Validation of a German Version of the Cultural Intelligence Scale

Intercultural competence plays a crucial role in increasingly multicultural societies. The Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) has proven to be a promising approach to measure intercultural competence in a variety of contexts. Despite its use as a reliable and valid instrument across the globe, however, the CQS has not yet been systematically validated for German-speaking countries. Therefore, the present study examined the psychometric properties, factor structure, and convergent and discriminant validity of a German translation of the CQS in two distinct samples (N_{Study 1} = 392; N_{Study 2} = 414). Across both studies, a bi-factorial model with three specific (i.e., cognitive, behavioral, and motivational CQ) and a general CQ factor best reflected the data. The results demonstrated good psychometric properties and promising results regarding the convergent and discriminant validity of the general factor whereas the incremental validity of the specific factors requires further consideration.     

Interpreting Vienna Cafe Culture‘from A to Z’

The Viennese publisher Christian Brandstatter spent half his life in hometown cafe since he couldn't find a better way to pass the time.In this article,he inter...     

The Right to Write in German Colonies of the Early Twentieth Century: Pugnacious Settler Newspapers,Anxious Governors and African Journalism in Exile

ABSTRACT

The entangled history of the German Colonial Press Law (written 1906–1912) begins with the wish of the German East African Governor to keep the pugnacious settler press under control. Under the influence of a racist discourse that sought to restrict education for Africans and feared anti-colonial actions and networks, the law developed into a legal basis that could impede publishing activities of the colonised in all German colonies. In Togoland, African writers bypassed such restrictions by publishing critical articles in the adjacent British Gold Coast Colony and thereby succeeded in entering transnational supportive networks.     

The body that can(not) represent us—Tian Chi-Yuan's White Water and modern Taiwanese theatre

ABSTRACT

The denial of Taiwan's status as a nation by international communities has long-served as a catalyst for Taiwanese theatre practitioners’ pursuit of an expressive body that responds to complex national identities. Taking Taiwanese society as the basis for considering the irreducible complexity of postcolonial struggles vis-à-vis the power relations of neoliberal cultural production, in the theoretical framework of this paper, I propose a biopolitical reading of modern Taiwanese theatre. In particular, to reveal the constructedness of the idea of the body, I foreground the embeddedness of theatre in local society and scrutinize the interplay between an imagined body and the theatre through Taiwanese practitioner Tian Chi-Yuan's (1964–1996) White Water (or Baishui, 1993). Using this work as a case study, I focus on his experiment of intercultural bodily gestures through which the fabrication of national identity is both revealed and questioned. I consider Tian's practice of integrating cultural traditions expressive of the dynamics of decolonization with the experiment in reconfiguring the local body—a practice that positions the theatre in Taiwan as an experimental and cathartic site for pursuing an epistemological change in identity formation. Thus, the theatre constitutes a performance of a necessary identity-burdened space between history and memory, struggling to renew itself in distinctive contexts.     

A prison audience: women prisoners,Shakespeare and spectatorship

ABSTRACT

In 2017 the Donmar Warehouse presented The Tempest to women prisoners at HMP New Hall, UK. The production was part of a trilogy of Shakespeare plays directed by Phyllida Lloyd, each staged with an all-female cast and each set within a women’s prison. Over the five years of developing this trilogy the Donmar undertook extensive research and development into the prison context, including in collaboration with York St John University’s Prison Partnership Project. This paper explores the prison audiences’ experiences of The Tempest, examining how they responded to seeing their own lived experiences on stage, filtered through the prism of Shakespearian plot, characterisation and language. In particular, this paper focuses on moments of identification, where the women found direct resonance and self-recognition with the characters and experiences in The Tempest. At the same time it draws on discourses from dramatherapy and aesthetic theory to argue for the importance of various forms of emotional, empathetic and psychical distance. Using close analysis of the spectators’ responses, it describes how for the prison audience the result was an oscillation between identification and distance, a reading of “me but more than me” that produced a powerful affective and reflective impact.     

Authors' Biographies

ABSTRACT

This article critically engages with a contemporary play, Aur Kitne Tukde, staged in the Hindi language in various cities and towns in India and Pakistan, about gendered violence during Partition. It unsettles the master narrative of ‘honour’, ‘martyrdom’, ‘choice’ and women's ‘agency’ on Partition. The article also highlights the significance of the play in breaking the silences around Partition in the theatre, which, as compared with other cultural and literary mediums, reaches out to a larger section of people in unique ways. It underlines how the whole production of the play was a process of traversing and sharing the journey and trauma of Partition not only for the actors but also for the audiences. The article also tries to problematize the whole question of violence and its representation.     

