Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication, Understanding Asia in Pandemic Times

00:00:02

Duncan McCargo

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

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00:00:07

Duncan McCargo

Welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of NIAS and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. I'm delighted to be talking today to Annelise Ly, who is an associate professor of professional and intercultural communication at NHH, the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. She's an expert on intercultural communication in the context of Asia. Annelise, great to have you on the podcast.

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00:00:38

Annelise Ly

Thank you, Duncan. Hello.

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00:00:39

Duncan McCargo

OK, so you work in this field of intercultural communications. Can you give us some background about your career and interests?

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00:00:49

Annelise Ly

Yes, I have a multicultural background. I have juggled most of my life with three cultures and I have a multidisciplinary background, international business, but also linguistics. And at some point of my life, I wanted to bring these disciplines and bring my multicultural background. And it made sense very much to me then to connect the dots of my personal and professional experience in intercultural communication. So, I wrote a Ph.D. in intercultural communication, looking at the interactions in business settings, and I examined the way people in an international organisation make sense of cultural differences in the workplace and how they actually communicated when they used English as a lingua franca in business settings. And then working on this project, I have drawn on my multidisciplinary background and my professional experience. I would say that my understanding of intercultural communication or more specifically my understanding of culture is I would say critical to the essentialist approach of culture. And I want to say that because we'll talk later on, on my teaching approach, and this understanding of culture colours the way I teach. So pretty early on in my project, I felt that the main frameworks to talk about culture in international business when intercultural communication could not show the full picture of intercultural interactions. What I mean by this is that frameworks such as Hofstede or Hall are large quantitative studies that do not reflect individual behaviour. They are quite generalising. We talk a lot about the data collection process, etc. but more interestingly, they talk about they give an idea of people's preferences in a monocultural environment, what is, say, accepted and expected, for instance, the French culture among French people. And I think that what is interesting is to look at the intercultural aspect. That is to say what happens when, say, a written specialist on Thailand living in Denmark, and you meet a French Chinese lady who has lived in Norway speaking in a language that, is on my side, not my mother tongue.

00:03:15

Annelise Ly

So how do we interact? What challenges can we have, etc.? This is what I am interested in. Research wise, I've worked on several projects, it’s a bit eclectic, but the common denominator is that I work with business communication. I look at how employees make sense and deal with cultural differences in the workplace. I look at how people communicate when they do not share the same mother tongues. I have a project where I look at how organisations transfer their culture, cultural values, corporate values in international subsidiaries. I've also looked at leadership discourse. Crisis communication now lately have also looked at my own teaching practice. I was recently awarded the status of excellent teacher practitioner.

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00:04:01

Duncan McCargo

Yes, indeed. Congratulations. That's something I noticed. And that was one of the things that stimulated me to get back in touch and ask you to have a conversation with us about what you've been doing. So, you've mentioned this idea of intercultural communication in a business context, obviously, we're the Nordic Asia Podcast and we're particularly interested in how the Nordic and the Asian would intersect. So, if you're teaching, for example, Nordic students or business people and they're attempting to interact or work together, collaborate with people from East Asia, what kind of challenges tend to emerge in those communications or miscommunications between these two groups of people?

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00:04:40

Annelise Ly

I think if we think about Nordic and say East Asia, there are cultural differences that are important to know about how we relate to hierarchy, for instance, how I would say in East Asia it is accepted and expected while in the Nordic countries we have rather flat structures. I've worked mostly with China when I talk about East Asia. So, the concept of face is still very important in China is not that important in the Nordic. And it's very important to think about when interacting, when doing business with Chinese people, the importance of relationship and network is important in many Asian cultures. If I'm thinking about the Chinese culture, the concept of guanxi is very important.

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00:05:23

Duncan McCargo

Well, it's a network of personal connections.

