CORPORATIONS-ECONOMIC WORLD MONSTERS

Nowadays, Corporations are not what they used to be. they have become in giant powerful entities thirsty for making more and more money every day.

With their legal figure, Corporations are able to have almost the same rights human beings have. Right such as selling, buying, having, among others which make them even stronger i the society because not only they have these rights but they just have one duty which is to generate revenues for the owners.

With Making profits as their only obligation, Corporations have been getting bigger and bigger , locating this duty as a priority and putting everything else on a second place. In other words, for them getting benefits is on the top of the list even above public and human being welfare, which involves damaging and not benefiting others external to the organization in order to achieve what they want.

for instance, not providing the right treatment to employees, clients, are consecuences of the damage caused by these powerful entities who do whatever they want without any punishment.

Publicity and promotion are also a way of deceiving because through media, corporations search for manipulating consumers

mind in order to gain market.

today more companies are being privatized coming from a subsidiary which served to the society to a private company which only serves to its owners. For that reason it is important for the society, victim of these huge corporations to not be influenced by them and to raise against the power of the corporations by not following what companies want people to do.

It is also important for Coroporations to start implementing policies that benefit more the society than their own good, for instance environmental policies to make the company eco-friendly, policies to benefit employees, among others, and that way, corporations would become humanized having not only as their principal goal to make profits but also to benefit society.

Images taken from:http://www.cartoonstock.com/fullsearch.asp?ANDkeyword=company+policies&ORkeyword=&TITLEkeyword=&NOTkeyword=&performSearch=TRUE&mainArchive=mainArchive&MA_Artist=&MA_Category=&start=2

References:

Achbar Mark, Abbot Jennifer and Bakon Joel.The corporation documentary, 2003

Video Taken form Youtube.com, 2010. Corporations vs The People - Fighting Corporate Rule

OIM & WOMEN MIGRANTS

The IOM ( International organization for migration) is an inter-governmental agency which mission since its creation in 1951 has been working on providing secure and reliable services for thhose who require international migraton assistance, protecting and searching for effective respect for the Human right of Migrants in accordance to international law.

One of the IOM functions is the IOM & Gender issues in which one of the focus point is the encouragement of women by increasing gender balance and supporting the advancement of women within this organization.

In order to accomplish women migrants inclusion they have developed several plans and programmes.

One of these programs is the "Migrant Women for development in Africa" (WMIDA). This programme supports West African Women migrants residing in Italy interested in stablish enterprises in their countries of origin using joint ventures with Italian Companies.

This programme is really important because it recognizes the role of women in local development, encouraging them to be entrepreneurs and to be succesful and not discriminated by their migrant status.

Image taken from: http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/activities/by-theme/migration-development/engaging-migrant-women-for-development-africa

The IOM also safeguards policies that offer equal conditions and opportunities to migrate to both women and men reducing women vulnerability during migration. It is a fact that there is still some gender discriminations when talking about men migrant workers involved in skilled male-dominated jobs and women migrant workers usually involved in care and domestic services. The IOM is making efforts in order to have a more gender-sensitive labour migration policies.

Image taken from: http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/media/news-releases/newsArticleEU/cache/offonce?entryId=27062

Links:

http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/media/news-releases/newsArticleEU/cache/offonce?entryId=27062

http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/activities/by-theme/migration-development/engaging-migrant-women-for-development-africa

http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/iom-gender

UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY AS AN USEFUL TOOL IN MANAGEMENT

Image taken from:http://allscrubbedup.blogspot.com/2006/12/using-ubuntu-linux-to-solve-south.html

According to Leymah Gbowee ( african peace activist) who offered a translation of Ubuntu " I am who I am because of who we all are".

Ubuntu, a South African philosophy focuses on the relationship among people and how they behave toward each other in order to obtain a full degree of harmonity within the group.

Some of the premises of this philophy are:

• Extended family is important: " I belong, Therefore I am"
• Decisions by consensus
• Social Harmony is important
• Rewards are shared as well as suffering

This philosophy has been present in the African community, where they have higher respect for the ones surrounding them, for their family, friends. thinking as a whole, they highlight the importance of having and maintaining good relationships with others and only that way a person would become a person.