Social engagement and regional theatre: patterns of theatre attendance

This paper assesses the degree to which a typical regional theatre engages with society. It uses postcodes from theatre booking data and compares the socioecenomic profiles of these postcodes with postcodes from which no theatregoers are drawn. A re-working of recent theories of class provides a conceptual context, whilst discriminant analysis is used to identify the socioecenomic factors of postcodes associated with theatre and non-theatre attendance. Education factors were the principal determinants of attendance, with occupational categories being important, but lower socioecenomic groups were less likely to engage with theatre. However, social engagement and factors determining attendance varied by type of show: comedy, drama, family and Shakespearian productions.     

Wartime Holidays and the ‘Myth of the Blitz’

Published histories of the British home front during the Second World War, both academic and popular, say little or nothing about civilian holidays; the implication is that for most people they did not exist. This article disputes that reading. Complementing earlier work on officially sponsored ‘Holidays at Home’, the article first looks briefly at 1930s holiday expectations, then summarizes government measures to restrain ‘unnecessary’ wartime travel. Using rail-travel statistics, memoirs and diaries, contemporary novels, local press reports, Mass-Observation and other surveys it shows that throughout the war large numbers of people took holidays much as they had in peacetime. This apparent contradiction is then discussed in relation to, for instance, ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘wartime’, the survival of class in Britain, the wartime economy and the debate on the ‘myth of the blitz’ view of civilian behaviour.     

Measuring the value of theatre for Tyneside audiences

What values do theatre and dance hold for audience members? And how do these values differ between subsidised, amateur, and commercial performance? This paper addresses these questions through a survey of over 1800 spectators for theatre and dance in Tyneside in northeastern England, as well as a parallel set of focus groups, in the spring of 2014. These methods, which are designed for comprehensiveness and comparability, are being used across Europe by the Project on European Theatre Systems, a working group of theatre sociologists. Our research showed two sets of values which performances achieved; one was a common measure of performance quality, while the other described the values particular to subsidised work. This allows us to articulate both the general value of the arts and the particular values which subsidy (attempts to) facilitate. This has implications for both understandings of cultural value and for cultural policy, as the distinction between the two groups was not clean. We also found that amateur theatre participated in the same value system, but with an increased emphasis on loyalty and community cohesion. The paper concludes a methodological reflection on the use of quantitative methods in theatre studies.     

Challenges of cultural industry knowledge exchange in live performance audience research

ABSTRACT

With live performance audience research frequently relying on cultural organisations to facilitate access to their audiences, this article addresses the issues involved in evidencing spectators’ responses via discursive methodologies. Recalling a series of empirical projects conducted over the past ten years with a range of theatre practitioners, it examines the conflicts involved in carrying out scholarly studies of audience reception against cultural organisations’ pressures to produce their own ongoing audience evaluations. Examining key concerns about audience research raised by creative practitioners in varying theatrical contexts, from site-specific to building-based work, it addresses the difficulties of understanding live performance reception and aesthetic experience via impact frameworks. It begins by situating these three operations in the context of Knowledge Exchange (KE) between academics within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and those in the creative industry sector.     

Cultural styles of persuasion

The study explores the hypothesis that persuasion can be carried out in a combination of three basic styles: the factual-inductive, the axiomatic-deductive, and the affective-intuitive. The weight of each of these three basic styles differs from culture to culture. The paper begins with the presentation of some earlier research on this question. The styles adopted by the representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab countries in the course of debates in the Security Council of the United Nations are then analyzed. The analysis confirms the hypothesis of there being in each case a dominant style as described above. The results of the study should be considered as preliminary: there exists a possibility of bias among the judges; the sample, even though sufficiently large for statistical purposes, is limited to the discussion of one dispute; the style of other nationalities is not investigated. It is hoped that additional results will be presented in the near future.     

Cultural Honours and Career Promotions: Re-conceptualizing Prizes in the Field of Cultural Production

Despite their implications for careers, cultural goods and honours in the field of cultural production have rarely been examined as career events by culture researchers. More typically, cultural prizes are examined as they relate to the process of cultural valorization or are used to construct samples of venerated cultural products or producers for subsequent analysis. However, embedding cultural goods and distinctions in the career trajectories of cultural producers provides important neglected context. The example of the Academy Awards, the equivalent of a promotion in film acting, demonstrates the usefulness of the perspective. The research concludes that previously understood gendered age disparities are linked to earlier life course events, social networks, and structural factors that govern access to the career track. Implications for cultural policy are discussed.     

