Human Resource Development and the Emerging Needs of the World

This is the last paper from ICBME conference and some key points that I learnt from this presentation include:

1)The scope of HRD: from 72-95 there is no agreement of the definition of HRD. Scope is limited to organisational context, not the HRD in the societal context. HRD challenges include national environment, organisational factors, professional environment (i.e. emphasis on stakeholders, emphasis on strategic planning), global environment (leadership, technological change).

2) Comparison of traditional and modern HRD: limited to organisation VS. extension beyond that boundaries. Modent HRD is flexible to encompass multiple theories from multi-disciplines. Modern views are more into the critical perspectives of HRD (pragmatism).

3) HRD and its link to knowledge, skills and capabilities of individuals should be emphasised in the modern world.

Live from the ICBME Conference

I am attending an International conference on Business and Management Education in Bangkok. The paper that I am listening to (while I'm writing thins blog) is culture and leadership. The presenter identifies Long-Term Orientation (LTO) and tried to identify the concept of perseverance as a consistent effort to achieve goal and business culture in East Asia. He said that Chinese business look at long-term prospect of business and it plays an important role in goal-setting in the Chinese business context. Connection in the sense of relationship and thrift were compared in this paper. Very interesting to listen to the dimensions of LTO (thrift, connection and perseverance).

In terms of power structure, he discussed power asymmetry or the interdependency among business partners (i.e. suppliers and manufacturer). His pointed is in global business, big manufacturers such as P&G and WALMART seem to hold power over their suppliers and influence the pattern of global business and consumption.

New way to think 'Curriculum' in business education

Existing curricula and accompanying forms of pedagogy and assessment based on rigid borders and hierarchies between forms of knowledge, formal and informal learning spaces, individual and group identities, ages and stages of learning and between educators and learners seem increasingly outmoded in the global era. At the same time new spaces and possibilities have emerged for a creative re-imagining of what counts as relevant knowledge and of teaching and learning. Curricula must enable learners to participate in an increasingly and irreversibly global economy where new technologies have transformed the nature, speed and scale of production and exchange. They must also produce the capabilities to support sustainable livelihoods in a context where economic crisis has precipitated the production and reproduction of inequality along the lines of race, ethnicity, class and gender. At a political level the development of global and regional blocs and changes in the role of the nation state and of decentralization and localization have implications for how citizenship is defined and taught and for the politics and processes of curriculum reform.

Cultural globalization has also involved contradictory processes. On the one hand Western forms of culture and knowledge have assumed hegemonic status whilst on the other non-western, including indigenous and fundamental religious identities, have re-asserted themselves. Mass migrations have broken old associations between place and identity and created new, hybridized ethnicities and forms of difference. Curricula must empower learners to assess the relevance of different forms of knowledge, to negotiate new borders of group and individual identity and to understand and engage with diversity

International Business Conference

I am off to attend an International Business Education conference in Bangkok next week. In fact, the conference looks like an integration of business management and business education conference. What I expect most from this conference is to listen to the keynote speaker, Dr. Evangelos Afendras from AIT, who will deliver a speech on Phronesis and the redesign of MBAs. The conference will be held at Asian Institute of Technology and the paper that I will present is from my previous project. This is the link to my paper.

When I come back from Thailand, I will share with you the conference stories as usual.

Border

Impressive strands of research have convincingly shown, over the last decades, the emergent reality of increasing world-level interconnection in almost every field of social action. Corresponding theories, models and research designs, however, while conceptualizing this new reality in terms of incessant processes of the diffusion of specifically “modern” (i.e. mainly “Western”) models, policies and organizational patterns, and of the growing harmonization and standardization of fields of social action along “world-cultural” lines, have not gone unchallenged. Rather, cross-cultural studies and alternative social theorizing have pointed to much more complex developments of regional fragmentation, regionalization, and (re-) diversification; of multiple forms of adoption, transformation and hybridization of world-level models and ideas; and of the impact of specifically cultural – i.e. mental, semantic, religious etc. – cleavage or “border” lines. Thus, “multiple modernities”, “entangled histories”, social-cultural hybridization, and “culture-specific world of meaning” repeatedly raise the issue of identifying theories that allow one to systematically analyze, and explain, the intricate interaction of global processes with local agency, or of world-level forces with the self-evolutionary patterns of culture-specific meaning.

Border and Space in Education (the Theme for 2010 World Congress Comparative Education Conference)

‘Border’ is a key concept for analyzing the relationship between education and society at all levels. Borders can be national, regional, social or psychic; they can be fixed or shifting. Borders and ‘lines’ can be material (walls), psychological (in peoples’ minds) or metaphorical (the ‘glass ceiling’ for women’s careers). Discussions of borders are part of discussions of space, and of space-time.

‘Space’ can be absolute/concrete/fixed/measurable (rooms, properties, cities, territories) but also relative (flows and exchanges of energy, peoples, money and information in space and time); and relational (linked to how people operate together in or across these spaces). Space is something produced by human activity and in turn conditions it.

Educational space is where ‘difference’ is conceived, reproduced or contested. Our interests would be the linkages between material space (institutional buildings, camps), representations of space (maps and organizational charts as well as metaphors) and spaces of representation, (the lived or experienced space, our feelings and emotions, our senses of security or insecurity). Spaces are made in the living of our lives, and since they are always being made, the possibility remains for them to be made differently. ‘Border-crossers’, physically and psychologically, can defy or challenge structures, and can reclaim power or identity.

The production and control of space and borders is always tied up with questions of power and politics; and also with the production of inequality. Spaces and their uses can be classed, gendered, racialised, and sexualized. The production of space is also therefore linked to the production of identities, to spaces for assembly, or to keeping ‘others’ in their place, materially or symbolically – whether ‘members of the nation-state’, ‘believers’ or ‘the disabled’. Our educational concerns therefore link to inclusion and exclusion.

Reขbordering is an aspect of globalization, and it is thought that all themes would have globalization as a backdrop if not a direct concern, and as an opportunity as well as a threat. There would be concerns about responsibility across and within borders (for climate change, arms trade, movements of peoples). But also the concerns are about borders in terms of social divisions, the invisible and visible lines between groups, and how education can challenge those borders which deny freedoms, rights and capabilities. Then, what are the educational spaces for contestation of inequality, for interruption?

New Business and New Way of Learning

2009 was a big year for me. As an academic, there was a huge demand from the university and students for us to redefine our concept of teaching and learning. We know we need to keep on 'improving' our way of teaching..how to do it?...this is a big question I kept asking myself.

I did a number of activities to find the best solution for the abovementioned question.Je ne sais quoi kepts on running in my head when I went to the class, conducting a couple of projects with my mates, or reading articles on this topic. I think it's a real complication for people like me to understand points I raise. I hope this year I might start to see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.