The road to an international career: The “Erasmus effect” on resilience,intercultural interactions and cultural intelligence

This study is part of a framework that views study abroad programs as an opportunity for experiential and transformative learning. Using a mixed-methods approach with a quantitative multi-wave study, this research examined the relationship between cultural intelligence and the internationalism career anchor – the individual predisposition and desire for international mobility for work. This study considers the role of resilience and intercultural interactions as predictors of cultural intelligence. In addition, we examined the transformative learning process by relating the development of cultural intelligence to specific critical incidents or critical experiences in intercultural interactions that can be considered triggers of the learning process. A sample of 170 outgoing Italian Erasmus students completed a self-report questionnaire prior to departure and another upon return home. The study also included a control group (n = 52) consisting of students from the same university who had not participated in the Erasmus program. The results revealed the positive value of the Erasmus experience, particularly in terms of strengthening the internationalism career anchor, cognitive cultural intelligence and resilience. The results also showed that students’ pre-departure resilience and intercultural interactions with other international students from different countries can explain higher levels of cultural intelligence and the desire to work abroad or take on global work assignments. No significant change across time was found for the same variables in the control group. In addition, the critical experiences reported by students highlighted a strong cognitive and motivational component associated with the Erasmus program. Some practical implications for higher education are discussed.     

Moderation impact of national culture on international firm’s environmental,social, governance and financial performance

We examine whether country-level national culture dimensions might moderate an international firm’s environmental, social, governance performance to strengthen or weaken its financial performance based on the Institutional Difference Hypothesis. We find that low power distance, high individualism, high masculinity, high uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgent national culture would moderate a firm’s environmental, social, governance performance to strengthen its financial performance further. On the contrary, high power distance, collectivism (low individualism), feminine, low uncertainty avoidance, short-term orientation, and restraint dimensions would be expected to weaken a firm’s financial performance by discouraging firms from undertaking superior environmental, social, governance performance. GLOBE’s findings such as low power distance, collectivistic institutional and in-group national culture, high uncertainty avoidance, future orientation, all report a significant positive moderation impact on a firm’s environmental, social, governance performance to strengthen its financial performance further. However, high gender-egalitarian national culture and high assertiveness would negatively moderate firm’s financial performance and environmental, social, governance performance. Overall, we think that our findings would further propagate the institutional difference hypothesis as we observe that each of our studied national culture dimensions would moderate firm’s environmental, social, governance performance and financial performance associations significantly.     

Diplomats’ quality of life: The role of risk factors and coping resources

The health-related well-being of diplomats has rarely been addressed in empirical studies. This is a shortcoming since this group of expatriates is confronted with specific mobility challenges. This paper has two central objectives. First, we investigate how the self-reported health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of German Foreign Service (GFS) employees compares to respective reference values from the German general population. Second, within the framework of an expanded Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model, we analyze how diplomats’ HRQOL is affected by exposure to international relocation mobility and various personal risk and protective factors.All employees of the GFS were surveyed using online questionnaires (N = 2433). Our HRQOL measure was derived from the “Quality of Life Questionnaire Core 30” (QLQ-C30).We show that, compared to the general population, diplomats report a worse HRQOL with respect to all subdomains included (physical symptoms as well as role, emotional, and social functioning). Absolute exposure to mobility (time spent in international rotation) did not affect HRQOL, while individually perceived stress shows significant detrimental effects and personal resources (self-efficacy, mobility-specific coping, social support) show significant beneficial effects on diplomats’ HRQOL. Perceived demands of work in diplomacy had significant health-impairment effects, but perceived resources had no additive value in explaining diplomats’ HRQOL once controlling for other factors. Moderator analyses reveal that mobility-specific coping acted as a buffer in the relationship between perceived stress and perceived job demands and HRQOL.Practical implications are drawn as to support plans that respect the individual’s stress perceptions and available resources.     

Is emigration worth the trouble? Satisfaction with life,group identifications,perceived discrimination,and socio-economic status of immigrants and stayers

In the present study, we examined satisfaction with life (SWL), group identifications, perceived discrimination, and socio-economic status among immigrants and stayers. The study had two main objectives: 1) to test the morbidity and salutary hypotheses of immigration by comparing the psycho-social characteristics of immigrants and stayers; 2) to test a resource model of well-being among immigrants and stayers by investigating the effect of different resources and stressors on SWL. The study was conducted using a random representative sample of first-generation immigrants from the Former Soviet Union to Israel (n = 400) and a not-random large and geographically dispersed sample of Jews staying in Russia (n = 935). The comparison of immigrants and stayers revealed that immigration is a mixed blessing, salutary in some aspects and onerous in others. In general, immigrants were more satisfied with their life than stayers. In addition, identification with the country of residence was stronger among immigrants than stayers. However, immigrants reported a higher level of perceived discrimination, and their socio-economic status was lower than that of stayers. Socio-economic status, identification with the country of residence, and perceived discrimination were directly connected to SWL among immigrants and stayers. In addition, among stayers, identification with the ethnic minority group was connected to SWL, while among immigrants, identification with the country of origin was not connected to SWL. Socio-economic status and perceived discrimination also affected SWL indirectly, through their connections to identification with the country of residence among immigrants and stayers and through their connection to ethnic identification among stayers.     

