Planting a Paradigm in Central Europe

Abstract

This article selectively reviews the recent experiences of western management educators and trainers, drawing particularly on work done in Poland, Slovakia and Russia. It argues the need to develop alternative models of teaching and learning strategy which can at least ensure identification, if internalization is not found to be possible (to use Kelman's terms); models which address the learner's expectations within his or her own culture. Identification is a matter of perceived reward, and of the relationship between the learner and his or her role models, as these are encoded by the construct system of the individual trainee. The focus of the article is therefore on language: on the ideas which an eastern epistemology is capable of construing and expressing, and on the figures (idiom and metaphor), which encode meaning and understanding.