“How to run a meeting of people from different cultures” - Rebecca Knight

. Who are the authors of the text? What are they specialists of?

Rebecca Knight is a journalist, and a lecturer in journalism. Her work focuses on workplace issues, management, and leadership and she has been published in several high-profile newspapers.

What is the source of the text? Briefly describe its characteristics (type of publication, how often is it published, subjects, etc.).

This article was published in the Harvard Business Review, which is not a scholarly journal, even though it is owned by a subsidiary of Harvard University. It is a magazine coming out every two months, specialised on management and publishing opinion pieces from a wide range of experts.

. What is the date of publication? What are the relevant elements that can be found in the text about the context?

This issue was published on 4 December 2015. Globalisation had been gathering momentum with the widespread use of new technology, pushing companies to adapt their managerial techniques. One of the challenges facing global managers was to manage cross-cultural meetings, that is to say meetings involving individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

. What is the title of the text? What can you guess from it about the authors’ thesis?

The article is entitled “How to Run a Meeting of People from Different Cultures”. The use of “How to” suggests that a method is going to be explained, so the article aims at giving advice to professionals on how to tackle cultural diversity in their business meetings.

What is the author’s point of view? Do they seem to be in agreement with other specialists?

Rebecca Knight is first and foremost a journalist. In this article, she relies on the knowledge and expertise of three scholars specialised in cross-cultural management : Jeanne M. Brett, whose work deals mainly with conflict resolution, Erin Meyer, whose research focuses on how local cultural contexts can affect global business, and Andy Molinsky who is also an expert in behavioural sciences and psychology.

Rebecca Knight does not put forward her own point of view explicitly, she summarises the insights and findings of the three scholars (we can suppose she agrees with them)

What type of methodology is used in the article?

Rebecca Knight has selected three experts in cross-cultural management with different areas of expertise complementing one another. She has presumably interviewed them on how to run cross-cultural business meetings and condenses their opinions into a set of guidelines.

The three experts generally concur and only suggest different leads. At the end of the article, two case studies give an account of the experience of two professionals confronted to cross-cultural management problems in order to bring a more practical perspective to the article.

The methodology is qualitative since it is based on interviews with experts and professionals

What is the goal of the article? What is the author trying to achieve?

The goal of the article is clearly prescriptive. The author seeks to offer global managers a series of concrete guidelines to help professionals improve their practices when it comes to dealing with cultural diversity.