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00:05:26

Annelise Ly

Yes. Well, in Nordic countries, each generation is independent from each other. Informality is also prevalent in Nordic countries, in business relationships, for instance, the way you address people in your position. And again, this is very different from what you would find in many Asian countries where formality is still the rule. So, these differences are important. And I would say that failure to understand these differences can harm a work relationship or destroy a negotiation. But again, those are tendencies. So, I think it's really important that Nordic students or businesspeople, Nordic businesspeople are aware of these differences when they interact with people from East Asia. On what I've said, you may meet someone who is not or a Nordic person. Nordic businessperson may meet someone who does not act as a say. Typical Asian looks Asian, come from East Asia, but has studied abroad and does not act as a typical Asian might. So, I think what is important is also to have the ability to recognize the fact and possibly adapt quickly to the situation.

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00:06:38

Duncan McCargo

Right. This is obviously a dilemma that I'm very familiar with as somebody who's been immersed in studying Southeast Asia and particularly Thailand, that all the foreigners who try too hard and their language is excessively polite to the point that the people that they're trying to talk to find it slightly comic because they're attempting to be this sort of caricature of the foreigner who bends over backwards to understand the people that they're encountering. So that's a bit of a challenge

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00:07:05

Annelise Ly

Exactly. Yes.

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00:07:06

Duncan McCargo

So, I'm obviously one of these Asia scholars who spent years and years training in an ongoing, what's really a lifelong, attempt to understand certain Southeast Asian societies, and particularly Thailand. And someone like me would say, well, if you want to understand Thailand first, you really need to go and spend a couple of years living in Thailand, learn the language fluently, ideally embed yourself in the local community and society in a very, very deep and profound way. And after that, let's talk about what you should actually do. Clearly, you can't do that in the kind of teaching that you're doing. So how would you offer people sort of shortcuts to understand other cultures that don't involve such elaborate processes as those of us who try to understand Asia professionally are able to engage in?

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00:07:53

Annelise Ly

Well, I think that it would be great if we could all spent extended period of time abroad. But as you say, clearly not doable. But I think that is another thing that we see more and more. And again, in the context of I teach, and I do research in the context of a business school. In the business world, people are more and more global work in global organisations, global teams where several cultures meet and people can be in the country of origin, say Norway, and have to collaborate or lead successfully. A team that is multicultural, say 10 nationalities. And so, I think that it's difficult to specialise in one culture. And understanding one culture doesn't mean that you will understand all the cultures. And sometimes actually it may be dangerous to think that. Okay, I understand the Norwegian culture, therefore I will understand the Danish one because they look so closely and actually, they're close but different. I'm also thinking in the business context that expatriates were sent abroad for work assignment, are being relocated after their four- or five-years assignment in a country. And when they're reassigned, they are not necessarily reassigned in the same part of the world. So, they will be, I don't know, spend three or four years in China, five years in Brazil, five in France. So, I think that in addition to knowledge specific to a country or to a part of the world, it's important to develop our students, business students or just students in general, cultural intelligence.

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00:09:19

Duncan McCargo

Right. And how do you inculcate cultural intelligence in a classroom in Bergen? How can you bring to life all the possibilities of things that people might encounter if they were to pursue these sorts of international careers or lives of the kind that more and more people are having these days?

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00:09:35

Annelise Ly

That's a challenging task. It's really to bring the complexity of the world to the classroom. Right. So I'll try to exemplify with the two courses that I teach in intercultural communication, I have a course on the East Asian culture and communication at the bachelor level, and I have another course on global leadership at the master's level, at different levels, different types of students, different knowledge base. So, it requires really different teaching approaches. And as you rightly pointed out, I cannot bring the students to East Asia, so I have to use different activities in the classroom. One of the activities that a use is case studies, so students examine an existing business problem and discuss possible solutions. And that's really good for students to develop their analytical skills. And it's also very good for them to understand that, say, cultural differences can actually is a relevant topic to study because it can create so many problems in the business world. So exposing students to case studies is one of the activity that I have. Another activity that I have is simulation exercises. So, for instance, I have a case study on a business meeting between a Chinese and a British delegation. And once we are done discussing the case, I divide the student groups into two groups. One will represent the Chinese delegation and the other one the British. And they have sent in their groups. They have to discuss the problem from the Chinese or from the British point of view. And doing so, the students really get to play this role and it helps students to see the other from the inside somehow and to learn to identify and see a situation from another perspective. And this is, I think, a crucial competence for third types of activity that I have that I like very much as experiential activities where students are effectively and cognitively engaged in a situation.

