Cultural Safety And Safe Space: An Analysis Of House Of Lies Video

Scope

Question:

Discuss about the Electronics Engineering for Intelligence, Capabilities.

Background:

The cultural safety refers to an environment that is safe for the employees, space where there is no denial or challenge for their identity of what they need and who they are and three is no assault (Cox and Taua 2012).  A safe area is a place there the rules protect each person’s dignity and self-respect and highly encourage everyone to respect each other.

Scope:

The report presented here describes the cultural safety and safe space and define it with respect the video scenario that is selected. In the given example video the workplace is entirely unsafe area.

Aim:

The reported aim is to analyze an unsafe and safe space on the video (House of Lies, Episode 5: Racist). The safe and unsafe space refers to an environment in the workplace where employees are either protected or not protected by the rules and in safe space, everyone is treated with self-respect and dignity. By interacting with people who think you are wrong and don’t take any risks and always be optimistic are some of the recommended ways that can be helpful to improve the safety of the space.

Summarizing House of Lies Video:

Marty Kaan got a new client Mr. B. Butterfield, and he is racist by nature. He had a perception in mind while entering into Marty’s Cabin that Marty Kaan is a white man, so he introduces himself to two white men’s who are the Marty’s management team, and he expected that a white will be the boss. While introducing to everyone, he found that Marty Kaan is a black man and he wished him luck and leave the cabin with an unexplained face. Then Marty asked who will handle Mr. Butterfield both of his teammates were raising hands to assign the client to one of them, but Marty gave the responsibility to his lady team mate for handling the customer and then told and warned her, if she fails to manage the customer, then we will be sent back to whatever place she has come from (YouTube.com 2016).  The video was made on January 30^th, 2012 United States of America.

The safe space is a space where everyone or anyone can relax and can express themselves fully without any fear and any feelings of discomfort, unsafe or unwelcome on biological sex, ethnicity, gender expression or identity and mental and physical ability (Ringland et al. 2015).  This is a place where some rules are there to protect individual’s dignity, self-respect and actively encourage individuals to show some respect to their workers or other employees.

Cultural intelligence: The Cultural intelligence defines a person’s ability or capability to function efficiently and more in situations represented by cultural diversity.  It can also be said that a person’s capacity that is consistent with modern conceptualizations of intelligence because it does recognize that general mental ability is less, and intelligence is more than it (Ang and Van Dyne 2015). 

Aim

Cultural Awareness: Cultural Awareness refers as a base or foundation of communication where it involves the capacity of standing back from individual and can become aware of cultural perceptions, beliefs, and values. We can also say that it’s all about knowledge and understanding of cultural history and difference (Tomalin and Stempleski 2013).  It’s about got aware of various cultural groups, and that includes identification of own identity, practices, and cultural values.

The CI (Cultural Intelligence) becomes apparent in different situations where the individual is unknown about the present environment. The cultural difficulties can be faced by the person when they work in a workplace where the knowledge, age and experience are different from one another and or when someone visits an unknown country for the first time (Takeuchi and Chen 2013).  The individual needs to go through the following stages of culture shock represented in figure 1.

Figure 1: Cultural Adjustment Curve

(Source:  Chao et al. 2012, pp-20)

The communication is always a fundamental aspect across different cultures when to develop a cultural intelligence (Ting-Toomey 2012).  But there are some distinct hurdles which prevent an effective communication. The hurdles that are stereotypes, behavior and language and this can avoid the communication to be better. Strategies that are need to be addressed to overcome the entire obstacles to create a safe space. They are avoid stereotyping, honest communication, clear and open questions and active listening. The cultural intelligence and cultural awareness are the fundamental requirements to create a better safe space (Bowe et al. 2014).

Considering the physical factor of the given video, it has been observed that the area in the office is a single cabin where all the teammates were sitting in their appropriate position.  The size of the office space was limited and is filled with Red color showing class and professionalism. Marty seems to be confident while taking with the client with a polite voice and body language. But there is a lack of cultural self-awareness and cultural intelligence because Mr. Buttterfield was racist by nature and was addressing Marty with less value and belief etc. 

