Complete copies of these and the other professional publications listed on my Resumé can be obtained by contacting me at garymfontaine@gmail.com. In some cases full text of the publication is available online.
"I was trekking over the Milke Danda toward Taplejung. ... It was very clear and fine and soon I caught sight of Kangchenjunga. I've often seen the Himalayas take on an ethereal appearance as they seem to float above the horizon. As I looked at Kangchenjunga, I could not believe that I could possibly be in the same place, at the same time, as anything so utterly beautiful. Then I saw fire-tailed sunbirds drinking nectar from the rhododendrons. Superficially they are like hummingbirds. They were the most brilliant birds I had ever seen, scarlet and gold with sapphire blue heads and incredibly long tails. Words cannot do justice to the experience. The sense of presence was extreme. ... Since then my definitive description for a magical experience has always been like Kangchenjunga and the sunbirds."
Strange Lands -- we were all born into one. Most of us over the years have by choice or necessity molded ours into the much more familiar and predictable place we call "home." But strange lands are still out there, everywhere. By "strange lands" I mean those relationships, teams, organizations, or foreign lands within which we must deal effectively with new peoples, cultures, places, and technologies. Increasingly we confront these lands abroad on global assignments for multinationals, in foreign study, or intercultural marriage, or even as tourists. We encounter them face-to-face or online as we participate more and more in geographically dispersed teams. And, of course, we encounter them at home every time we wander into our culturally diverse office, classroom or bar. Presence in Strange Lands focuses most significantly on those literal new lands encountered on sojourns abroad, though it deals significantly with these others as well.
"Why do we journey to such lands?" That, in a nutshell, is what this book is about. In spite of ecoshock, frustration, fatigue, failure, and sometimes danger what lures we sojourners from home to the road? What causes us to journey to these strange lands for an assignment, a career or a lifetime? What keeps us there? And, what entices us back there, again, and again–the job, the money, the adventure, the people and cultures we find, the challenges we encounter, the stories we can later tell? That is what this book is about. It is also about the tools we need to take with us to be optimally effective in these lands. But most particularly, it explores the experience of a "sense of presence" -- the heightened immediacy, broad awareness, vividness, responsivity, and clarity so commonly described by sojourners on these journeys. It explores what a sense of presence is, what induces it, what nurtures it, and its key role in helping us deal with the challenges to success encountered in these lands. It introduces the “presence-seekers” -- sometimes presence “junkies” -- for whom a heightened presence is the allure of a life on the road. And it describes what happens as we return to that once familiar land we called "home." Presence in Strange Lands unfolds through the words of numerous sojourners on a broad variety of journeys to very diverse lands (an excerpt from one opens this summary). These descriptions of a sense of presence were elicited through several research projects with methodologies ranging from informal interviews, to focus groups, to web-based forums. They are intertwined with interpretation based on current research and theory to guide readers to a better understanding of their own experiences and to better deal with the challenges encountered in their own strange lands.
Presence in Strange Lands is a book for "travelers," but one that deals not so much with the wear on the feet, but the changes to the mind and the spirit. It opens with the view of Kangchenjunga floating in the sky and along its trek encounters much both outside us and within us. After journeying through the many ways that a sense of presence affects our experiences as we travel the globe--both literally as we get into airplanes and figuratively in geographically dispersed online teams, it ends with an appeal for continued dialogue designed to nurture both the exhilaration and insight that we all have of the Strange Lands in our own lives. And those that by choice, or necessity, we will face in the future.
eBook available at eBook Mall www.ebookmall.com/ebook/presence-in-strange-lands/gary-fontaine, as a Google Book http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=HvT5RiOWgfAC#v=onepage&q&f=false, or as a Kindle Book at http://www.amazon.com/Presence-in-Strange-Lands-ebook/dp/B001KBZFU8/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331673126&sr=1-2
Our world has become international. To do our business successfully today we must rely not on habits developed at home in the past--however effective there--but on strategies responsive to the international world we face. We must do this whether our business is in commerce, diplomacy, science and technology, education, entertainment, tourism, transportation, religion, communication, or the military. And to do business internationally typically requires going there, be it a short-term assignment to negotiate a treaty or a long-term one to manage a subsidiary.
This book provides both practical and conceptual insight into the management of these international assignments. It provides an honest, realistic assessment of the requirements for doing business consistently effectively on them and what personnel and their organization can do to maximize that opportunity. It reviews the commonly described strategies for doing business internationally and their weaknesses. It describes an optimal strategy for doing it and the essential skills associated with this strategy. The book then presents how an organization can best manage programs for screening, self-selection, orientation, training, travel, accommodation, and support to help personnel in using that strategy.
