Working Across Cultures

Cultural understanding is indispensable for people who live and work abroad or in multicultural settings, but few have appropriate knowledge and training in this area.Working Across Culturesaddresses this need. Suitable for general readers yet intellectually challenging, the book illustrates how to thrive in unfamiliar cultures by understanding and tapping into the stress management mechanisms used by the people who live there. The book begins by refuting the notion that professional life interacts with culture only at the level of etiquette. Distinguishing between rule-based and relationship-based cultures, the author examines the roles of authority, individualism, competition, security, negotiation, contracts, supervision, lifestyle, and even humor in different cultures. He shows how different concepts of time, space, information, and wealth shape everyday life across cultures. The book concludes with a comprehensive reading list for more than one hundred countries.

John Hooker is the Holloran Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at Carnegie Mellon University.