The effect of perceived overqualification on job satisfaction and career satisfaction among immigrants: Does host national identity matter?

Overqualification is a form of person-job misfit that is common among those who reside in a foreign country. It is associated with poor work-related well-being and can inhibit full adjustment to the host society. The goal of our study is to examine the impact of perceived overqualification on job satisfaction and career satisfaction among immigrants. Furthermore, we investigated immigrants’ host national identity as a moderator of the impact of perceived overqualification on job satisfaction and career satisfaction. We analysed longitudinal online survey data from 124 Italian and Spanish immigrants who migrated to Germany between 2000 and 2014. Regression analyses show that perceived overqualification is negatively associated with job satisfaction six months later. Furthermore, host national identity moderates the association between perceived overqualification and job satisfaction: low overqualification is beneficial for job satisfaction whereas high overqualification is a threat for job satisfaction, especially for immigrants who identify strongly with the host society. We do not find corresponding direct and moderating effects on career satisfaction. We conclude that indicators of acculturation, such as host national identity, are worth considering in order to understand the impact of person-job misfit on work-related well-being among immigrants.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

The online place of popular music: Exploring the impact of geography and social media on pop artists’ mainstream media attention

Many authors have pointed to the internet’s potential to increase connectivity across the world, which would imply an equalizing effect, yet few researchers have examined this. At the same time, the increasing usage of social media by popular culture celebrities for self-promotion has been signaled. We study the extent to which social media can reduce inequalities in mainstream media attention between artists from central cities in popular music production (e.g., New York, London) versus more peripheral cities. We distinguish between media attention by institutionally embedded music critics and lay users on the internet. The results show that artists coming from more central cities have higher chances to get attention in mainstream media—both by institutional critics and lay users—than artists from peripheral cities. Building a fan base on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace can compensate for some of this inequality, but not for all of it.     

Chinese university students’ mediated contact and global competence: Moderation of direct contact and mediation of intergroup anxiety

In recent years, popularity of social media and influx of international students have provided Chinese domestic students ample opportunities to contact with alien cultures both directly and indirectly. To understand impact of the new environment, the present study focused on Chinese domestic undergraduates and proposed a moderated mediation research model examining the relationships between mediated contact (through foreign TV series and movies) and the three dimensions of global competence (global attitudes, skills, and knowledge). We also explored mediation of intergroup anxiety and moderation of direct contact (with international students) underlying these relationships. Results from a multi-group structural equation modeling analysis revealed direct contact as a moderator, modifying the relationship between mediated contact and intergroup anxiety. Specifically, this negative relationship was significant at low, rather than at high levels of direct contact. Further, at low, rather than at high levels of direct contact, mediated contact had indirect relationships with all three dimensions of global competence via the mediator of intergroup anxiety.     

The Impact of Receivers’ Nationality and Cultural Orientation on the Effects of Fear Appeals in Health Communication

Participants from the Netherlands (n = 52), China (n = 50), and South Africa (n = 166) either read a self-targeted or a family-targeted fear appeal message about chlamydia. Seven aspects of individual cultural orientation were measured, and six effects of the different messages. Interactions between nationality and target of threat were found on perceived severity, perceived susceptibility, and danger control. Only for perceived susceptibility, a difference in cultural orientation partly explained this interaction. The outcomes add to the doubts about claims in earlier literature about the relevance of receivers’ nationality and cultural orientation for developing a fear appeal message.     

The ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism: the post‐ideological cultural representation of North Korea and the cultural criticisms of Korean nationalism

Abstract

This essay questions the ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism in which a ‘genuine’ figuration of North Korea is presumed to be achievable at the popular level. I define the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism as the political‐cultural discursive formation obscuring the ideological powerfulness of anti‐North Koreanism that hinges on ‘the normality of nationalism’. The truth politics reinscribes and reinforces the populist and functionalist belief in national unification that justifies developmentalist agendas for North Korea. As an alternative, I discuss the post‐colonial cultural criticism that calls into question the identity politics of popular nationalism, which implicitly performs along the lines of the Sunshine Policy guidelines to naturalize the normality of nationalism under economic developmentalism. The questionable formation of nationalism prevents South Koreans from gaining self‐reflexive access to the way in which heterogeneous tropes of the nation rupturing in the discursive practice of popular nationalism are exploited. But I also critically interrogate the analytical framework presumed within the criticism, because it constrains its own scope and abilities of questioning the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism the criticism ostensibly targets.     

The effects of Latino immigrants’ acculturation strategy and U.S. Americans' assimilation attitudes on perceptions of accommodation satisfaction and willingness to communicate

Guided by the acculturation framework (Berry, 1980, 2011) and communication accommodation theory (CAT; Giles, 1970, 2016), this study examines the effects of an immigrant target’s acculturation strategy on U.S. Americans’ accommodation satisfaction and willingness to communicate with the target and the potential interaction effect between the immigrant’s acculturation strategy and the participant’s assimilation attitudes. Supporting the hypotheses, results indicated participants with lower assimilation attitudes were most satisfied with the integrated target’s accommodation behaviors, followed by the assimilated and separated targets. In addition, participants with higher assimilation attitudes were equally satisfied by the integrated and assimilated targets’ accommodation, followed by the separated target. Across all levels of assimilation attitudes (i.e., low, moderate, and high), participants were more willing to communicate with the integrated or assimilated (no significant difference) target than with the separated target. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed regarding acculturation and inter-ethnolinguistic group relations.     

