Most people go abroad to experience something different, so we´re disconcerted to find the distance of oceans changing very little. Teaching corporate English in Mexico particularly highlights this. I´ve been surprised to find that corporate culture has given certain workplace practices and ideas a global freedom of movement most workers can only dream of.
In a pharmaceutical company lesson I instigated a discussion on what to do when you don’t know the answer to the something. Students generally agreed that it’s never a good idea to admit total ignorance and that one should smooth over the absence with some patter and maintain the impression of competence (I reckon this blagging culture is a key British export). Another is the idea of ‘story of self’, which is pretty pervasive these days across business and politics, dictating that a presentation of quarterly sales figures will be far more effective when hung around some personal experience. This prompted glowing accounts from my students of a soft drinks executive who had won over her international audience through a comedic but touching account of a hangover.
Admittedly not all ideas are universally accepted. The concept of the balanced team met with a bit of resistance. Although I elicited agreement from most of my class for the idea that different personality types make for a more effective team, one student, an accountant, wasn’t having any of it and insisted that the best teams would include only people like her.
These ideas get disseminated via an effective global curriculum meaning one set of people, in Mexico and presumably all over the world, are imbibing a set of dare I say it ‘neoliberal’ ideas. These include concepts of the flexible self, the importance of impression over substance and so on, in an environment that is often uncritical (not the organisation per se, but the key ideas, which either pass unquestioned through practice or formal training which rarely allows for critique of the core ideas).
Mexicans working in global corporate roles are more likely to be privately educated, drive cars and avoid public transport. Ten minutes from Polanco where many of them work, is Tacubaya, where hundred vendors and hawkers in the informal sector live out a more physically grounded existence selling food, clothes, phone cases, pretty similar to vendors in Walthamstow Market. It made me wonder what learnings Tacubayans might share over breakfast telecons with their counterparts in North London, assuming they´re not at capacity.
Prickly Pears 