Search

Despite decades of policy interventions and awareness raising programmes, migration and mobility continue to give rise to tensions and questions of how to live together in a culturally diverse world. Managing Cultural Change takes a new approach to these challenges, re-examining responses to migration and mobility as part of a process of managing wider cultural change. Presenting research from a range of settings, from liberalising India, global workplaces in Asia, and migrant youth culture in Sydney, this book explores the manner in which cultural change disturbs established frames of reference. In considering affective responses to these liminal moments of disruption, it argues that adaptive strategies such as'demarcating difference'and're-placing home', that is, reasserting belonging, are deployed in order to reclaim a sense of synchronicity within the self and with a transforming external environment. With attention to the prevalence and durability of the processes and tensions inherent in cultural change, the author also examines the intercultural, or cosmopolitan, competencies developed in interaction with difference, and whether it is possible to'teach'people these skills in order to re-find'cultural fit'and manage change in a constantly shifting world. Contributing to research on transnational migration and mobility studies, while developing the use of conceptual tools such as'cultural fit'and'liminality', Managing Cultural Change will be of interest to sociologists, geographers and anthropologists working in the fields of globalisation, migration and transnational communities, ethnicity and identity, belonging and cosmopolitanism.

This bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities advocates the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical methodology attentive to the legacies of colonialism.

Under the simultaneous influences of globalization and localization, there has emerged a prevalent social formation based on a hybridized culture in which the cultural norms are many and various: boundary transcendence, alternative cultures, cultural hybridity, cultural creativity, connectivity, tolerance, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism. While the economic forces shaping globalization are powerful and seemingly getting stronger, they are not immutable, nor are their effects predictable or necessarily overwhelming. Contributors to this book are optimistic that the socio-cultural formations of the future, such as cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism, will be a viable option for constructing new or renewed global communities of migrants around the world. It is on these diasporic communities that the self-definition (the self-identity) and cultural expansion of all migrants depend, and it is with these tools that migrants are best equipped to navigate the raging torrents of globalization in the new millennium of a post-postmodern era. Globalization brings with it a fear, a sense of loss and demise. It also brings with it a new sense of opportunity and hope. It is in this spirit that this book should be read. Contributors: Chan Kwok-bun, Jan W. Walls, David Hayward, Michael E. DeGolyer, Lam Wai-man, Georgette Wang, Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu, Lu Fang, Nan M. Sussman, Rie Ito, Oscar Bulaong Jr., Brian Chan Hok-shing, Millie Creighton, Anthony Y.H. Fung, Ho Wai-chung, Chiou Syuan-Yuan, Chris Wood, Chung Ling, Steve Fore, Todd Joseph Miles Holden, Ashley Tellis, Jeffrey S. Wilkinson, Steven McClung