Blog post 4: Evaluating Intercultural Behaviour

It was 9.40am at Engineering Block 4, as usual I was waiting for Bus C that heads toward science for my 10am class. The wait as usual was long and I took a sit at the bench, listening to songs on my MP3 player. A conversation between a Chinese male in his 40s and Malay male in his 60s broke out. Being the “kay po” “inquisitive” me, i quickly paused my music to spy on their conversation.

*digression* After taking up Bahasa Indo in NUS, i started to cultivate this habit of “actively” listening in on conversations in Malay or Bahasa Indo. My girlfriend says this habit of mine has become an obsession cause I rarely listen to her when Malays or Indonesians are talking.

So the conversation sort of proceeds like this in my weak translation.

Malay Male, in his 60s (MM), in no way am I referring to the great Minister Mentor.
Chinese Male, in his 40s (CM)

CM: In a rather commanding tone, shoulders pulled back and a posture that i feel is abit too straight. His position is too far from MM such that he had to raise his voice a little.

“Sesudah kerja anda selesai di sini, cuci toilet di lantai dua ar” - “After you finish your work here, clean the toilet at level 2”

MM: Head and body turning away from the CM, eyes closed and hands raised up making a sweeping movement.

“ Tak tahu, Tak tahu la” - “Don’t know, don’t know la”

The conversation ended with the MM walking away from the CM towards his store room. The CM walked away without much expression.

This incident shows quite a bit of tension between the both of them and the frustration of the CM not being able to do anything much about this incident is evident. To me, this incident can be dissected into 3 levels though not all are related to intercultural communication. First, a relationship between a supervisor and the worker. Second, is the issue of intercultural tension. Lastly, the issue of age difference.

First, looking at a supervisor and worker level, a worker must follow the instructions of his supervisor so that things can be done. By turning his back on him and making a sweeping movement with his hands shows a strong non-verbal reply to the supervisor. To me, the combination of his non-verbal gestures mean that he does not like the supervisor allocating such tasks to him. Also, the commanding tone, his posture and his distance away from the worker of the supervisor does not help at all.

Next, on the issue of intercultural relationship. From what I have gathered from talking to my Malay friends and Malay taxi drivers, they feel discriminated against by the Chinese. The general consensus is that they feel the average Chinese in Singapore, being more educated and rich, tend to look down on them. With regards to our conflict, I feel that the above statement is sort of a reflection of my previous statement. However, I cannot be sure of this since I am not involved neither do I know the personally. The CM with his condescending way of asking the MM to perform tasks represents a serous issue that has to be solved. This behavior of the Chinese population in Singapore I feel is not adequately addressed by government agencies. I am not implying that the campaigns to promote racial harmony in Singapore is not effective. Giving credits to our government, these campaigns are effective in that it has reduced racial conflicts to a bare minimum but the attitude that I have discussed is not targeted. Actually, through another module “Introduction to Japanese Studies”, I realised that this kind of less violent and more subtle form of racism is also present in Japan. Perhaps this is a recurring problem in Asia which has links to our culture and way of dealing with matters.

Lastly, less evident would be the tension of an elderly being ordered around by a younger person. In Asia or at least the Malay culture, an elderly person should be treated with respect. The younger CM, according to me, did not show much respect for the Malay elder. In my opinion, if the younger male were to get the elder male to do things, he should be more polite and use more courteous words like “please” or “thank you”.

I did not have the chance to talk to both parties and I suppose they would not want to talk about it. Also, I do not feel comfortable giving comments on this event as I do not know the full situation. I just feel that intercultural relationship rank tops on the sensitivity scale. To be able to treat such relationship properly, the least anyone can do is just be courteous even though you might not feel like it. Just be like our Courtesy Lion, always put on a smile!

Sarah Palin, The Large Hadron Collider and The Hackers

The Large Hadron Collider
Sarah Palin
David Kernell, the hacker

Sometimes its difficult to understand a person's non-verbal actions. In our course, we learn methods to decrypt the actions of others based on orthodox reasoning. However there are certain groups of people that do not operate in our sphere of social mechanism. The group that I will be focusing on will be the hackers. Most of the time they hack into high profile systems to gain reputation or mostly just out of fun. It is also not shocking to know that some do it for the monetary gains by selling the hacked information.

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, sends out sensitive information via email to other government agencies on a daily basis. Instead of using the secure government server, she used a web-based Yahoo! email client to send confidential emails. If she had understood the general characteristics of hackers, she would have known she's a sitting duck waiting to be shot. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), capable of exciting a single proton to such a speed that some say a dark hole could be formed when 2 of them struck together, was also hacked by a group of hackers from Greek. According to reports, they were only a hairline away from gaining control of the whole system. The result would be catastrophic according to the engineers from LHC. Similarly, had they thought about what might hackers do to their $8 billion machine, they would have taken precautionary measures to be well protected.

We learn alot on how to present ourselves to others but equally important is how we should receive others. This may make me sound overly paranoid but we should equip ourselves with skills to understand these groups of people as well. Such skills are more of a preempt reaction that provides us with a shield that protects against these people.

*Note: With the incident of Sarah Palin in mind, getting a good password for your senstive accounts is extremely important. Bytes Interactive is a website I chanced upon that provides suggestions for good passwords.

Survey survey survey

Hey peeps!

Our group has done our survey! Please head on to our survey and give us a hand!

Environmentally Sustainable Business Practices

Sustainability: Business context

Background

In America, the U.S. Green Building Council has launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating program. This rating program encourages big companies to build their offices such that it can cut down energy usage. Genzyme Corporation’s 12-story headquarters in Massachusetts used 42% less energy and 34% less water than standard buildings of comparable size.

Also, Apple has refined their product design and manufacturing process to produce products that are more energy efficient thereby saving energy as you use the product.

Business Sustainability

From Green Earth campaigns to the recent 10% Energy Challenge to reduce household electricity usage, Singapore has done quite an impressive job in educating the population. However, I feel that such activities focus a lot inculcating individual responsibility of being environmentally healthy. There has not much emphasis on how to apply such habits on a business level. Looking at factories in Beijing, the China government had to halt many smoke bellowing factories from operation just to clear up the air for the Beijing Olympics. If the designers of their factories were more green savvy, this incident would not be necessary. In Singapore’s context, we have regulations in place for companies to be more environmental friendly, however I feel is not known wide enough among the NUS population.

According to the NUS Graduate Employment report 2001, almost 95% of NUS students go on to take up high paying jobs ($30 000 to $40 000 annual income). Their positions can exert certain kind executive influence over their departments (more research and data has to be acquired for this statement to be substantiated). The point is that, if the graduates have sufficient knowledge on this area, they can implement ideas or techniques on sustainability onto processes in the company. Hence, to start educating the undergraduates before they graduate would be a good time frame for them to understand this role.

This leads me to my research topic,

"Do NUS students have adequate knowledge about environmentally techniques for sustaining business."

My objective of the survey is to determine how much of the population in NUS knows about environmentally friendly ideas and techniques for sustaining business. Following which, it is crucial in determining the attitude of students towards this issue. Determining how concerned they are about sustainability in business would allow the relevant bodies to design tailored campaign. The 150-200participants would be undergraduates from any of the 4 major universities in Singapore namely NUS, NTU, SMU and SIM.

This report is targeted at the NUSSU Students Against Violation of the Earth (SAVE) and the Campus Sustainability Committee. (CSC) Hopefully through this report, they will bring in focus the idea of educating NUS students about business sustainability.