Page 429 - Cultures and Organizations

394 IMPLICATIONS

have been expressed on one or two pages.” The comments of the French-
language class on the readings translated from English therefore were
identical to the comments of the English-language class on the readings
translated from French. What is felt to be a message in one language does
not necessarily survive the translation process. Information is more than

words: it is words that fit into a cultural framework. Culturally adequate
translation is an undervalued art.
Beyond differences in language, students and teachers in intercultural
encounters run into differences in cognitive abilities. “Our African engi-
neers do not think like engineers; they tend to tackle symptoms, rather
than view the equipment as a system,” said a British training manager,
unconscious of his own ethnocentrism. Fundamental studies by develop-
ment psychologists have shown that the things we have learned are deter-
mined by the demands of the environment in which we grew up. People
will become good at doing the things that are important to them and that
they have occasion to do often. Being from a generation that predates the
introduction of pocket calculators in schools, Geert will perform calcula-
tions in his head for which his grandchildren prefer to use a machine.
Learning abilities, including the development of memory, are rooted in the
total pattern of a society. In China the nature of the script (for a moder-
14
ately literate person, at least three thousand complex characters) develops
children’s ability at pattern recognition, but it also imposes a need for rote
learning.
Intercultural problems arise also because expatriate teachers bring
irrelevant materials with them. A Congolese friend, studying in Brussels,
recalled that at primary school in Lubumbashi her teacher, a Belgian nun,
made the children recite in her history lesson “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois”
(“Our ancestors, the Gauls”). During a visiting teaching assignment to

China, a British lecturer repeated word for word his British organizational
behavior course. Much of what students from poor countries learn at uni-
versities in wealthy countries is hardly relevant in their home country
situation. What interest does a future manager in an Indian company have
in mathematical modeling of the U.S. stock market? The know-how sup-
posed to make a person succeed in an industrial country is not necessarily
the same as what will help the development of a country that is currently
poor.
Finally, intercultural problems can be based on institutional differ-
ences in the societies from which the teachers and students have come,
differences that generate different expectations as to the educational pro-