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00:11:32

Annelise Ly

Yes. So, for example, instead of lecturing about the challenges of working in a multicultural team, I put the students in a multicultural group, and they have to work together. The whole semester they stuck together. So, they need to find common ground to work effectively and deal with the misunderstandings of the frustrations that are associated with working with people who are different from you. And also, they have to deal with conflicts if they occur in that perspective. In one of the courses that I teach, students are requested to write weekly peer to peer student feedback. They write and then identify the feedback and then distribute it so that the students get can see how their contribution has been perceived by the members of the team and what improvement points have been detected in the last activity that I use is reflection, because I think that experience, emotions, frustrations, they have a limited value if they are not reflected upon right. If a misunderstanding occurs, for instance, it's really useful for students to write it down, to reflect on it, to come with a potential corrective action and then to test this new behaviour. And in these reflections, students get to work on their self-awareness on the cultural bias. And by doing so, I think that using all these activities together, they developed a form of, say, cultural agility, being exposed to different types of situations, learn how to tackle them and therefore develop their cultural intelligence.

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00:13:10

Duncan McCargo

Right. Is that a phrase then, cultural intelligence or is there some abbreviation like CQ or something like that that you said? What would be the most common terms?

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00:13:19

Annelise Ly

Well, cultural intelligence is very briefly defined the skill to relate and work effectively in culturally diverse situations, the ability to interpret cultural cues and act accordingly. Well, we get one what theories on cultural intelligence shortly you have three parts that important. You have the cognitive part, which is the knowledge that you have about other cultures. You have the metacognitive part, which is briefly, again, knowing yourself and your own culture. Right. You know, knowing someone else culture and then knowing your own

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00:13:52

Duncan McCargo

reflexivity?

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00:13:54

Annelise Ly

Exactly, reflexivity... And then the third part is the action part, the ability to actually adapt, or to translate this knowledge into actions, specifically.

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00:14:03

Duncan McCargo

Indeed, because some people can get all this in the abstract, but they're still blundering around very ineptly.

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00:14:08

Annelise Ly

Yes, exactly.

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00:14:10

Duncan McCargo

Interesting. Now, obviously, we've all been facing a lot of professional challenges over the past year and three months or so because we haven't been able to work in exactly the way we were doing before. I can imagine how nice it was when you were getting together, groups of students in these groups of culturally diverse people and giving them a chance to work together over the course of a semester. What happens when you go into a Covid-19-pandemic-induced lockdown and the students can't see each other face-to-face? Are you still able to replicate this kind of way of teaching?

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00:14:44

Annelise Ly

That was an interesting challenge, how to keep this interaction online, and particularly given the fact that the activities that I use in the classroom are very interactive. I had no previous experience of teaching online, so that was a lot to learn. But it was a really interesting process. I was actually inspired by the work of a professor at the Harvard Business School, who has researched digital change in different industries, and he has been in charge of implementing the Harvard Business School offer online. He wrote a really interesting book, by the way, called The Content Trap. His name is [Bharat] Anand, I can't remember his given name, but the main message is in the digital world, connection among users is more important than content. And if we think about it, if we get back to March 2020, we focused a lot on lockdown and teaching online. And the focus was very much on understanding the technology and how we could cover the content that we had online. And people stressed a lot about content, forgetting the end user to the students. And I got to know about Anand's work in 2019, doing a short stay at Harvard Business School. And it really helped me rethink how I wanted to teach when the country shut down in March. So, I had two questions or two aspects that were really important for me back then already was how could I keep my students engaged when the teaching was digital and how could I create a sense of community in my classroom when everything is taking place online? I actually thought about online teaching as a learning opportunity, and when you think about it, talked earlier about the positive way of thinking, take it as a learning or teaching ability. And I'm thinking about my course of global leadership. One of the topics that I discussed with the students is working in virtual teams with people with different cultural backgrounds, that they meet with different sets of priorities that need to collaborate and work effectively towards a common goal.