Scene Number/Timeframe	Physical Factors	Communication      Factors	Exclusion	Cultural self-awareness and Cultural Intelligence
House of Lies Scene (5) Racist and Time frame is 1 minute and 13 seconds.	-The dark red color has been used in this video, and the room looks brighter with light, some plants are placed in the office room. -Everyone was sitting in their chairs and seems to relax and surprised by seeing the client visiting and addressing Marty.	-Eye contacts are properly made among the four characters. Especially with Marty and Mr. Butterfield. -The body language of everyone was tensed because the client was addressing the wrong guy and he clearly seemed to be racists. -Marty thinks that it should be a white person who can handle the client, so he asked her employee to follow Mr. Butterfield project.	-People were very confused with the client presences in the room, and they were not much humor in the scenes that can be related to inclusion. -Marty seems to be bit angry and warns one of her staff to take care of the client’s project or else she will be fired.	-There no signs of cultural awareness and cultural intelligence because Mr. Butterfield showcased racism among the management team. -Marty got angry on the client and showed his anger on the staff and warned her lady employee that she will be fired if she didn’t handle him well.

Table 1: Description and Observation in Video

(Source: Created By Author)

The early video scene displays that a relax working culture in the office where one of the staff is completely relaxed and been causally eating and working in the given workspace (Crowne 2013).  But they all displayed a high cultural intelligence because they all adjust their behavior as soon as the client enters the room. They all show an instant reaction which gathers the customer’s attention, and a warm welcome was shown towards the customer and the client begin to talk. Now this demonstrates an excellent example of cultural intelligence (Eisenberg et al. 2013). It was clearly seen that Marty was reading the body language of the customer and others and was adjusting his approach because the customer was racists and he didn’t want to make him angry. Moreover, the lady employee also shows some intelligence. On the other aspect of the scene after the client leave the office room, Marty displayed an unsafe space for working, because Marty asked everyone that who is going to handle the customer, and he showed his anger on the lady employee by just giving her the warning that, if she fails to manage the customer then she will be sent back to the place from where she has come from.

Summarizing House of Lies Video

Racism is the personal view of individuals, in this case, and the client displayed racism which cannot be controlled.  The video scene clearly showed that the office is an unsafe space to work (Leatherman and Griffin 2014). Because the boss Marty seems to show anger and threats his employees about the client because he was racists. The following things can be done to neglect such incident.

The freedom of speech needs to be given to the employees because they seem that in the scene that Marty seems to be dominant with his employees.

Marty has to be an active listener (Mae et al. 2013).

Active participants of all the staff are required to improve the unsafe space to a safe area.

The employee needs to feel much more secure working with Marty.

Conclusion

The report presented here to showcase how a workspace can be made safe space using cultural intelligence and capabilities and cultural awareness as well. The report is made based on the selected video where a scenario is displayed, and it has been explained in general on safe space, cultural awareness, and cultural intelligence. The purpose of this report is to understand how a safe space can be created using the above factors that are cultural advocacy and information.  The report covers various aspects on the establishment of a safe space and moreover a detailed report is submitted with a recommendation to improve the unsafe area to safe space.

References

Ang, S. and Van Dyne, L., 2015. Handbook of cultural intelligence. Routledge.

Bowe, H., Martin, K. and Manns, H., 2014. Communication across cultures: Mutual understanding in a global world. Cambridge University Press.

Chao, M.M.C., Takeuchi, R., Farh, J.L., Zhang, Z.X. and Hong, Y., 2012. The Role of Essentialist Beliefs on Cultural Adjustment and Cultural Intelligence Development. In 2013 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Orlando, FL.

Cox, L. and Taua, C., 2012. Cultural safety: cultural considerations. Jarvis’s Physical Examination and Health Assessment, pp.40-60.

Crowne, K.A., 2013. Cultural exposure, emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence An exploratory study. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 13(1), pp.5-22.

Eisenberg, J., Lee, H.J., Brück, F., Brenner, B., Claes, M.T., Mironski, J. and Bell, R., 2013. Can business schools make students culturally competent? Effects of cross-cultural management courses on cultural intelligence. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(4), pp.603-621.

Leatherman, J. and Griffin, N., 2014. Unsafe Spaces: Trends and Challenges in Gender-Based Violence. World Politics Review-First Response: Health Work in Conflict Zones.

Mae, B., Cortez, D. and Preiss, R.W., 2013. Safe spaces, difficult dialogues, and critical thinking. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 7(2), p.5.

Ringland, K.E., Wolf, C.T., Dombrowski, L. and Hayes, G.R., 2015, February. Making Safe: Community-Centered Practices in a Virtual World Dedicated to Children with Autism. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing(pp. 1788-1800). ACM.

Takeuchi, R. and Chen, J., 2013. The impact of international experiences for expatriates’ cross-cultural adjustment: A theoretical review and a critique. Organizational Psychology Review, p.2041386613492167.

Ting-Toomey, S., 2012. Communicating across cultures. Guilford Press.

YouTube.com, (2016). House of Lies Season 1: Episode 5 Clip – Racist. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKPI5jSjt0M [Accessed 31 May 2016