Learning and Acquisition people in different
cultures learn to learn differently and go about the
process of acquiring culture in their own way.
Learning to learn differently is something that has to
be faced by multicultural stakeholders who have
stake in the same project. It seems inconceivable to
the average person brought up in one culture that
something as basic as this could be done differently
from the way they themselves were taught. The fact
is, however, once people have learned to learn in a
given way, it is extremely hard for them to learn in
any other way. This is because the process of
learning they have acquired a long set of tacit
conditions and assumptions in which learning is
imbedded. The rest of culture reflects the way one
learns, since culture is “learned and shared
behaviour”. Learning, then, is one of the basic
activities of life (Hall, 1959,1981). However, these
differences represent one of the barriers that have to
be overcome each time two people raised in
different cultures interact over any but the shortest
period of time, i.e. education, training, rearing, what
gets taught or learned (Stamper, 1988).
Play people laugh and tell jokes, knowing
the humour of people from different cultures, will
give you a wealth of information about that specific
culture. Many people around the world have what
are known as” joking relationships”, also in some
cultures, there is a category of relationship known as
the “play mate” (Hall, 1959,1981), i.e. recreation,
fun, games, art, sport, what is amusing (Stamper,
1988).
Defence (Protection) Human beings use
defensive techniques in many matters in their lives
such as warfare, territory, religion, medicine (against
diseases), and law enforcement (against criminals).
They feel they must cope within destructive forces
within their own persons. The main point which
should be kept in mind is about the way different
cultures tend to treat religion. In the Middle East,
Islam plays a more pervasive role than Christianity
does today in Europe. People in the western world
have difficulty grasping the extent to which religion
pass through all aspects of life in the Arab world.
The content of religion, its organisation, and the
manner in which it is integrated with the rest of life
varies greatly from culture to culture (Hall,
1959,1981), i.e. protection against elements, other
groups, disease and the supernatural (Stamper,
1988).
Exploitation human beings developed
extensions of practically everything we used to do
with our bodies. All manmade material things can be
treated as extensions of what was once done with the
body or same specialised part of the body
(McLauhan, et al., 2001;Hall, 1959,1981). A
transportation vehicle for example is an extension of
what we use to do with our feet, i.e. tools,
technology, systems, materials and their uses, skills
(Stamper, 1988).
2.2 Valuation Framing
Valuation framing is a method proposed by
MEASUR (methods for eliciting, analysing, and
specifying user requirements) (Stamper, 1988).
These techniques deals with matching the system
design effort to the social and economic
infrastructure, matching the communications
subsystems to the informal exchange of information,
and matching the control subsystem to the prevailing
ethical practices.
Valuation framing takes Hall’s ten categories of
cultural norms, slightly modifies them and applies
them quite differently to gauging the impact of an
innovation by treating the general culture and the
subcultures of the stakeholders as though they were
musical instruments made of resonant networks of
strings that the innovation strikes to produce the
reverberations of the stakeholders’ reactions that the
IS designer must listen to. That’s a no trivial, quite
novel and a useful extension of Hall’s work
(Stamper, 1988).
After identifying all the involved stakeholders
(stakeholders identification is another method from
MEASUR) the valuation will be applied taken into
account the interest of all stakeholders (Alexander,
et al., 2004;Kolkman, 1993;Liu, 2000;Tan, 2006).
The total system will be the object of valuation. The
stakeholder will be accustomed to having, in his
familiar cultural setting, a range of available
behaviour patterns. These cultural patterns are
divided into the ten areas discussed above and
subsequently the analyst asks, hypothesizes or
predicts how the proposed innovation will affect the
stakeholders that were identified.
There will be impacts on how people
communicate, how they associate, their subsistence
or economic position, differential effects for the two
sexes, their use of time(temporality) and
space(territoriality), how they learn to use the new
system, how it affects their creative or recreational
behaviour, their vulnerability of power (protection),
and their tools and skills (Kolkman, 1993;Tan,
2006).The technique of valuation framing assesses
the cultural impact of technological innovation on all
the stakeholders. Hall’s ten criteria are the criteria
for a full assessment of gains and losses of each
stakeholder in relation to the innovation or change in
the social system (Tan, 2006).
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