The western culture has much of a self-interest and self-achievement thought without regarding others and without taking into account that maybe consolidating as a whole not as individuals would be benefical for the improvement of our culture.

I the following video, Bill Clinton refers to Archbishop Tutu in order to explain the word " Ubuntu" in order to get people conscious and aware about the importance of this african philosophy.

Regarding the value of this concept in the African culture, The Ubuntu Mission has been created in order to guide and help people and business leaders to have greater commitment trust and understanding toward others.

Now, Organizations should take this approach, in a way that managers have a higher degree of understanding, trust and faith in their employees providing a confiance environment so that way employees can be able to accomplish their tasks properly and improve their skills feeling secure in the environment they move making the company achieve higher standars of development and labour maximization.

References:

Mangaliso,Mzamo.2003. Building competitive advantage from Ubuntu

TASK # 5 METAPHORS USED AS PROMOTION

Today I am going to talk about Metaphors used as international strategies to promote a product from Colombia in Foreign marktes.

First of all I want to give some dfeinitions and examples of what a metaphor is.

A metaphor is " a figure of speech in which and implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common " ( taken from About.com).

This type of figure is often used in the literature area, as in our daily basis and even in the marketing field.

In the Marketing field, metaphors are very used in order to promote products, ideas, services, nevertheless, these types of metaphors can be misunderstood damaging ideas of clients and possible customers.

For that reason is really important to take into account that metaphors can be very useful if you use them correctly and select clearly the message you want to transmit.

Now I want to give an example of one possible metaphor that could be used when promoting a product. Let's guess that I am trying to promote latin dancing classes in North America and in Europe. In order to do that I want to use some advertising so that way people can feel attracted to this specific service.

I would use the following phrase " Latin Dancing, Feel the Latin culture inside of you". That way possible consumers in Europe and North America would feel like if they take dancing classes they would be immersed on the latin culture at the same time that they are acquiring some Latin features. This metaphor can fit properly to the service its being promoted because it creates a feeling or an idea that if people take these classes they will be having more knowledge about the latin culture.

This metaphor can be very useful when approaching latin clients in other marktes different of the latin one. That way they would feel like they are in home and they would feel even more the latin culture that is already inside of them.

Taken from:

http://www.flyglobalmusic.com/fly/archives/latin_america_reviews/va_baila_a_latin_dance_party.html

References:

About.com: Grammar & composition

TASK # 4 COMMENTS ON BLOGS

In order to achieve task # 4, I visited several blogs and I found some really good blogs with very interesting posts.

Carlos Roldan Vargas
Luz Maria Fernandez
Juan Cailo Vanegas
Juan Fernando Ramirez
Alejandro Bustamante Benjumea

TASK # 3: Pygmalion Effect as motivator in real situations

The Pygmalion effect has its roots in France, eighteen century with a mythological story of a sculptor named Pygmalion who was disappointed of women; however, in a dream the goddess Venus said to him that she will guide his hand in order to build a statue of herself. He succeeded with the sculpture and this statue was so perfect for him that he started to wish so bad a life for his statue. His desire was so strong that the statue started to acquire movement and even thought and speech.

Pygmalion with Galatea

Taken From:

http://www.21to21.com/2010/07/15/the-pygmalion-effect-and-profits-why-the-saying-attitude-is-everything-is-true/

As we just saw, The Pygmalion effect has been present for centuries. Philosophers, theorists and scholars have taken this story in order to explain how a positive or negative expectation from one person may affect the end result. Studies have been more focused on the relationship between positive expectations of somebody and the possibility of achieving a positive performance, but not only positive expectations affect one person’s performance but also negative ones.

With a purpose of clarifying even more the concept of “The Pygmalion effect”, I am going to give an example of how the Pygmalion effect can work in the real life.

