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Background: Due to changes in Polish society resulting from a significant inflow of immigrants to Poland, the need to develop the cultural competences of various professional groups who have contact with immigrants in their work has increased. These groups should include healthcare professionals, especially because of the significant increase in the number of culturally diverse patients. Therefore, medical education in Poland has had to rapidly adapt to this novel situation. For instance, the teaching process should be now more focused on the development and evaluation of the cultural competences of prospective health care workers. However, there is still a lack of standardized, valid and reliable instruments to assess cross-cultural competences among healthcare professionals. The purpose of the present paper was to describe, for the first time, the translation, adaptation, and psychometric evaluation of the Polish version of the Cross-Cultural Competence Inventory. Methods: Across two studies, we examined psychometric properties of the Cross-Cultural Competence Inventory (CCCI) such as reliability (i.e. internal consistency, test-retest reliability, factor structure) and validity (i.e. theoretical, criteria, convergent). In the first study, 408 participants (75% were healthcare professionals) completed the Polish version of the CCCI and the Positive/Negative Attitude Towards Culturally Divergent People Questionnaire. In the second study, 317 participants (97% were healthcare professionals) completed the CCCI twice, with an interval of at least 22 days. In addition, across two study sessions, participants completed questionnaires constructed to measure (a) cultural intelligence, (b) need for cognitive closure, (c) emphatic sensitiveness, (d) emotional intelligence, (e) self-esteem, (f) social desirability, and (g) personality. Finally, to additionally examine the theoretical validity, 36 professional cross-cultural competence trainers completed the CCCI during a one-session study. Results: Our findings confirm the reliability and validity of the CCCI. More precisely, in study 1 we proved the theoretical validity and reliability (i.e. internal consistency) of the CCCI. While the assumed structure did not fit the data well, all items were significantly related to the general factor, thus providing strong support for the usage of the total score of the CCCI. In study 2, we additionally estimated the test-retest reliability and theoretical, criterion and convergent validity. Across two studies we were able to successfully confirm these psychometric properties. The reliability was satisfactory and ranged from .83 to .86. We also observed a high and significant positive correlation between CCCI and the Cultural Intelligence Scale, which measures a concept similar to the one measured by CCCI. In addition, a significant relationship between intercultural competences (CCCI) and other variables such as personality, empathic sensitivity, emotional intelligence, self-esteem (positive correlations) and the need for cognitive closure (mainly negative correlation) were demonstrated. Conclusions: The obtained results support the usage of the CCCI questionnaire in scientific research, such as, for example, among healthcare professionals (nurses, doctors) and students of medical fields (nursing, medicine). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this volume generally represent new developments in anthropology and cultural theory. Inevitably, in an evolutionary flowering, divergence can occur. Two of the papers represent a very new approach to theory for anthropology. This note discusses issues related to construction of theory that distinguish those papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the establishment of the scientific field of Food and Culture in Brazil, guided by Bourdieu's concepts. We describe the science park corresponding to this field, its geographical and institutional distribution, its insertion in the fields of knowledge, the issues investigated, the qualifications of the researchers, their academic programs and its links with post-graduate studies, their societies and scientific organizations are more specific objectives of this paper. Three areas of social science world are analyzed: "Sociology and Anthropology," "Health" and "Food and Nutrition" which is incorporated into the habitus of its main agent, the researcher of the Health Sciences, reflections, potential and methodological resources from the Social Sciences and Humanities. A woven web of meanings in this meeting place of different knowledge is marked by hegemonic biomedical viewpoint, resents and demands a stronger field of concepts and methods capable of dealing with the complexity of reality and the problems beyond laboratory benchs in life in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current studies on the borderland territories suggest insufficiency of research tools, which, if applied, would improve the theoretical level of the conducted studies, particularly if that research would cover the borderlands of civilizations. Until now, the research on borderlands in Poland and elsewhere were dominated by the concepts of borderlands and trans-borderness. In my opinion, to cover the full scope of social phenomena and processes, which appear on borderland and trans-border territories, the new terms should be introduced: "borderlandness" together with the existing "borderland" and the "trans-borderland" to complement with the "trans-borderlandness". In this paper I intend to present shortly the conception of the borderland applied in my research and, on this basis, I try to develop the concept of borderlandness as well as to stress its utility in the studies of borderlands, including the borders of civilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the paper concerning the history of diplomacy in medieval and early modern Europe. It has been noted that diplomacy contributed to the development of multiple other discourses that structured in the country during the medieval and early modern periods. The history brought out a consciousness of diplomatic agency to develop on other areas of cultural and political practice in the country. Furthermore, several investigations and studies have been established beyond the national histories that continue to dominate most treatments of premodernity.

