reasonable standards for all business. Some corporations have decided to enact clear rules of engagement for the local contexts where their subsidiaries function. This gives managers the confidence to make decisions knowing that they will be supported by company policy. Failure to abide by such codes often results in disciplinary action.

Donaldson states, “Companies must help managers distinguish between prac-

tices that are merely different and those that are wrong.”6 He offers three helpful principles to guide companies in ethical decision-making: 1) Respect for core human values, which determine the absolute moral threshold for all business activities.

2) Respect for local traditions.

3) The belief that context matters when deciding what is right and what is wrong. 7 These guidelines are useful for effective intercultural management, but they may be hard to implement. It is difficult to establish a consensus on what “core human values” are. “Core human values” might mean the human rights of safety and security, a clean environment or a decent living wage. These can be negotiable in another setting, as governments, companies and citizens often disagree about how these are interpreted.

Richard DeGeorge, a professor at the University of Kansas, has also written about business ethics. He suggests the following guidelines for companies that do business abroad.

• [Companies] should do no intentional, direct harm.

• [Companies] should produce more good than bad for the host country.

• [Companies] should contribute by their activities to the host country’s development.

• [Companies] should respect the human rights of their employees.

• [Companies] should pay their fair share of taxes.

• To the extent that local culture does not violate moral norms, [companies] should respect the local culture and work with it, not against it.8 Some of these guidelines from the examples above are not easy to implement.

Often, they must be negotiated between various stakeholders. What kind of development? Which human rights? What moral norms? Local citizens may differ from their host government or from an American company on how these should be interpreted.

This dilemma reinforces both the idea that doing business abroad can lead to difficult ethical decision-making and that managers need to be intentional about their Continued on page 7

Ethics...

National Film...

Continued from page 6

Continued from page 3

professional decisions and the content of their training programs. Managing business abroad can lead to complexities because of cultural differences. Although there may be disagreement over how to interpret values and their importance in a cultural context, it is crucial that managers implement strategies that consider these complexities. The very attempt to negotiate these dilemmas can improve the workplace for managers and employees and makes future business that much better.

visitors to the country hold large misconceptions about Spanish culture. Many fail to recognize that the country has a great deal of varied and rich cultural traditions, and instead think that all of Spain is a land of flamenco dancing and singing and bullfighting. One reason for this was General Francisco Franco’s homogenizing cultural mission which he undertook during his dictatorial rule from 1939 to 1975. He advertised traditional Andalusian culture as representative of Spanish culture, both abroad and at home. Now, many Spanish filmmakers reclaim cultural elements that Franco manipulated and actively engage the validity of these stereotypes.

One film that very explicitly unpacks the stereotypical Andalusian culture is Fernando Trueba’s 1998 movie, La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams). This film is a parody of the españolada genre (a genre of melodramas filled with Andalusian aesthetics) which Franco’s regime widely used to propagate stereotypical Spanish images. By openly discussing and examining these stereotypes, the film subverts the rosy image that Franco tried to maintain abroad about the country and his regime.

Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film, Hable con ella (Talk to Her) reclaims bullfighting as a cultural element by situating it in a modern context. Bullfighting is a very symbolic practice in Spain, and at the crux of its

References 1

Thomas Donaldson, “Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home,” Harvard Business Review (SeptemberOctober, 1996), 60.

2 Archie B. Carroll and Ann K. Buchholtz, Business & Society: Ethics and Stakeholder Management, Mason, OH: Thomson South-Western, 2003), 286.

3 Donaldson, 49.

4 Donaldson, 56.

5 Thomas Donaldson and Thomas W. Dunfee, “When Ethics Travel: The Promise and Peril of Global Business Ethics,” California Management Review, (Summer 1999), 41: 48-49.

6 Donaldson, 52.

7 Ibid.

8 Carroll and Buchholtz, 300; from Richard T. DeGeorge, Business Ethics, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), Chapters 18-20.

Brad David, a former program coordinator at IMI, and is now an Internaitonal Organization for Migration associate living in Juba, Sudan. He earned his Master’s degree in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service.

significance are the matador as the aggressive male symbol and the bull as the submissive female figure. However, this film features a strong and sexually confident female matador. In this way, Almodóvar turns bullfighting on its head while also challenging traditional male/female roles in Spanish society. Furthermore, in the traditional folkloric cinema that Franco advocated, women were most often desexualized, and those that were not were presented as demonic. Therefore, this film reclaims the culture of bullfighting and challenges old sexual stereotypes.

Contemporary Spanish film has significant interaction with Spanish culture, not only by portraying and engaging important cultural elements, but also by reclaiming stereotypes and presenting a view of Spain that its people hold and wish for others to appreciate as well. This truth applies to other national film industries, making watching a foreign film an enjoyable and effective way to gain practical and salient cultural insights.

Cristina Trujillo studied English and Spanish Literature at the University of California, San Diego. In May 2006, she graduated with her Master’s degree in International Communication from American University’s School of International Service. Cristina plans to work in the Washington, DC area.

Intercultural Management Institute Summer 2006 Skills Institutes 1. CULTURES OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT; June 10-11, with JP Singh 2. GLOBAL POSITIONING: CROSS-CULTURAL NEGOTIATING IN A POST-GLOBAL WORLD; June 17-18, with Dean Foster For more information or to register, contact Anna Lee at imi@american.edu or 202-885-6439.

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