In several films, we can see the Pygmalion effect present. One of those movies is “pursuit of happiness” in where we can see a positive Pygmalion effect when Chris Garner, a broke salesman abandoned by his wife, but with his son as his only motivator, Garner started a hard journey for a job as a stockholder, and his son’s positive expectations about him made Chris garner be motivated about this mentioned job and he does whatever it takes in order to get it and in order to not disappoint his son. Finally after putting all of his efforts, he gets the so desired job.

Chris Garner is affected by internal factors such as his economic situation, his instable life that affects him and his son, past experiences but the most important factor is the expectations his son has about him and that becomes a triggering event that encourage him to work for all he has wished for.

In this following video we see how Chris Garner has always his son right next to him, supporting him and those positive expectations worked as a motivator in order to get a better job and that way a better life.

Other motivational video is the following, in which Chris gives and advice to his son, telling him that nobody is allowed to tell him what to do or what he can’t do and if he want something he just must go and get it.

References:

J. L. Carr. 1960, Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The animated statue in Eighteen Century France

Takao inamori, Farhard Analoui, Beyond Pygmalion Effect: The Role Of Managerial Perception. Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29, pp 306-321

TASK # 2 " Femininity and masculinity: A Dimension of Cultural Differences

When getting into the international business field, we can realize how different people act in one culture or another. That is why Professor Geert Hofstede from the Maastricht University has made a research on cultural differences in order to be more efficient interacting with people in other countries. One of these cultural dimensions is the Masculinity/femininity Dimension in which Hofstede made a distinction between a Masculine society and a Feminine society; where the first one man are assertive, focused on material success and tough and women are tender, modest and concerned by the equality. In femininity society men and women tend to be both tender, concerned about the equality, modest and both care about others. The following table shows the differences between masculine and feminine society

taken from:

Hofstede, G. 1999. Masculinity and femininity: The taboo dimension of national cultures

For instance, In Germany even though there is a M

asculinity society, sometimes the femininity dimension is reflected. In the business area it is very often the team work in order to improve the productivity within the company that can be considered as a feminine characteristic because it is related with the good relationships among partners to accomplish some task. One good example of this team work is the automotive industry more specifically the German Auto Industry Mercedes- Benz in which within a plant there are several different teams and within each team there is a team speaker, nevertheless the team speaker has no more power than other team members, so decisions are made by everyone.

As we have seen, that way some German enterprises apply femininity model in order to success in the business management structure.

Masculinity societies are seen very often in most of the countries; men taking care of external affairs like military, administrative and trade matters,

women at work tending to be more concerned about their relationship with others, at home tending to be more devoted for their family.it shows the tough, assertive and material succes features of a man, The t

ender, concerned about their family and caring about relations, features of woman in a masculine society.

Taken from:

http://smallbusinessonlinecommunity.bankofamerica.com/blogs/startingABusiness/2007/10/15/mom-and-entrepreneur-are-you-among-the-growing-number

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/07/19/slick_mad_men_visits_madison_ave_at_dawn_of_the_60s/

References:

Hofstede, G. 1999. Masculinity and femininity: The taboo dimension of national cultures

FAVORITE BLOGS IN THE BOBs

In order to accomplish the Task # 1 for the Organisations and cultures' course, I visited the www.thebobs.com , a webpage in where the Best Blogs around the world are posted and rewarded and I found many interesting Blogs from differennt countries discussing topics of all kind.

The following are three of the most interesting blogs I found:

Sub-Prime The Musical: through informational podcasts, parodies and music, the author makes an attempt to explain aspects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the economic crisis in general that affetcs all of us. I found this Blog really interesting because it shows in a different and innovative way opinions and comments the author has about this specific topic.

TH!NK ABOUT IT-CLIMATE CHANGE : It is a Blog platform created in order to develop an european blogging competition in where bloggers around the world wrote about issues related with climate change focusing on the UN climate change conference in copenhagen.
In this blog, participants are able to write about local stories showing the effects of climate change policies every day.

INT'L RELATIONS + : It is an Academic blog different from other International Relations field Blogs in a way that Bloggers are able to talk adn comment about INternational Relations in an informal way.
Bloggers can talk about topics such as diplomacy, International marketing, IR theories, conflicts, among others.