Comunicação intercultural para estudantes de gestão no ensino superior em Portugal – um estudo de caso

Comunicação apresentada em Colóquio A Comunicação entre Culturas - Grupo SIETAR Portugal, AlmadaEste paper apresenta reflexões de um estudo piloto que tenta responder à questão: Quais são as perspectivas interculturais, conhecimentos e competências que devemos ensinar aos estudantes de gestão do Ensino Superior de forma a promover, com sucesso, a comunicação internacional a nível empresarial? Este estudo exploratório tem seguido o desempenho de estudantes da Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais que participam em jogos de gestão internacional, cujo objectivo é promover as relações interculturais entre estudantes de diferentes países que trabalham conjuntamente em equipas internacionais para resolver problemas, negociar preços e desenvolver e implementar estratégias de negócio num ambiente de simulação empresarial. Esta simulação realiza-se anualmente envolvendo equipas internacionais, com estudantes oriundos da China, Rússia, EUA, Finlândia, Alemanha e Portugal. O jogo realiza-se, rotativamente, em cada um destes países. Este paper apresenta algumas reflexões e pistas para futura investigação acerca do ensino e comunicação intercultural para estudantes de gestão no Ensino Superior em Portugal

Developing a Program Community of Practice for Leadership Development

This article outlines how a community of practice can be designed within management education for effective leadership development. Through a qualitative study of a cohort of 25 owner-managers of small businesses, we explore how a program community of practice (PCoP) acts as a pedagogical device for focusing on the development of leadership practice. Drawn from ‘grounded theory’ analysis, we outline a pedagogic heuristic of a PCoP built upon on an emergent rather than a didactic curriculum, shaped by the PCoP members’ own experiences and practices of managing their businesses. Our contribution is to illustrate the significant value of applying communities of practice theory to pedagogic designs in order to advance the development of leadership practice in small businesses. We critically examine this contribution with regard to the scope that designing a PCoP can bring to leadership development and the challenges for educators designing and facilitating an emergent curriculum

Systems Convening: A Crucial Form of Leadership for the 21st Century

Social learning across complex landscapes requires a certain kind of leadership, which we have called systems convening. Many people do this kind of work without any label, often unrecognized, and sometimes not even particularly aware that they are doing it. A systems convener or systems convening team sets up spaces for new types of conversations between people who often live on different sides of a boundary. For example, a geographic, cultural, disciplinary, political, class, social boundary. These conveners see a social landscape with all its separate and related practices through a wide-angle lens: they spot opportunities for creating new learning spaces and partnership that will bring different and often unlikely people together to engage in learning across boundaries. A systems convener takes a “landscape view” of wherever they are and what they need to do to increase the learning capability of that entire landscape – rather than simply the capability of the space they are standing in. Importantly, a systems convener is someone who has enough legitimacy in different worlds to be able to convene people in those different worlds into a joint conversation. This book draws on interviews with 40 systems conveners who are using this approach around the world, working on diverse issues ranging from improving government transparency to enhancing cancer care

‘I understood the words but I didn’t know what they meant’: Japanese online MBA students’ experiences of British assessment practices

We report on a case study of high Japanese student failure rates in an online MBA programme. Drawing on interviews, and reviews of exam and assignment scripts we frame the problems faced by these students in terms of a ‘language as social practice’ approach and highlight the students’ failure to understand the specific language games that underpin the course assessment approach. We note the way in which the distance learning and online context can make the challenges faced by international students less immediately visible to both students and institution