Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environme ...

organization that gives culture its institutional context and which the institutional structure, in turn, reflects also varies from place to place over time. To guide their actions and interactions, therefore, different peoples from different places, in diverse ways, make meaning of their daily life by making generalizations, distilling categories from the generalizations, and making interpretations from such categories based on their local and immediate contexts (Geertz, 1973). When foreign academics arrive to commence work in institutional contexts that clearly have preexistent norms and worldviews, there is bound to be some form of adjustment to be made—especially by the immigrants but also by the host population.

The authors who contributed to this book—all immigrant scholars at one time or another—arrived from areas that were culturally different than the areas to which they emigrated. Their adjustment process to become effective members of their new societies naturally brought them to encounter major culture-related difficulties and conflicts in their particular professional universe—academia—in addition to generic acculturation problems common to all immigrants. They encountered a range of more-or-less critical mismatches in the norms, traditions, expectations, communications, symbolizations, and identities that were represented by their new homes and workstations and the various peoples from the different culture areas in that universe. This book is a reflection on the different ways they managed or resolved their conflicts and cognitive dissonances.

According to one view, since culture is essentially about an individual’s sense of belonging, national culture does not disappear into an amorphous global pot just because people move into a new country. There is, according to Pike (2000, p. 68), “a reality in which, at the level of individual identity, some cultural patterns endure.” Immigrant scholars, therefore, initially base their actions and responses on the only prior cultural templates they have: the ones with which they came. This happens at least until they master the use of the symbols and the language prevalent in the host society and are, consequently, able to choose how best to integrate new cultural elements and eliminate or demote some elements in their primary cultural portmanteau.