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New Course Combines Classroom Preparation with Study Tour
The class visits the Beijing National Stadium construction site. The structure, known as the “Bird Nest,” will be the centerpiece of the Beijing 2008 summer Olympics.
A new class offered during the Spring 2007 semester gave 22 UW-Madison undergraduates the opportunity to combine a tour of China with 10 weeks of classroom study of that country’s culture, history, language, and business management practices. Taught by Associate Professor Alex Stajkovic of the Management and Human Resources Department, Managing Across Cultures was designed primarily for management students but drew students from marketing, international studies, and economics as well. The students read and discussed books and heard guest lectures about China’s history, culture and business; learned the basics of the Mandarin language; kept a semester-long diary to track their changing perceptions; and researched the companies they would visit during their tour.
“You can’t really understand management without understanding the history and culture” of the country involved, said Stajkovic. “History and culture frames the perceptions of the Chinese.” Jessica Greenwald, the teaching assistant for the course, found the students to be surprised by the history of China and by how business is practiced there today. The pre-tour preparation helped the class “actually understand the history and why Chinese behave the way they do” in business situations, she said.
Stajkovic began planning the course two years ago in consultation with Greenwald and MHR Chair and Professor Randy Dunham. They chose to focus on China because of its “major significance to the world economy today,” said Stajkovic, but worked to develop a model for learning to manage across cultures that could be applied to another country such as India.
After eight weeks of on-campus work, the class traveled to Beijing and Shanghai for 11 days over spring break with assistance from the UW-Madison CIBER. Stajkovic designed the tour to introduce students to a variety of aspects of the Chinese society and economy. They visited affluent tourist areas but also saw people living and working in poor sections of the city. They visited state-owned enterprises such as a traditional Chinese jingtailan (cloisonné) craftsmanship factory and the Olympic village being built for the 2008 games, a private vocational school offering free education to children of migrant workers, and private-public ventures such as the Yangshan Deep Sea Port and Beijing’s Pearl Market. Tours of cultural sites such as the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Tian An Men Square allowed students not only to see well-known places, but to learn “what they mean and how that contributes to the mindset of society,” said Stajkovic. Student Shannon Johnson said “the trip made everything we learned in class come alive.”
As a final project, class members prepared reference manuals designed for use by management executives working in China. They also identified key principles of cross-cultural management learned throughout the semester. These principles each related to being cognizant of cultural differences and of reserving judgment and thus could be applied generally to doing business in other countries, Stajkovic said.
Johnson believes the semester-long experience will give her an advantage over her peers and future colleagues. “It was a great introduction to the culture,” she said. While she does not consider herself an expert on China, she did come away with an appreciation for what she sees as key to doing business in that country. “The Chinese value relationships and building partnerships and you have to take the initiative to get to know them,” she said.