Bicultural Resourcefulness in Global Management: From Education to Corporate Collaboration

Biculturals are increasingly viewed as a resource in global business. They are effective in multicultural teams, they are great boundary spanners between corporate headquarters and their subsidiaries, and their abilities are acknowl-edged in cross-cultural leadership. This article aims to generate typologies that will help global businesses gain a clearer understanding of the competences that biculturals can offer them. This study explores biculturalism in two set-tings: business education and global corporations. What unique skills and abilities allow biculturals to take advantage of knowledge from two or more cultures? Do they perceive their skills as resources? And how does corporate experience harness bicultural competences? Surprisingly, this study showed that the bicultural students were not aware of their strengths and advantages. In contrast, the corporate study provided ample evidence of how bicultural abilities were acknowledged and leveraged in international business, once bilculturals were established in the workplace. This article presents a theoreti-cal matrix of bicultural competences, based on the concepts of frame switch-ing and meta-cognition. The matrix categories are: 1) bicultural dissonance, 2) bicultural thinking, 3) bicultural action and 4) bicultural competence

Effects of a brief pre‑admission telephone reminder on no‑show and dropout rates in substance use disorder treatment: a quasi‑experimental study

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Proximity as a Journalistic Keyword in the Digital Era : A study on the “closeness” of amateur news images

Proximity is an ambiguous journalistic notion for which there is no single definition. In this article, we re-evaluate the relevance and use of the concept in the digital news environment. Based on interviews with journalists in Finland and audience focus groups in Finland and the United Kingdom, we ask how new forms of visual amateur production incorporated into professional news journalism have transformed the concept. The concept of proximity has evolved from being a criterion of news selection into a central imperative of news production aiming to engage audiences. Through the prism of amateur news imagery, proximity appears as a spatio-temporal, emotional and strategic keyword.Peer reviewe

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Moving beyond stereotypes in managing cultural difference: Communication in Danish-Japanese corporate relationships

Summary This study addresses challenges in intercultural management between corporate headquarters in Denmark and subsidiaries/alliance partners in Japan. It takes its point of departure in the prevalent cross-cultural stereotypes of 'national cultures', shows the limitations of using such stereotypes and offers a social constructivist framework that captures the complex processes of understanding others in intercultural collaboration. Based on interviews with 50 managers in five companies, this study presents lessons learned and describes how management practices in the intercultural workplace can result in several approaches from "ongoing culture clash" to situations where cultural differences are considered a strategic asset. It illustrates how some managers perpetuate stereotypes, how some managers move beyond stereotypes, and how others are actually able to "trump" them.Denmark-Japan Headquarter-subsidiary Intercultural management Stereotypes Context Lessons learned Value-trumping Social construction