Development of a Canons of Practice Policy at Washington State University

Public policy educators, researchers, and administrators at Washington State University developed the Canons of Practice to guide faculty and staff engaging in contentious public issues. The need for such a document became evident when existing university policies and procedures lacked a suitable mechanism for resolving external criticism of public policy education and research. The Canons of Practice sets parameters for involvement in public policy research and education, provides guidelines for faculty and staff conduct, defines expectations of citizens and stakeholders, and establishes due process as the core of administrative response

Training “international engineers” in Japan: discourse, discourse and stereotypes

Training programmes and materials that aim to enable professionals to function effectively in international contexts often draw on Hofstedian approaches to intercultural communication (ICC); in other words, they employ an essentialist framework which puts nationality at the core of conceptions of culture (Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). While seductive, they arguably draw on and reinforce stereotypes, and may damage rather than facilitate ICC (Handford, The Language of Business Meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Piller 2011). This chapter outlines an alternative approach to ICC training, developed over several years with an engineering multinational based in Japan. The core aim of the training was to change the organisational discourse around ‘internationalisation’. Trainees were introduced to the concepts of discourse, Discourse (Gee, 2005) and stereotypes (Bar-Tal, 1997), and were encouraged to critically apply them to their demanding work contexts