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00:16:52

Annelise Ly

And that became very salient in March, April 20 20, when my international students had to move back to their countries, had to deal with quarantine hotels, emotional stress, different understanding of technology, and still had to learn to deal with the situation and work towards a common goal, which was to deliver a final report. So, it was really in some ways, it was great to illustrate my virtual team topic.

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00:17:22

Duncan McCargo

So how do things actually work out in teaching in small groups once you move those groups online?

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00:17:28

Annelise Ly

It worked well. I would say I implemented a few measures that I think were successful in creating the sense of community that I talked about and interaction. So, a few measures that I've created. The first one is that I implemented digital lunches or coffee. The idea was for students to get to know each other and it easily done teaching online. And you just connect 15 minutes before your session, or you leave your session open 15 minutes after the class ends. And it's just a space for them, for the students to get to know each other and then also to get to know you and for me to get to know those students, which I think it's very important entering the past. You have a frequently had this feedback that these digital lunches are coffee, were highly appreciated by the students because it gave the students the possibility to connect and the feeling that they knew each other to they never met. Another thing that I've done online is that I have communicated a lot about what I do to the students mostly. So, I like different teaching methods and I experiment a lot. And at the beginning I thought that students would just understand intuitively understand why I did what I do. And I realised that while they didn't, that's what I do. Now I explain my teaching philosophy, I explain my teaching method. I explain what I expect from my students. And also, during the classes, I give a lot of meta communication. I use a lot better communication. I explain what I do when I do it, when I share my screen, when I cannot share my screen problems that I have with the different documents, etc. So, I talk a lot about what I do and at the end of each session I always wrap up what the learning objectives were, what I intended to do and how the activities that I implemented to reach these learning objectives.

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00:19:19

Annelise Ly

Another thing that I've done online is that I've used lots of group activities using breakout rooms. For instance, yes, this is to engage students and I think that I need to keep their attention so that they are not tempted to do other things during my classes. Indeed, such as, I don't know, watching Netflix or doing the dishes.

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00:19:39

Duncan McCargo

So, turning off the cameras is always a bad sign, isn't it?

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00:19:43

Annelise Ly

Yeah. And actually, talking about cameras, I actually have my camera on and asked the students to have their cameras on as well. And this in Norway. I don't know how it has been in Denmark, but in Norway it has created lots of heated discussions. Students didn't want to show their surroundings. Yes.

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00:20:00

Duncan McCargo

Yes. We've had a lot of resistance to some degree.

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00:20:03

Annelise Ly

What I've tried to do about the camera. Subject is a try to lead by example, showing that my background is not perfect, I had half a semester from my own bedroom with bad lighting and I had my kids in the background, right. There was always a mess around. And then I taught now for a whole year from my guest room again with a kid’s toys and drawings around, and I don't make a fuss about it. I think that this really helps students because they realise that, well, the situation is not perfect, so let's not pretend it is right. Let's just try to make the best we can do.

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00:20:38

Duncan McCargo

Right. That all makes total sense. And what about lecture format? I found it relatively easy. Once you break the students into these smaller groups to discuss things, it's very easy to make that interactive. But I can sit and listen to fairly boring lectures about very academic topics in a room for an hour without much problem. I'm socialised into that. But listening to people talk for a long time over a Zoom call is a very different matter. So how do you deal with the content delivery part of the sessions?

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00:21:07

Annelise Ly

Well, I don't lecture much.

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00:21:09

Duncan McCargo

Right, I suspected that.

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00:21:11

Annelise Ly

So, if students asked me on a specific point, then I may have a mini-lecture the next 10 minutes. But otherwise the content part is moved before class. Before class as students. So that's really the flipped classroom idea or method where students are asked to be prepared before coming to class. So, they watch videos so I can make videos, lecture videos shot once while I ask them to read papers or I ask them to gather information. And then class time is devoted to interaction.