This paper explores the concepts of knowledge culture and epistemic culture against the background of contemporary transformations in global society. Studies of knowledge culture came to prominence in the 1970s, with the trend towards laboratory fieldwork and direct observation in the new sociology of science. If the focus in such early studies was on knowledge construction, the focus in an epistemic culture approach by contrast is on the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction, relocating culture in the micropractices of laboratories and other bounded habitats of knowledge practice. Not all places of knowledge, however, are bounded spaces, and there is a case to be made for including in the empirical agenda more distributed locations. This is done here by introducing the concept of 'macro-epistemics', to describe wider networks of knowledge generation such as what is often known as 'the global financial architecture'. The discussion concludes by moving out from macro-epistemic circuits to questions of the cultural environment of epistemic settings, and of the more general knowledge culture in which specific knowledge processes are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on Piaget and Habermas to underline the importance of the theoretical distinction between social relations of constraint and social relations of cooperation for reflecting upon inter-institutional projects. I argue that the socio-cultural approach to collaboration has some important limitations that restrict ideological critic and emancipatory research. The limitations of this approach can be located in its epistemological assumptions, a homogenized notion of culture and a weakness in articulating the intrapersonal, inter-personal, inter-group/positional and social representational/ideological levels of analysis. As an empirical example of this I discuss the Sloan centres for family research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists involved on cross-cultural research face a variety of challenges. This issue is discussed in the context of emic and etic approaches to research. A project illustrating some of these challenges is presented. A projective measure completed by each family as a group was used to capture the experience of family in Japanese and American families. Some culture-based hypotheses were confirmed, and an interesting serendipitous finding was explored in depth by a cross-cultural team. The unexpected finding was that pictures made by Japanese families, compared to those made by American families, were more likely to contain multiple images of the family. Further evaluation showed that the Japanese multiple images were most likely to reflect a textured, non-unitary experience, depicting a variety of contexts. This paper concludes by providing suggestions for enhancing the quality of cross-cultural research.

This paper discusses methodological and theoretical issues that arise in contemporary analyses of cultural consumption. First, I review measures of cultural consumption that receive attention in the literature and I put forward several others that broaden the definition and measurement of this concept. I propose the inclusion of a variety of consumption realms and consumption publics, and advocate the use of integrated and flexible measures. I discuss the comparability of consumption indicators in the context of cross-national, crosscultural, and longitudinal research, and submit that it is important to have standardized measures for the sake of their reliability and validity, but also that it is important to have case-specific measures in order to prevent blurred cultural distinctions. Second, I suggest that consumer culture research further develop a series of theoretical questions that stand at the core of the field, particularly those that acknowledge the significant social consequences of cultural consumption: the transition from production to consumption; cultural consumption and the social matrix; cultural consumption as a generative concept; multiple consumer identities; and cultural consumption and cultural policy. The shared emphasis of these theoretical questions is on locating the position of individuals on multidimensional hierarchies of consumption, thus facilitating conceptualization of lifestyle tribes, status groups, or taste communities as generators of values, attitudes, and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developmental psychologists have often found it difficult to take cultural factors seriously in their research. This is in part because the holistic notion of culture appeared to have global effects that are difficult to model as variables in research designs, and anthropologists have not been able to agree on a viable unit of culture. This paper proposes that treating culture as ‘models’ is a powerful way to conceptualize cultural aspects of human development, and that specific kinds of cultural models can easily be factored into research designs in developmental psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]