Multicultural education tries to provide answers to cultural plurality and to the need to incorporate the values of cultural diversity into teaching policies and practices. The importance of articulating multicultural education to teacher training and education, particularly in OR/MS, impacts not only academic staff and students in terms of gender, race and religious beliefs, but also impacts organizations facing growing international mobility of staff and the cultural plurality resulting from the presence of expatriate managers, culturally plural customers and organizational fusions. Implications are that, for example, a lecturer teaching the same course for different classes should adopt teacher training techniques that are different, so as to help the success in the course. Likewise, the themes and the field of application of OR/MS are multicultural in themselves, since OR/MS topics refer to problems, models and decision-making applied in culturally diverse contexts.

Therefore, we argue that the introduction of multicultural aspects in OR/MS courses should certainly help education in that area. In order to achieve that, educators could benefit from being exposed to multicultural training, irrespective of the approach adopted in their courses, providing a broader cultural perspective. It could result in a new bridge created by OR/MS.

In order to develop the argument, we firstly analyze the impact of new critical thinking and of multiculturalism on OR/MS education, focusing on the multicultural nature of organizations as a new paradigm. Secondly, we deal with practical implications of that thinking in terms of some main areas of operational research education, proposing a framework for a multicultural OR/MS education, with suggestions for taking into account cultural variables in problem solving, teaching and researching.

Impacts and Possibilities


The concept of a "multicultural" approach to teacher and student education offers possible answers to questions regarding cultural identities of gender, social class, religious beliefs and linguistic diversity. Those answers have to do with policies and practices that build on cultural plurality as an asset instead of a deficit, and take the construction of identity and difference as a process at the heart of any meaningful learning within educational and other organizations. As argued by Canen and Grant [8] and Canen and Oliveira [9], multicultural education and teacher education build on cultural plural scenarios in order to adapt curriculum and classroom practices to an increasingly culturally diverse and globalized world, as well as to students' cultural backgrounds, so as to construct bridges between subject contents, a broader cultural perspective and students' cultural experiences. As suggested by Canen and Canen [5, 6], breaking curriculum barriers and preparing professionals in all areas in a multicultural perspective is arguably feasible and desirable. An experiment with an "international logistics" course with multicultural sensitivities in an higher education institution is described [4] in which students were exposed to cultural aspects involved in logistics thinking with important results in students' attitudes and competencies.

Higher education institutions and other non-academic organizations, which constitute the destiny of OR/MS workforce, are multicultural both in terms of the culturally diverse actors that take part in them and their institutional and organizational identity, as constructed in their mission and philosophy.

As argued by Canen and Canen [7], multicultural organizations provide a multicultural environment in which all feel valued and in which cultural plurality flourishes. Rahim et al. [12] talks about an organizational climate in which empathy is one of the main qualities, being related to the competency of seeing another one's perspective and challenging any attempt to downcast those who think differently. Cases of academic staff that fail to understand cultural diversity in their different classes and insist on the same, homogeneous approach to teaching are not rare. They miss opportunities to take into account multicultural sensitivities and make an impact on students' learning in different areas, including OR/MS. Considering once more the destiny of OR/MS students in the market, as suggested above, it is crucial that they should have multicultural education in their undergraduate and post-graduate courses, so as to be prepared to deal with the multicultural nature of organizations, including higher education institutions, as well as the cultural aspects involved in real life organizational decision-making.

The issue of embedding OR/MS in multicultural aspects irrespective of the approach chosen to its courses is not intended as an upheaval in OR/MS practices, but rather as a new angle by which to understand the cultural context of real problems faced in the area. Therefore, multicultural OR/MS could be viewed in the context of working out classical approaches, as well as critical and post-modern thinking.

In fact, an overview of OR/MS teaching trends could be useful here. Talking about OR/MS education, a classical approach is that defended by some authors since the 1960s, concerning what they perceive as complementary types of academic training relevant for careers in OR/MS. It is important to note that such authors did not mention multiculturalism at that time. However, in a multicultural, globalized scenario, organizational management cannot consider cultural diversity and multicultural contexts. We contend, however, that such a perspective is not contradictory.

In fact, we render that a multicultural perspective can be articulated to it. As an illustration of that approach, authors such as Hillier and Lieberman [10] talk about three complementary types of academic training relevant for a career in OR/MS. The first is a basic training in the fundamentals upon which operations research is based (mainly mathematics and science); the second is special techniques of the field (linear and nonlinear programming and the introduction to the methodology of OR/MS); the third is specialized training in some field other than OR/MS, citing specifically physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering or economics. However, as also claimed by the above authors, even though mathematical methods and the research modeling approach are paramount in OR/MS, it does not imply that mathematical analysis is the only ingredient for operational studies. The classic operations research study as understood by these authors includes: formulating the problem, constructing a mathematical model to represent the system under study, deriving a solution from the model, testing the model and the solution derived from it, establishing controls over the solution and putting the solution to work implementation.

