Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Navigation And Immersion Of The American Identity In A Foreign Culture To Emergence As A Culturally Relative Ambassador, Lee H. Rosen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Globalization is forcing many American college students to re-evaluate their perspective on foreign travel. If they are offered an opportunity to improve their cultural relativity skill set by immersing themselves into a new culture, the more astute students might choose to embark on that journey especially if it would result in resume enhancement. This paper focuses upon a group of twelve community college students' cross-cultural experiences, navigation techniques, and adaptation methods as student interns teaching conversational English in Changchun, China for a period of nine to thirteen weeks in spring 2011. Several areas of interest emerged from their experiences …

Guanxi, Networks And Economic Development: The Impact Of Cultural Connections, Patricia Anne Weeks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore the mechanics of guanxi in an organizational setting, focusing on the use of interpersonal relationships within Chinese firms to discover how firms initiate, build and use guanxi networks. Two richly detailed case studies document changes that take place over time in two distinct networks with respect to key actors and their contacts. This research also investigates patterns of social structure that emerge over time in these two distinct cases looking at brokerage relationships, network density, and dyadic redundancy in three waves at six month intervals. The cases are dissimilar in all aspects …