Welcome to TIRG Blog…There
is No APP for That.
Communicating across
cultures sometimes seems like a strange landscape, littered with cultural and
communication bogs, bottomless wells, impenetrable thickets and poisonous
plants. Yet we all manage to thrive in
our inter-cultural marriages, go to work, interact with colleagues and friends
from other countries and get by—more or less.
The name of my blog arose from my belief that it is not
currently possible to consult an iPhone or Android application that will guide
one through the sometimes bumpy terrain of cross cultural communication. (It
would be really cool, though, to be able to open an app like the NY Times
Cooking App (cooking.nytimes.com) and choose a recipe for negotiating
working hours in Korea or time off in Japan, or learning how to manage domestic
help in India or on a Caribbean island).
It remains one of the ironies of our time that in a world
filled with very sophisticated pocket
computers, really cool cell phone apps and web pages that can translate
themselves, our personal software—our knowledge, perceptions, spoken languages, attitudes, written and oral
communication skills— remain relatively under-developed and prone to
misconstrual.
I plan to use this blog to share some of my experiences of
crossing cultures and to reflect on issues related to communicating,
interacting and working with people of other cultures. Future topics will
include discussions of issues that can arise while living, working or traveling
in a country other than your own as well as issues related to welcoming
visitors from other countries to your home or workplace.
TIRG stands for The InterCultural Research Group. We are a consulting company that specializes
in helping people learn how to communicate across cultures. Established in Ottawa,
Canada in 1997, TIRG is currently completing its eighteenth year.
Our clients are people who are preparing for working visits
to developing countries for periods of
between six weeks and two years. People
we have worked with include groups of college undergraduates heading out for
six weeks of agricultural work in the tropics and high school students preparing
for dancing and drumming workshops in West Africa to experienced teachers on
sabbatical and retired couples preparing for two year postings as technical and
policy advisors and trainers. We have also provided on-arrival briefings for
Indian computer nerds and African economists undertaking twelve week study
tours of Canada and the US.
As noted in the profile section of this page, I am Jamieson
Campbell, the owner and principal consultant of the InterCultural Research
Group. Assisted by team members, I design our workshops and other learning and
teaching materials.
I welcome your comments.
While I am open to a good discussion— critical or otherwise— I will not
publish comments that I deem to be inappropriate due to the use of offensive
language, extreme views or racial, ethnic or gender bias. That said, I plan to
be as inclusive as I can be. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
The InterCultural Research Group’s web page is currently
being remodeled. I’m hoping to have it ready to publish within three or four
weeks. When it’s ready it will be linked to this blog.
Thanks for stopping by. See you next time.
