Challenging to study culture
BSc in Business Language & Culture (BLC) in Academy of Management Learning & Education
More and more demands are placed on employees to think across borders, and this does also influence the educational sector. Students must be able to handle globalisation, which means that they have to study foreign cultures. This is not as easy as it may seem – because how do you approach the concept of culture in the best possible way? This has led Associate Professor Maribel Blasco from the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management to write the article ‘Cultural pragmatists? Student perspectives on learning culture at a business school.’
Abstract
CBS makes a point of being international and views culture as an essential factor in the attempt to think globally. Therefore, Maribel Blasco has been able to gather her empirical data from qualitative and quantitative interviews with current and former graduate and undergraduate students of Business, Language and Culture (BLC). All interviews pointed in the same direction; the students think that culture is abstract and complex, and they are having difficulties figuring out how culture is connected with economics. So culture becomes something they add to a classic economic analysis or is a kind of a ‘black box’, which explains everything else that cannot be explained by economic theories. Therefore, a lot of students apply simplified cultural perspectives to okay their assignments – in full knowledge that there is more to it.
- Culture seemed at the time to explain everything and nothing. As one undergraduate student admitted: “If you have something you can’t explain, you can always ‘blame’ the culture”… This sense of being more culturally enlightened than business students in other programmes was, however, tinged by frustration at the inability to quantify or express in concrete terms what exactly they had gained from their studies of culture, Maribel Blasco states in the article.
Necessary to integrate
The demands from the surrounding world to internationalise education and make students more culturally minded are, according to Maribel Blasco, not very easy to meet. She claims that it is essential that teaching integrates the concept of culture, so that students learn to perceive economic activities as culturally determined and not only as a comparable factor to be added to a classic economic analysis.
The article ‘Cultural pragmatists? Student perspectives on learning culture at a business school’ has been published in the June edition of the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education (AMLE). AMLE is one of the highest-ranked journals within its field.