The effects of positive affectivity on expatriate creativity and perceived performance: What is the role of perceived cultural novelty?

This study set out to investigate the effects of positive affectivity (PA) on expatriate creativity and perceived performance in the host country workplace. Most importantly, the study examined the moderating role of perceived cultural novelty in the relationship between PA and creativity and its consequences for the indirect association between PA and perceived performance as mediated via creativity. Data from 297 expatriates in Denmark were collected and hypotheses were tested using regression-based analyses. Consistent with predictions, findings showed a positive relationship between PA and creativity. In addition, PA was positively associated with perceived performance. Results of mediation analysis indicated that creativity mediated the effects of PA on perceived performance. While a moderating effect of perceived cultural novelty in the relation between PA and creativity was found, this moderation was in the opposite direction of the postulated hypothesis, i.e. the positive association between PA and creativity was strongly attenuated at high levels of perceived cultural novelty. Subsequent moderated mediation analysis showed that the identified mediation ceased to exist at high levels of perceived cultural novelty.     

Negotiating women’s social space: public debates on gender in early modern Kerala,India*

Abstract

The paper argues that the formation of modern gender identities in early‐twentieth‐century Kerala was deeply implicated in the project of shaping governable subjects who were, at one and the same time ‘free’ and already inserted into modern institutions. Because gender appeared both natural and social, both individualising and general, it seemed to be a superior form of social ordering compared to the pre‐existing order of caste. The actualisation of a superior society ordered by gender was seen to be dependent upon the shaping of the fully‐fledged individuals with strong internalities and well‐developed gendered capacities that would place them in distinct social domains of the public and domestic, as ‘free’ individuals, who, however, were bound together in a complementary relationship. While this model still remains dominant in Kerala, by the 1930s, the public/domestic divide came to be blurred with the rapid spread of disciplinary institutions. Womanhood came to be associated not with a certain domain but with a certain form of power. This legitimated the entry of Malayalee women into public life, undergirded the much‐discussed ‘Kerala Model’ of development, and still holds up the highly ambiguous sort of ‘liberation’ elite Malayalee women have experienced. It has also strongly influenced the specific shape the resistance to patriarchy has taken in Kerala in the twentieth century.     

Broadening the mind: Beneficial effects of sojourn experiences and contact with visiting international students on prospective teachers’ motivation to avoid prejudiced behavior

Opportunities for intergroup contact are particularly important for prospective teachers because they bear responsibility for an ethnically diverse student population. Using data from a sample of 330 students inscribed in Austrian university colleges of teacher education, we investigated the long-term effects of international student exchange on prospective teachers’ motivation to avoid prejudiced behavior (MAPB). Both sojourning and domestic students’ friendships with visiting international students (VIS) were evaluated as potential instances of naturally occurring intergroup contact that can affect students’ MAPB. Sojourning students had an increased MAPB even nine months after returning to their home country. No effect was found for domestic students’ friendships with VIS. Possibly, the quality of these friendships was insufficient to result in long-term prejudice reduction. Implications of these results are discussed, and the need to advance interventions that are appropriate to improve domestic students’ contact with VIS is ascertained.     

Confronting dictatorship,democratization, and post‐democratization – personal reflection on intellectual and social practices in the context of dictatorship,democratization and post‐democratization

Abstract

This essay tries to trace the life trajectory of an intellectual, in terms of his intellectual and social practices, who wants to live through modern Korean history via progressive activism. The trajectory can be divided into three different stages: the first comes with the military developmental dictatorship in 1961, ending in 1987. The next is during the democratic transition since the Democratic Uprising in June 1987, which put the Korean society onto the road of democratization. The last one should be the so‐called ‘post‐democratization’ period in which we now find ourselves. This is more a story than an analysis of the progressive intellectual movement in the form of the personal recollections. The story is, however, not just about an individual but it is a window giving a glimpse into the larger trajectory that many progressive intellectuals have gone through, and that directly reflects the huge changes in contemporary history of South Korea, such as the interaction between the domination and social movements.     

Making American Friends: The Effects of Musical Tastes and English Proficiency on Chinese International Students’ Social Networks in the United States

This study investigated the relationship between Chinese international students’ social networks in the United States and their musical tastes. Based on concept of homophily, this study used a self-reported Social Network Analysis (SNA) survey to examine whether sharing similar musical tastes affected Chinese international students’ relationship, their musical tastes, and music consumption. The results showed that having high musical taste similarity predicted closer relationship between respondents and their alters, and higher likelihood of new music consumption. This study also found that frequent American English-language songs listeners were more likely to have Americans in their social network than less-frequent American English-language songs listeners.