Business and Culture

Description

This course is about business and cultures. Culture can be seen as the assumptions and assessments we humans make about the world and the values and beliefs that guide or underpin them as we seek to create and maintain connections between people and with places. We think, write, talk and discuss culture in many different ways. For instance, occupational cultures help us make sense of the expectations people have of us in our roles as workers, organisational and business cultures are specific to particular entities, ethnic cultures can refer to groups of people who have common ancestry and history, and digital cultures create virtual meeting places for engagement. We can also envisage faith-based cultures, community cultures, national cultures and so on.  Of course, cultures can also change as people respond to, and proactively engage in, different ways of doing things.

In this course, students will reflect on their own participation in multiple cultural forms: ethnic, occupational, gendered, national, digital, global, temporal etc. They will hear from academics and practitioners about their experiences of culture and their advice on how to engage with cultures. A practical question that will help orient the course is, how can students build connections with people in ways which respect cultural traditions and allow for reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationships to develop in their future occupations and workplaces? The course is underpinned by all aspects of culture (such as those discussed above), but the course content is mostly structured around how students can engage with local, national and international cultures as well as reflect on their own cultures. As such, the course asks students to consider how their multiple, varied and perhaps conflicting cultural perspectives are part of, similar to, and different from, those of mana whenua, Māori, tangata whenua, Aotearoa New Zealand, and international cultures. It looks at the role Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi has in contemporary workplaces and the relevance of that role for the students’ subject majors, as well as the political and regulatory influences on business and the economy.