Reflective: Cross-cultural Communication and Culture Essay

Submitted By layefe
Words: 3154
Pages: 13
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Reflective Paper
Introduction
Culture is learned. Man is not born with culture, but with the ability to learn, acquire, and develop culture through experience. For example, a child is born not knowing what culture is or how things are done in the eyes of society. But he learns through imitating, how thing are properly done. He then develops the necessary tools to go about his daily activities. Also, through the help of language, this is the primary tool for communication; the elder generation can pass to the younger generation the knowledge and skills they had acquired through experience. Therefore, because of these things, you could say that culture is learned. All people have varied culture. There are differently groups of people around the world, and we call these groups different societies. A society may be a group of people banding together and living in a stable union, and pooling together their efforts to attain a common objective by collective action. Knowing this, people should not judge a custom of one society using his own since they both have different societies and culture. With this consideration, this paper gives a short overview of my observed behavioral pattern of the French and Chinese business culture. Understanding this behavioral pattern is important for doing effective communication with people and people groups from these countries. Effective communication is vital in establishing business and personal relationship in these countries.
This paper is intended to be a reflection of my learning experience in a cross cultural environment context. The first part of the paper gives a short overview of my observed behavioral pattern of the French and Chinese business culture.

My Background
I was born in Hong Kong but I finished my last 5 year of formal education in Australia. I have a Bachelor degree with a major in accounting from an Australian university. Prior to my undergraduate studies I had studied my year 11 and year 12 in a Catholic High school in Australia. I am a qualified accountant and have worked in the finance and accounting field for somewhat twenty years now. After I graduated, I worked in an Australian CPA firm for 3 years. These 8 years of oversea experiences have rooted my thinking pattern and communication style. Cross Culture Environment Culture is a group product. Culture was not designed by man to become what it has become. It is simply the accumulation of certain practices acquired by man through his interaction with other people. For example, I with my group may start out on a research. I may find a good method in doing this research with the help of another group mate. Other members may find a better way of improving the method I used in doing the research. And in due time, other groups may seem interested in my way of doing research and may try to imitate it. Just one person in the group may not be a Man just adapted whatever practice was most useful to him at the time and then went on to keep that practice as time went further on. Therefore, culture is not only learned but is also transmitted through human interaction and experience. A generation may put an imprint upon the one before it, thus, making an accumulation and selective result of group life. I do believe that culture is transmitted from generation to generation or from another to one another. This may happen through oral traditions or in writing. It may be transmitted through everyday conversation, through interaction between the older and the younger, and even through reward and punishment. Culture is accumulated and whatever the past has learned, the present and future generation may build on it to produce something better which may aid them more as they go along the roads of everyday life. For example, when people in the early days wanted to preserve food to keep them from rotting, they put them in barrels filled with salt or put in seasoning or exposed them under the
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