On October 19th 2010, a delegation from York University led by VP Lorna Wright visited IEA at CASS. All the members including Professor Martin Singer, Dean of Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Dr. Bernie Frolic, Director of ABMP，and Ms. LIU Jie，Program officer of York’s Beijing office, were welcomed by IEA Director General ZHANG Changdong and Vice-Director General HUANG Xing. A routable discussion was arranged and Dr. Lorna Wright presented her talk on Canadian Business Culture. She mentioned that one will not have a complete picture of Canada if all one has are economic models and figures. Corporate culture and cultural values in general are also necessary to round out the overall understanding. This presentation explored those values and their effects, both on Canadian business and on the perception of Asian businesspeople who do business with Canadians. This seminar chaired by Professor DU Fachun, Deputy Secretary-General of the Association for Canadian Studies in China.
On October 29-30th, Dr. Lorna Wright and Dr. Jack Jedwab attended the 14th biennial conference of ACSC. Professor Lorna Wright delivered a keynote speech titled Canadian Small and Medium Enterprises and E-Business. Dr. Jack Jedwab presented his speech on this topic, Multiculturalism and the Case of Chinese Languages in Canada.
From Oct. 31st to Nov. 2nd , they paid a visit to Yunnan Normal University (YNU) and Yunnan Agricultural University (YAU) and welcomed by the Professors and students in two universities. In YNU, they had two lectures in two deferent Faculties; in YNU’s Economic Management School Dr. Lorna Wright gave a lecture titled Canadian Women Entrepreneurs in the APEC Context, while in the Faculty of Foreign Studies at YAU, Dr. Jack Jedwab talked about the topic on The Words and Phrases Preferred by The Canadians. During their stay in YAU, they did two lectures in the Economic Management School of YAU, centering on business and entrepreneurship. Professor Wright’s topic was Canadian Small and Medium Enterprises and E-Business, and Dr. Jedwab’s talk focused on Multiculturalism and Ethnic Entrepreneurship in Canada. He said that Canada likes to distinguish itself as a country that values minority ethnic cultures and presumably endorses their preservation and enhancement. It might follow therefore that by supporting a mosaic of cultures, the country might have somewhat higher rates of ethnic entrepreneurial activity than other immigrant receiving countries that discourage the retention of ethno-cultural heritage. Yet drawing such conclusions assumes that government policies or discourse in the area of cultural diversity has an impact on the market behavior of members of ethnic groups. It further assumes that individual members of ethnic groups engaged in entrepreneurial activity are guided by some strong connection to their culture of origin. These relationships have rarely been tested. Instead much of the research on ethnic entrepreneurship se-lects a sample of individuals of self-employed persons in a given community and examines their economic practices to draw conclusions about the cultural characteristics of ethnic entrepreneurs.
It is acknowledged that this project is undertaken with the assistance of the Canadian Studies Center in the Yunnan Normal University and the Canadian Studies Center at the Beijing Foreign Studies University.
(Reported by the Canadian Studies Center, CASS/IEA)