This study investigates Polish expatriates’ stories of encounters with local personnel in a Chinese subsidiary of a Western multinational company. A narrative analysis of the stories produced important insights into Polish-Chinese communication in an intra-subsidiary context. Low proficiency in the host language was a serious obstacle to expatriate socialization and a source of expatriates’ exclusion and social isolation in the workplace, which often led to stress, frustration, and negative attitudes toward collaboration with local personnel. Language-related issues prevented the expatriates from acquiring information from Chinese superiors, learning about problems within a team, and participating in decision-making. The findings of this case study relate to communication challenges in the Chinese subsidiary, expatriates’ accounts of how they overcame communication difficulties, and their reflections on what fostered and hampered intercultural communication.
Contemporary research on mindreading or theory of mind has resulted in three major findings: (1) There is a difference in the age of passing of the elicited-response false belief task and its spontaneous-response version; 15-month-olds pass the latter while the former is passed only by 4-year-olds (in the West). (2) Linguistic and social factors influence the development of the ability to mindread in many ways. (3) There are cultures with folk psychologies significantly different from the Western one, and children from such cultures tend to show different timetables of mindreading development. The traditional accounts of the data are nativism, rational constructivism, and two-systems theory. In this paper, we offer criticism of these traditional cognitivist accounts and explore an alternative, action-based framework. We argue that even though they all seem to explain the above empirical data, there are other, theoretical reasons why their explanations are untenable. Specifically, we discuss the problem of foundationalism and the related problem of innateness. Finally, we explore an alternative, action-based framework that avoids these theoretical limitations and offer an interpretation of the empirical data from that perspective.
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Linking children’s pretense with creativity has a long tradition. Most authors claim that pretending children exercise divergent thinking, so they can generate many diverse ideas. We show that focusing on divergent thinking when describing the creative features of pretense is not enough. Both pretending and creating are not only about thinking ideas, but also about acting, exploring the surroundings, and adjusting oneself to other people and to the ongoing happenings. Furthermore, both pretending and creating do not entirely rely on generating many and various ideas or actions, as they also include exploration and evaluation of the outcomes. Consequently, we propose to link creativity and pretense by focusing on children’s exploratory and evaluative actions. In our view, pretend play is a creative activity resulting in outcomes that are both novel and valuable.
We agree with Held’s (2020) arguments for establishing a research practice that prevents numerous forms of othering in mainstream psychological research, which is essentially derived from omitting concepts embedded in the lived experience of the other. However, we believe those arguments are not yet sufficient for fulfilling the true potential of such research practice. In this discussion, we focus on accessing a lived experience of the other as a means of preventing epistemic violence that contributes to the oppression of othered people. We suggest that researchers broaden their psychological perspective that detaches concepts and theories from personal experience. To truly meet the other, the narrative approach offers promising potential, as it captures an individual’s lived experience and subjective perspective. Finally, we stress the pivotal role of social interaction in concept and folk theory formation, which is necessary to implement Held’s postulations for Indigenous psychology.
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