Corporate Communication Seminar: Is ‘culture’ a dirty word?
02.05.2013
Our annual Corporate Communication Seminar on 25 April ,”Multilingual and intercultural issues in Corporate Communication” got an effective start, when Professor Ulla Connor claimed that ‘culture’ has become a dirty word that people dare not use any more. Her talk presented the approach of intercultural rhetoric to intercultural communication, and she challenged the audience to question the top-down view of culture - but to keep the concept , and look at it from bottom up: “how people do things” makes culture. In other words, culture as a static concept (Finnish culture, Japanese culture) could be rejected, but in all interaction dynamic, (multi)cultural elements are present.
Professor Connor, IUPUI University, and Director of the Center for Intercultural Communication, Indianapolis, visited Aalto University School of Business this week.
Her presentation was followed by a communications practitioner perspective offered by Pia Friberg, Senior Manager, Wärtsilä Corporation, Communications & Branding. Pia Friberg is a communications graduate from AaltoBIZ (Helsinki School of Economics). She vividly described her daily multilingual and intercultural life among 114 nationalities and dozens of languages, giving interesting examples of ‘bottom up’ cultural situations.
As in the earlier Seminars in 2008-2012, the academic and practitioner perspectives converged , complementing each other. At the end, we concluded that culture is not a dirty word, but an important concept that we had been discussing as “culture”?! – with all the punctuation marks of our own Aalto identity giving meaning to the word.
More information: Leena Louhiala-Salminen, leena.louhiala-salminen(at)aalto.fi
From the left: Pia Friberg, Senior Manager, Wärtsilä Corporation, Prof. Leena Louhiala-Salminen, Aalto BIZ, and Prof. Ulla Connor, IUPUI University.
Attentive audience focusing on ”Multilingual and intercultural issues in Corporate Communication”.