/ have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply...

Cultural competency is an essential skill for family physicians because of increasing ethnic diversity among patient populations. Culture, the shared beliefs and attitudes of a group, shapes ideas of what constitutes illness and acceptable treatment. A cross-cultural interview should elicit the patient's perception of the illness and any alternative therapies he or she is undergoing as well as ...

There has been much debate about the types of leaders needed in tomorrow’s schools and about the optimal forms of leadership preparation. This study examined the applicability of the Boundary-Breaking Leadership Development Model to a cross-cultural travel study programme for Canadian and New Zealand graduate students in educational leadership programmes at two universities. The Canada–New Zeal...

Conflict is competition by groups or individuals over incompatible goals, scarce resources, or the sources of power needed to acquire them. This competition is also determined by individuals’ perceptions of goals, resources, and power, and such perceptions may differ greatly among individuals. One determinant of perception is culture, the socially inherited, shared and learned ways of living po...

Introduction Cross-cultural psychology is a broad term for the scientific study of human behavior and mental or cognitive processes among cultures. In general, this field addresses similarities and differences among cultures. According to the American social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Ara Norenzayan, the view that there are differences between cultures (at least for cognitive processes) ...

This article reviews research on cross-cultural organizational behavior (OB). After a brief review of the history of cross-cultural OB, we review research on work motivation, or the factors that energize, direct, and sustain effort across cultures. We next consider the relationship between the individual and the organization, and review research on culture and organizational commitment, psychol...

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g. Nisbett, R...

Married foreigners On 1 January 1999 the Netherlands was home to 453 thousand married couples with at least one partner born in a foreign country (table 1). Less than half of these couples consist of partners who were both born in a foreign country. 108 thousand foreign-born males have a Dutch-born wife and 133 thousand foreign-born females have a Dutch-born husband. Since 1992 the number of th...