Culture and conflict in urban Tanzania: Professionals’ voices in educational organisations

Abstract

This article is interlinked with an article that has previously been published in this Journal (Mayer, Boness and Louw 2008). Since the previous article focused on value-orientations in cross-cultural encounters and mediation in the Tanzanian educational system, this follow-up article provides an overview of cross-cultural conflicts and their professional management in educational organisations in Tanzania. It firstly gives an insight into current theoretical discourses and will, secondly, present selected empirical data and findings from an ethnographic, qualitative study that has been conducted in selected urban areas in Tanzania. Claude-HélèneMayerandChristianMartinBonessBy presenting qualitative findings, this follow-up study provides further insights into the context-specific professionals' views on conflict and its management in urban educational contexts, and thereby deepens our understanding of the quantitative findings on values and mediation gained and presented in the previous study. The conclusions drawn from the presented findings lead to recommendations for scientists conducting research on the above-mentioned topics and for practitioners working in educational, cross-cultural contexts in Tanzania.

Perceptions of Chinese and Tanzanian employees regarding intercultural collaboration

“…As a result of globalisation, intercultural collaboration has become extremely prevalent during the past decades and research has emphasised that employees in intercultural work situations are often challenged by intercultural collaboration (Hinds, Liu & Lyon, 2011). It has been highlighted that the potential for conflict increases in intercultural work situations (Mayer & Boness, 2011;Mayer & Louw, 2012) and that having a dynamic and contextualised view of culture can support an improved understanding of the perceptions in intercultural collaboration (Hinds et al, 2011). Culture, in this case, is viewed as a group phenomenon which is defined primarily by values, norms and basic assumptions (Rosinski, 2011) and which impacts strongly on the collaboration between members of different cultural groups (Mayer, 2011).…”