UNDERSTANDING CULTURE IN INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION XIAOZHENG ZHANG
Following the trend of internationalisation in higher education, there are an increasing number of European universities setting up international business schools in China. CBBS (Chinese-Based Business School) was co-founded by one British and one Chinese university, in 2010. The management of the school was divided between the two partner universities along administrative and academic lines. The Chinese university looks after the administration, dealing with issues such as student recruitment and registration; employing the administrative staff; providing support such as logistics and supply of equipment and facilities. The academic work is taken care of by the British university, with responsibility for matters of learning and teaching, academic staff recruitment, evaluation of student academic performance, etc.
The administration is made up of native Chinese employees, who are required to be able to speak fluent English in order to communicate with the academic staff. In order to introduce British higher education standards into China, CBBS recruited all academic staff from the UK. These included both Chinese and British academics, who obtained their higher education degrees from a British university, and who had at least five years’ work experience in the British higher education sector. Working as expatriates in Shanghai, the academic employees were provided with accommodation and other assistance in settling in China. As part of their induction to the job, academic expatriates were briefed about the structure of CBBS in China, the student entrance level and some basic Chinese cultural background knowledge. The key concepts of Confucianism were introduced, including harmony, face-saving, respect for age and hierarchy (Flynn et al., 2007). Face-saving means to maintain an individual’s positive self-image in front of others as much as possible (Merkin, 2006).
Moreover, within the Chinese context, an individual is not only required to protect their own ‘face’ in society, but also to pay great attention to caring for others’ ‘face’ (Zhang, 2012). By doing this, people maintain harmonious relationships and avoid conflict with others. After running for a year, the CBBS management identified some communication issues between the administrative and academic teams. The CBBS management requested the human resource department to evaluate the current situation and propose some practical plans to improve it.
Questions
1 Considering the potential influence of national culture, try to identify the main problems in communication between the administrative and academic teams.
2 What should be included as key themes in cultural training programmes for the academic expatriates?
3 In terms of recruitment and selection of academic staff, what are the important criteria that need to be considered?
