Author: admin

Race, gender & cultural appropriation

Recall the fires on gender and race that were flaring up? In response to Tim Hunt’s dinosaur joke on women in labs and falling in love and crying, another scientist had put up an image of a tree house with ‘no girls allowed’ – which reminded me of the...
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Work in progress

The recent UK election results made me decide to sit on the fence before any comments are made on what lies ahead. I am concerned about a BREXIT and the Human Rights Act. I worry about zero-hour contracts and wonder how we can support small/medium business entrepreneurs in the...
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Too many of us?

When I travel on the London underground and take an escalator up or down, I watch the faces of the people across going into the opposite direction. Usually, these faces are expressionless, on their way to something that will require some engagement but for now, on this metal vertical...
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Oh that’s why?

Cross cultural management is the ability to handle issues between people from different backgrounds effectively. In our current globalised environment, any individual with responsibility over or for others, i.e., a leader and decision maker, would do well to take heed of the cultural differences that exist but it can...
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A poem for James Foley

For James Foley from an Iraqi poet I dreamed that Iraq was a sea. Her wars high waves, her sorrow dark sand, the blood a distant sunset. I dreamed that the Sunnis of Iraq were sharks, the Kurds starfish, the Christians dolphins, the Yezidi goldfish, the Shiites octopuses and...
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Under organizational wings

How the universal need for certainty in nations under socio-economic stress can be satisfied by greater formalization within organizations. Addressing debates about a) the negative correlations between cultural values and practices and b) the controversial effect of formalization and bureaucracy on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), we developed a cross-level...
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Person-Nation Fit and group equality

If Multiculturalism ‘has failed’, then a better understanding of what concepts such as citizenship, tolerance and value congruence mean to society is required. Modern societies are hybrid versions of the traditional culture and new influences (Claeye & van Meurs, 2013) and within each society, in/out group dynamics among subcultures...
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Happy 2014!

Time, perspective and remembering to take in the here and now, here is an interesting video to realise that: “The birthday of the oldest person on earth is closer to Napoleon than to 2014” http://lnkd.in/dfEMEgm  and we need to be in the moment to enjoy life....
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What’s behind the image?

Twitter allows us to find information quickly and catch up with the latest news, innovative developments and (mass) opinion. I use it as a search engine, especially if I don’t want to be searching through links from 2006 or before. Nothing can be more frustrating than entering ‘(comedian’s name)’...
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Memory: A reality check

This weekend I had dinner with friends and we discussed an occasion where the two others distinctly remembered a previous outing (and a discussion about tipping) and I couldn’t recall this at all. Not only did I not recall the event, I also didn’t think that the behaviour described...
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