On the other hand, Magala [11] suggests that modern management science has been suffering the influence of critical theory and post-modern thinking that tend to challenge the notion of "truth" from research studies. Critical theory, as claimed by Magala, allows for the effort of "revealing the distortions caused by powers that be in the social construction of organization, management and research in the on-going social construction of reality." According to Magala, in the context of management sciences, it should include, among others, a critique of prevailing ideology and of the managerial ideologies, especially in O.R.; empirical studies of organizing, focusing on the asymmetries of power in companies; and methodologies of change, with a focus either on a local planning practice or on a broader concern for developing critical theory into a practical tool for inquiry and design.

Post-modern thinking comes as a paradigm that suspects any political agenda, including critical theory, which claims to change reality. It adopts a relativist approach, which is characterized by the challenging of any discourse that aims to construct a sense of truth. It prefers to understand the various cultural systems of truth, recognizing the role of women and minorities in the work place. As suggested by Magala [11], post-modern thinking in its extreme would seek to empower diversity "to get rid of management."

A hurricane in managerial thinking is occurring, influenced by critical theory, post-modernisms and other epistemological critiques. On the one hand, those discussions bring into the limelight the need to suspect the balance of non-conflict, and bring to attention the existence of power relations and conflicts interfering with optimal solutions. On the other hand, such critics fail to provide OR/MS with practical tools to deal with the challenges of organizing and managing. Even though such paradigms help in devising the relative nature of truth and in pinpointing the weight of plurality in organizations, we argue that they should focus on practical and feasible ways to teach and practice OR/MS.

We claim that multiculturalism as a field that drinks in the two paradigms could move toward incorporating the critiques mentioned above without neglecting the influences of classical theories on OR/MS. In order to do so, it should go beyond the dichotomy between classical and critical perspectives, articulating multicultural sensitivities to OR/MS education in whichever approach chosen. OR/MS spreads across traditional disciplinary lines, being interdisciplinary by nature. We add that it should spread and incorporate multicultural issues so that the model, the solution and all the phases take into account cultural issues. The examples and problems faced in classic operational research field could be adapted and linked to cultural issues, and a new bridge could be constructed given the very nature of the OR/MS field. It is not a dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methods, or between classical and critical or post-modern approaches, but rather a new perspective to be added so as to illuminate cultural variables at work.

How could multiculturalism bring such a perspective? How could it be defined? The increased role of culture and cultural identity is at the heart of multiculturalism, the issue of identity being crucial to it. We argue that there are individual identities, collective identities and organizational identities [7], volatile, constructed and reconstructed in higher education institutions and in organizations. Thinking of identities adds new breath and is the driving force of thinking broadly of solutions, optimal mathematically but not so in practical terms. As argued by Canen and Boaventura [3], "optimal technical solutions are not always optimal political decisions and sometimes the best compromise is the 'true optimal' answer.' " That was already a hint as to the impact of other variables on the decision making process.

Embedding OR/MS with multicultural aspects could help understand that more clearly, in the real life context of plural cultural individual, collective and organizational identities. In order to do so, OR/MS education with multicultural aspects should be an important new bridge to be built.

OR/MS Education with Multicultural Aspects


We live in an age in which people have been exposed to cultural diversity in a more complex way than ever before. More and more students, staff and organizational managers have been moving to new countries and cultural settings as international mobility increases. Also, cultural plurality along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, social class, religious beliefs and other cultural aspects has seriously impacted organizational culture, structures and decision-making. The lack of preparation to deal with cultural diversity can result both cultural shock and in failure to provide effective learning through the homogenization of teaching practices in heterogeneous scenarios.

