Towards interculturality in international creative business management in higher education
Fitzpatrick, Frank (2022) Towards interculturality in international creative business management in higher education. In: Creative business education: exploring the contours of pedagogical praxis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 7-25. ISBN 9783031109270
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Increasing diversity in global business has had an impact on the nature and structure of international business education. The provision of international education courses for students studying business has continued to grow, while universities have adopted enhanced internationalisation strategies as a business model worldwide. Such trends have compelled higher education institutions, in general, and business schools, in particular, to reflect upon how to engage with students from diverse cultural backgrounds and how to respond to their potentially different prior educational experiences. The response of higher education institutions to cultural diversity, however, is considered by many as broadly inadequate and heavily reliant on a largely discredited essentialist and deterministic view of culture. This manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, the content of business management courses in higher education tends to draw upon the dominant paradigm in Cross-Cultural Management (CCM), which is increasingly considered to lag behind current thinking in conceptual trends in social science. This has the consequences for the treatment of culture and diversity when analysing and explaining behaviour and issues in the globalised workplace. Secondly, a poor understanding of the concept of cultural diversity has an impact on how administration and academic systems and structures in universities actually engage with international students to overcome what are perceived as problems or difficulties in adjustment to university life in an unfamiliar context. Addressing these two issues requires, on the one hand, a better understanding of the concepts of culture and cultural diversity in the teaching of international business, drawing on contemporary research and approaches within the broader social sciences, and, on the other, a sense of how cross-cultural and intercultural processes work to develop a true sense of interculturality both in the experience of internationalised business education and what students will eventually take into the global workplace. This article explores these concepts and issues and proposes that an understanding of interculturality should be at the heart of a global approach to higher education.
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