Interpreting the Cultural Revolution politically

Abstract

This essay reviews the recent work of three sociologists, Andrew Walder, Alessandro Russo, and Joel Andreas, on factionalism in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR). To varying degrees, all three authors under review question the dominant sociological interpretation of CR factionalism, which directly links factional allegiance to objective class position, and they each attempt to develop a political interpretation instead. Politics, however, is understood differently by the authors. Walder argues that, through attending to the ‘event sequence’ of the CR in which factionalism emerged, factional politics can be de‐linked from the sociological base to which it is usually tied. Russo, influenced by the work of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, argues that the factionalism of the CR should be linked to the emergence of a subjective ‘political sequence’ and not to the pre‐existing structural organization of Chinese socialism. Unlike Walder, for whom mass politics seems to be firmly identified with elite intra‐party power struggle, for Russo a space between elite power struggles and the pluralization of mass political organizations allowed a genuine subjective politics to emerge. Joel Andreas employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of political and cultural capital in order to study the development of CR factions in the Qinghua Attached Middle School and Qinghua University, painting a complex political and sociological understanding of factionalization. These works not only offer reinterpretations of the CR itself, but also help to generate interesting questions about the political relationship between the present and the 1960s, both in China and globally.     

Social stratification of culture and leisure in Turkey

Using three sets of survey data, this article explores the variations and social bases of leisure and cultural consumption patterns during the last decade in Turkey. In particular, this article explores the social basis of reading habits of daily newspapers, magazines and journals, going out to movies and the theatre, as well as spending patterns on these and various other cultural activities. Questions addressed in this study are: how are culture and leisure consumptions stratified in contemporary Turkish society, and what types of changes can be detected between 1994 and 2004? In summary, the data indicate that leisure and cultural consumption tend to be stratified by educational and income level and, to some extent, white-collar occupations. Second, households with female heads tended to engage more in “highbrow” consumption, compared to households with male heads.     

Cultural distance and expatriate job satisfaction

Despite its strong impact in domestic settings on job performance, organizational commitment, stress, and turnover intentions, job satisfaction has received little attention in the literature on expatriates. This paper analyzes the predictors of job satisfaction that may arise in an expatriate context. Drawing on the cultural distance perspective, we propose that the national cultural distance, supervisor's nationality, host-country language proficiency, expatriate type, and company nationality are important determinants of expatriate job satisfaction. Survey results from 148 expatriates in Japan demonstrate that national cultural distance, supervisor's nationality, and expatriate type have a statistically significant influence on expatriate job satisfaction. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.     

Cultural History’s Absent Audience

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders Peter Mandler’s essay ‘The Problem with Cultural History,’ and the complexities of locating evidence of culture’s impact upon ordinary people, or ‘throw.’ A brief examination of the history of market research and public opinion surveys in the 20th century offers important lessons for the cultural historian faced with locating and interpreting evidence of audience response that is either rarely there, or more disturbingly, rarely meaningful by our current standards of interpretation. Ultimately this paper asks of my fellow cultural historians: Does culture matter as much as we cultural historians want it to?     

Cultural capital and the literary field

The literary field has been conceptualized in social scientific work as patterned in particular ways. Historically, popular reading has been linked with contested processes of social change. Tastes for reading have, following Bourdieu, been seen as embedded in continuing processes of distinction and the making of hierarchies. Research has demonstrated the ways in which these hierarchies might be reflective of gender as well as of class relationships. This article examines the findings of the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion study in the light of these debates. The survey gathered data about the types of reading material used by a representative sample of the United Kingdom (UK) population, including their preferences for newspapers, magazines and books. The article reports on a number of possible relationships identified in the study about the location of reading as a social practice, drawing on the survey data and explanatory accounts of respondents' reading preferences drawn from focus groups and interviews. The regularity of participation in reading and ownership of books are outlined in relation to occupational class. Evidence relating to the reading of magazines and newspapers is then examined in the light of contemporary policy concerns. Patterns of taste in books are explored, examining preferences for ‘literary’ genres, gender, education and ethnicity. The article concludes by addressing the position of taste for, and knowledge of, specific works representing a range of positions within the literary field to complete the picture of cultural capital and the literary field in the contemporary UK.