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00:21:42

Duncan McCargo

That is very good and it reflects the kind of things we've also done in our online events at NIAS where most of the time I'm begging speakers not to talk too much and trying to turn those events into as much as possible conversations that may become podcasts like this one rather than people talking for 45 minutes or unmentionable episodes in the past where people have talked for an hour and 20 minutes more or less without pausing for breath, and felt that that was a perfectly reasonable kind of presentation, which it might have been in the past. But I think it's harder and harder to pull off these days.

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00:22:14

Annelise Ly

But I think that if you have a one hour, 20 minutes lecture, then you don't need to have students in front of you. So, you just record it, right? We can make three times forty minutes, or four times 30 minutes. Put that online. Ask the students to watch these videos, ask a few questions and then discuss the content in class. So again, every time you meet the students, then it's really about creating this sense of community, interacting, discussing problems. And I think I also think that students actually learn better when they discuss problems instead of being lectured about it.

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00:22:47

Duncan McCargo

So, it may be that before too long, most of us are getting vaccinated around this time we'll revert to something resembling normalcy, which might not be the old normal, but would be a new normal. How much of what you've learned during this pandemic period do you think you'll be able to make use of once we're able to have more in-person physical teaching again?

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00:23:12

Annelise Ly

There are a few things I'd like to keep from this special time. I think that showing vulnerability is something that I'd like to keep and sharing with students. This vulnerability I have, this continuous dialogue with my students has been very useful to improve my classes and to improve my mental health, really to create this safe learning environment where we can share how we are and how we feel there and then. But I think that from a pedagogical perspective, I think that it was really interesting to ask students to provide me with feedback on how things are online and how things can be improved. For example, students told me pretty early on that when we teach online, they need more breaks. OK, then I included more breaks. I also think that sharing among colleagues has increased much during this time and I hope that it will stay. Teaching online was new to most of us and it really created this culture for sharing among colleagues. I'm thinking about NHH For instance, we have teaching seminars and sometimes we have experts in the field, but now we also have colleagues at different departments, the colleague next door talking about having these informal seminars and talk about how they can best use class time or zoom or top of the tablet. So, it's really these kind of hands-nn tips, best practice sharing. I think that this has been very helpful, and I hope it continues. And I think the last thing that I'd really like to keep at develop further again, I try to see potential opportunities with situations. And what I've experienced is that we can actually ask experts to come to our courses before it was, you know, with the travelling. And I really do, don't misunderstand me. I really look forward to being able to travel again.

 

But in the meantime, I just find it great that we can have this discussion while I sit in my home office in Bergen and you're in Copenhagen, and a few weeks ago, I don't know, I was in France in Strasbourg online and then two hours later I was in Newcastle the same day. And then I went back and picked up my kids in Bergen. And I think that we could think about inviting our colleagues to our teaching that there's less possibilities to discuss a case. Do you have a short lecture then? You know, you have the expert on the field who comes right in the short lecture. So, they are actually these interventions hoping I find it is a great opportunity,

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00:25:36

Duncan McCargo

Absolutely! No, we're very interested in all these things that NIAS we now have virtual supra students coming to visit NIAS without setting foot in Copenhagen. And for the second time next week, we'll be organising a virtual PhD workshop with 11 PhD students from all over the place, having their papers commented on by academics who are currently in various locations around the world. And these are all things that it would have been difficult for us to imagine beforehand.

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00:26:01

Annelise Ly

And that's a great opportunity for the students to get to know scholars in the Nordics.

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00:26:06

Duncan McCargo

Exactly. So, thanks Annelise. It's been great talking with you.

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00:26:11

Annelise Ly

Thank you for inviting me.

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00:26:13

Duncan McCargo

I'm Duncan McCargo. I'm the director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. And I've been talking to Annelise Li of NHH in Bergen about the challenges of cross-cultural communication and teaching in pandemic times. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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00:26:33

Duncan McCargo

You have been listening to the Nordic Asia podcast