Multicultural education could go beyond relativism or extremely ideologically laden discussions and incorporate answers to cultural plurality as drawn from the influences of theories, both classical and critical and post-critical, in a way that it is academically acceptable and workable for OR/MS teaching in whichever approach chosen. We argue that OR/MS can build bridges with multiculturalism, besides those already in place. As we contend here, a framework for OR/MS education with multicultural sensitivities could be worked out, multiculturalism being their driving force. In the framework we suggest, a few components are present:

• discussions of what it means to think multiculturally, based on works and texts that deal with multicultural issues and multicultural organizations;
  
  
• devising practical strategies and developing competencies for dealing with culturally plural and disparate scenarios, both in organizations and in the OR/MS classrooms [7] offer some ideas on workshops based on the exposition of case studies];
  
  
• topics and themes of OR/MS education in terms of problems and modeling, articulated to multicultural scenarios;
  
  
• exposing students and academic staff to quantitative/qualitative approaches, that can add to understanding the multicultural nature of higher education classrooms and organizational settings; and
  
  
• training in evaluating and assessing techniques that interrogate the extent of cultural sensitivity in OR/MS everyday teaching practices [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Figure 1 visually summarizes the suggested framework for OR/MS education with multicultural aspects, as previously discussed. The framework outlined in Figure 1 is not intended to exhaust OR/MS thinking with multicultural sensitivities, but rather offer a possible contribution to understand it in a new perspective. The framework takes into account what authors such as Magala [11], Canen and Canen [6, 7] and Rahim et al. [12] have pointed out, but also builds on classical operational research studies such as Hillier and Lieberman [10]. Its idea is to try to move OR/MS education discussions toward a contemporary world in which more and more decisions are being affected by political and cultural issues that not only build on mathematical solutions but go beyond them.

Figure 1: A framework for OR/MS with multicultural aspects.

In a world where organizations are more and more culturally bound and where the world itself is showing the weight of cultural diversity and the tragic consequences of blindness toward it, moving O.R. to new links could help devise education that is meaningful and that accepts cultural diversity as an asset and not as a deficit. Given the urgency of considering competitive advantages to organizations and, at the same time, the crucial role of cultural understanding and respect in order to achieve that so as to create a multiculturally friendly organizational climate, the potential of OR/MS in building bridges with multicultural education can prove to be an interesting road ahead.



Alberto G. Canen (agcanen@pep.ufrj.br) is a professor in the Department of Production Engineering at COPPE/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a former visiting professor at the University of Glasgow. A past president of the Brazilian Operations Research Society (SOBRAPO), he has wide experience of working in industrial organizations. Ana Canen is on the faculty of the Department of Educational Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research interests include multicultural education, institutional evaluation and teacher education. She has wide experience in teacher continuing education.

References

1. Canen, A., 2004, "Institutional Evaluation, Knowledge and Multiculturalism: some ways ahead in Brazilian Higher Education," Current Issues in Comparative Education, Columbia University, Nova York, Vol. 6, No. 1.
2. Canen, A. G., 1998, "University and Organisations: a partnership for the learning of logistics," presented at the Operational Research Group of Scotland Meeting, Glasgow, Caledonian University.
3. Canen, A. G. and Boaventura Netto, P. O., 1993, "An O.R. Group is Born," OR/MS Today, October, pp. 46-48.
4. Canen, A. G., & Canen, A., 2001, "Looking at Multiculturalism in International Logistics: an experiment in a higher education institution," International Journal of Educational Management, Vol.15, No. 3, pp. 145-152.
5. Canen, A. G. and Canen, A., 2002, "Innovation Management Education for Multicultural Organisations: challenges and a road for logistics," European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 73-85.
6. Canen, A and Canen, A.G., 2005, "Rompendo Fronteiras Curriculares: o multiculturalismo na educação e outros campos de saber," Currículo sem Fronteiras, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 40-49.
7. Canen, A. G. & Canen, A., 2005, "Organizações Multiculturais: logística na corporação globalizada," Rio de Janeiro: ed. Ciência Moderna.
8. Canen, A and Grant, N., 1999, "Intercultural Perspective and Knowledge for Equity in the Mercosul Countries: Limits and Potentials in Educational Policies," Comparative Education, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 319-330.
9. Canen, A. and Oliveira, A.M.A., 2002, "Multiculturalismo e Currículo em Ação: um estudo de caso," Revista Brasileira de Educação, Rio de Janeiro, Vol. 21, pp. 61-74.
10. Hillier, F.S and Lieberman, G. J., 1986, "Introduction to Operations Research," Oakland, Calif., Holden-Day, Inc.
11. Magala, S., 2000, "Critical Complexities: from marginal paradigms to learning networks," Journal of Organisational Change Management, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 312 - 333.
12. Rahim, M. A., Psenicka, C., Oh, S-Y, Polychroniou, P., Dias, J. P., Ferdausy and Rahman, M. S., 2006, "Relationship between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership: A cross-cultural study," in M. A. Rahim (ed.), Current Topics in Management, Vol. 11, pp. 223-236, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.

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