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In cross-cultural business negotiation, culture is known to influence negotiation processes. As a lens to study this effect we deployed the Lemon Car Game, an online negotiation game developed for this purpose (Hofstede et al. in: Proceedings of 39th international simulation and gaming association conference (ISAGA). Technologia, Kaunas, pp 39–46, 2009a; Hofstede et al. in: David, Sichman (eds) Multi-agent-based simulation IX, international workshop, MABS 2008, revised selected papers, LNAI 5269. Springer, Berlin, pp 1–16, 2009b). In this article we report the results from the game, obtained from over 800 players from more than 70 countries. We employ several complementary analyses in a mixed-methods approach. Our findings show that to make sense of the players' actions during negotiation, economic rationality falls short. A pan-cultural individual-level analysis of actions and stated intentions also fails to yield a coherent picture. Within countries, however, actions and intentions do cohere, as shown by an ecological country-level factor analysis, from which three factors emerge for the sellers at country level: trustworthiness, opportunism, and fairness. We conclude from these findings that, in this game, players are driven by what we call relational rationality: they are rational from the perspective of the social world in which they live, with interpersonal relationships weighing heavily. Relational rationality changes players' perspective of economic rationality, and thus their observed behaviour in negotiation. Based on this evidence, we extrapolate that relational rationality significantly influences negotiation processes in all cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany in 1990, the landscape of Berlin’s cultural institutions has been transformed into an unstable and still-shifting geographical structure in which both the reassertion of early twentieth-century patterns and the active construction of new cultural centres may be observed. The paper traces the evolution of Berlin’s cultural landscape over the past decade and questions the future of Germany’s capital city as a European cultural metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli immigration to Berlin has increased significantly over the past decade, giving rise to a nascent Hebrew culture. Consequently, Hebrew letterforms, once seldom found outside the traditional context of synagogues, cemeteries or memorials, are nowadays also found in public spaces and restaurants across the city. While research on Israeli immigration to Germany has greatly increased in recent years, the visual characteristics of this community have, however, yet to be researched. Using two Israeli cafés in Berlin's Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts as case studies, this article will examine the expression of Israeli cultural identity in the German capital through letterforms. I will argue that the logo designs of both cafés express a connection to Israeli culture in two contrasting ways: on the one hand, a nostalgic connection echoing traditions from the past, and on the other hand, an attempt to maintain a distance from this very culture. Based on interviews with the café owners and a visual analysis of their logos, this article will show how both the café owners strove to express a personal stance in regard to their identity as Israelis through the typefaces and designs used to represent their businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a dream sequence that Heine describes in Ludwig Börne: A Memorial (1840), the narrator finds himself at night on a street corner exposed to the pulsating street life of nocturnal Paris. Read with recourse to the notion of Derrida's voyou (rogue), the paper examines the significance of street life in the 19th century and the critical issues and concern Heine's text poses. A unique view of the experience of modern city life, the narrator's observations from the corner stone at the intersection of Rue Laffitte and the Boulevard des Italiens articulate a visionary critique of the complex of the socio-economico-political and esthetic issues that define modern urban experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan and Germany both saw an opportunity in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games to use the publicity to promote their image in the world. In particular, the host country's mass media generated a wealth of materials, ranging from radio broadcasts to newspaper articles, cigarette-card photographs, and film footage. This study makes use of these primary sources to analyze their portrayals of Japan during the Games, revealing an overall image plagued by stereotypes and misconceptions. Japan, whose successes often came across as surprises, also appeared as a sort of lesser runner-up best suited for aping Germany. Given that the Olympics occurred only three months before the Anti-Comintern Pact of November 25, 1936, these unflattering depictions of Japan in the German mass media indicate that German-Japanese rapprochement resulted from a radical shift from previous cultural and social attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the views of culture critic Siegfried Kracauer on cultural spaces in Berlin, Germany. It explores the outlook of Kracauer on the surface character of Weimar Berlin. Kracauer emphasized the failure of the mass of salaried employees in Berlin during 1920s to understand the altered circumstances that surrounded them. It suggests that individuals may understand the nature of changes from their surface distractions than from any architectural icons if they will direct their attention to contemporary urban life spaces.

This article investigates the evolution of American and Soviet arts policy in Berlin between 1945 and 1947, with special attention to the role of music. Music's political ambiguity, and its reception as at once a uniquely German and international form of artistic expression, made it an ideal medium through which Allied military officials could project their country's aesthetic ideals and programmes for German cultural reform. If Berliners and their Soviet occupiers largely agreed upon the importance of élite musical tradition as an expression of national accomplishment and the mark of a cultured society, American authorities tended to treat music more as an entertaining, but non-essential diversion. Under the city's quadripartite military administration, it was difficult for any one occupation authority to pursue cultural objectives that were aesthetically or politically more restrictive than the others. Thus, superpower rivalry initially created more opportunities than limitations for Berlin artists. American officers were compelled to consent to more lenient denazification standards for musicians than they had initially intended, while the Soviets permitted and even encouraged modernist musical experiments in their sector of occupation. In competition with each other and seeking the loyalties of their German charges, the Allies encouraged Berlin to become a lively—and heavily subsidized—city of the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that multiculturalism is not integrated into the city's cultural policy which promotes Berlin as an internationally open, high cultural metropolis, not as a culturally diverse city. The responsibility for multiculturalism falls to the Commissioner for Foreigner Affairs, whose main concern is social integration while countering discrimination on the basis of cultural differences. Recurrent political debates on national identity, "majority society" and the "leading" culture have sought to perpetuate ethnic-based citizenship, underpinned by a singular, bounded notion of "German culture", from which migrants are excluded. The institutions themselves which foster a multicultural public sphere treat migrants as foreigners and their culture as deriving from the country of origin rather than being the product of an intercultural mix, "made in Berlin". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public, popular, and scholarly discourses, Turkish migrant youth appear as relentless agents of revitalized Turkishness or Islam in the midst of European modernity. Contrary to this seemingly intuitive assumption, I argue in this article that the manifest diversity of migrant youth cultures is facilitated and authorized by the discursive and institutional resources available to them in Berlin, the metropolis in the making. Particularly significant for the cultural projects of Turkish youths are transnational cultural flows and contemporary discourses of plurality, human rights, and equality, which (en)gender their presence in the public spaces of Berlin and complicate 'national' configurations of belonging and conventional conceptions of otherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]