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January 11, 2008 |
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| Ivey’s
BAFA BAFA exercise demonstrates the
power of ethnocentrism to exchange
students |
It’s easy to get kicked out of a meeting
when you don’t understand the culture of
the group. That’s what Ivey exchange
students learned in a recent exercise on
ethnocentrism.
Over 30 new exchange students have
arrived at the Richard Ivey School of
Business for a semester of school.
Exchange students have come from
Austria, Brazil, Czech Rep, Germany,
Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, New
Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland,
Poland, and Thailand.
As part of their orientation to Canada
and to Ivey, the exchange students had
the chance to experience the impact of
culture on behavior first hand.
Professor Joerg Dietz and PhD candidate
Chetan Joshi ran Bafa Bafa, a
cross-cultural simulation to demonstrate
the importance of understanding
different cultures.
The exercise placed students into two
different teams or “cultures”, the Alpha
culture and the Beta culture.
Separately, they learned the rules of
their new culture and then acted out the
newly learned behaviours and norms.
The hard part of the exercise came when
the two cultures had to interact
together while trying to achieve their
goals. It quickly became obvious, that
without knowing and understanding the
other culture, it wasn’t easy to
function effectively.
For example, when the Beta culture
visited the Alpha culture, some Betas
were thrown out, for reasons unknown to
them, because they insulted the Alpha
culture. The Alpha culture didn’t make
much progress with the Beta culture
either, as they didn’t understand their
language, signs, or trading system.
After the simulation the two teams were
brought together to talk about what they
thought of the other’s culture. Both
teams admitted to having trouble
figuring out the other culture. When
asked to describe the opposite culture,
the students used negative terms. This
was mainly due to a misunderstanding of
the culture; the students were trying so
hard to fit into their own newly learned
culture that they didn’t take the time
to try to understand the other students’
culture.
While debriefing the exercise, Joshi
explained importance of learning and
understanding another culture. Using the
D.I.E. framework, he explained the best
way to integrate into another culture.
First, when operating in another
culture, Describe the culture to
yourself. Secondly, Interpret the
culture, before finally Evaluating the
culture.
Joshi had the students re-evaluate the
negative words they had on the board
when describing the opposing culture.
Instead of being open minded, the
students realized that they were falling
bias to their own culture during
evaluation; they were looking for things
that they expected to see, modifications
of their own culture, instead of being
open to completely different rules. The
students were focusing on difference and
not similarities.
Through BAFA BAFA the students
experienced first hand the problem of
ethnocentrism, which is the tendency to
look at the world primarily from the
perspective of our own culture and the
belief that culture is superior to other
groups. After only an hour of mastering
the rules of a new culture, the exercise
elicited ethnocentric behavior from the
students. Considering that most of the
students have had at least 20 years in
their home culture before coming to
Ivey, BAFA BAFA demonstrated to the
students that they will have to be aware
of ethnocentrism during their time at
Ivey.
Armed with a better understanding of how
to integrate into another culture and
with an awareness of the power of
ethnocentrism, the 30 students from
abroad continued their orientation with
learning another important survival
skill during their semester at Ivey:
where to eat lunch on campus.
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