The book is useful as a companion guide for personnel in preparation for and during their international assignments; as a key source for managers, trainers, and human resource specialists responsible for organizational programs to manage these personnel; and as a textbook for students in academic or professional programs in international management, international relations, international studies, intercultural and international communication, or human resource development. It fills a large gap between material currently available focused primarily on comparative management and cross-cultural training ("how other cultures do business") and the full requirements of managing international assignments ("how to do business with those from other cultures"). Issues are presented within an integrated theoretical perspective yet are illustrated at a very practical level. The focus is international--on personnel from any country assigned to any country. Available for purchase online
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Gary Fontaine
University of Hawai‘i, USA
Theory, research, and practice on intercultural teams are emergent effects of the culturally based paradigms within which the scholars and practitioners involvedwork. The focus on intercultural interaction that emerged most significantly in themid-part of last century initially reflected theWestern paradigms in which it occurred, particularly in the fields of management and social science. It was heavily reflective of the dominant individualist and rational/empiricist paradigms. Emphasis was typically on broad, macro-level cultural differences and the manner in which they affected the interaction of individuals. Focus on anything at the level of groups or teams was relatively uncommon outside of a limited concern with teams in the military and athletics. Particular emphasis was on the role of leadership in teams. Over the years the focus expanded to include the impact of culture and cultural differences at the organization level. This occurred significantly due to changes in management science, the influence of an expanding, diverse, global body of scholars and practitioners, and a growing concern with intercultural issues in training and other forms of intervention. By the turn of the century, more work began focusing on the work groups or teams that were actually getting things done within organizations and the teammicrocultures within which they were doing it. While major concern continued to be on leadership, focus on more self-organizing processes also emerged. Most recently, paradigmatic changes in both management and social science brought about by the influence of more biological, evolutionary—rather than rational—paradigms are affecting work on teams, including intercultural teams. Much of this work emerges from a perspective that teams, like cultures, are not static phenomena to be described and classified, but living, breathing, evolving, transitioning, and—usually—dissolving phenomena. This work looks at the processes in this life cycle and how to optimize them. Intercultural teams are no exception and current theory, research, and practice significantly reflect that perspective.
Fontaine, G. (2017). Intercultural Teams. In Y.Y. Kim & K. McKay (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, Volume 2, 1377-1386. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. Also available through the Wiley Online Library at https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118783665.ieicc0061
Gary Fontaine
School of Communications
University of Hawaii
Honolulu HI USA 96822
fontaine@hawaii.edu
Over the last half century multinational enterprises have essentially "swarmed" the globe with regional and local offices in an attempt to benefit from expanded opportunities. The theme of the present paper is that this phenomenon can be usefully be viewed as significantly self-organized swarms searching a solution landscape for optimal solutions to challenges presented by new and rapidly changing organizational ecologies. The paper applies a particle swarm optimization perspective to this phenomenon, relates it specifically to current models of knowledge building and exchange in these enterprises, and discusses the implications for the globalization process.
Fontaine, G. (2006). Global Swarming. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Applications (ISDA'06), 1212-1215. Jinan, Shandong, China. Available for purchase online
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
Until recently the prototypical policy for staffing upper level management positions in local offices of multinationals was to assign personnel from headquarters. This strategy of expatriation significantly enhanced the cultural diversity of local offices and--typically to a lesser degree--headquarters. A decade or so ago expatriation strategies began changing to emphasize filling local positions with local managers because local managers were more familiar with the local staff, clients, markets, and cultures, were less expensive to support, and doing so assuaged a variety of political, image and ethical concerns. Additionally there are more trained, experienced and competent local personnel available and/or local knowledge and skills are now more recognized and valued.
While there may have been short-term increments in performance partially attributable to this change in expatriation strategy, there is the danger of some longer-term decrements. Although multinationals have recognized the problems "expats" have working and living abroad, they appear not to have been as attuned to the knowledge building produced by shuffling them around from local office to local office to headquarters, and so forth. They were involved with both the creation and exchange of knowledge associated with a vastly expanded range of tools for dealing with organizational challenges locally and globally.
This expansion in knowledge and associated skills is, of course, critical to prosperity, if not survival, in our rapidly evolving local and global worlds. Further, recent theoretical developments in the self-organization of biological systems suggest that significantly altering the diversity of people interacting at the local level with specific knowledge and skills is likely to impact the building of this critical knowledge. This paper examines both theoretical and policy issues associated with this impact.
Fontaine, G. (2005). A Self-Organization Perspective on the Impact of Local verses Global Assignment Strategies and Knowledge Building. International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations, 5(1), 57-66.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
This study assessed the motivational profiles of sojourners in international business and foreign study. A "Reasons for International Travel" questionnaire was administered to 107 Asian and American foreign study students, 90 Asian participants and 26 Americans participants in two graduate cross-cultural management programs, and 32 managers for two large multinationals. Principal components factor analyses produced six factors: (1) Presence-Seeking; (2) Explorer; (3) Recreation; (4) Job/Career; (5) Collector/Consumer; and (6) Family Stability. MANOVA and ANOVA indicated surprising commonality in the profiles across these factors with Explorer, Recreation, Presence-Seeking and Job/Career most important. There were, however, several significant differences between groups.
Fontaine, G. (2005). Motivations for going international: Profiles of Asian and American foreign study students, cross-cultural management students, and global managers. International Journal of Management, 22(2).
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
Research over the last couple decades has explored the relationship between a variety of states of consciousness, performance, and motivation. These have included flow and a sense of presence in face-to-face, online, and virtual environments. This study examined the relationship between presence and flow experienced by 75 male and female participants from several Pacific-Rim nations on 4 international teams and their self-reported performance, enjoyment, and motivation associated with team-related tasks. The results indicate that in these relatively novel (because of their cultural diversity) task situations self-reported performance correlated more highly with presence (r = .34, df = 72, p < .01) than flow (r = .26, df = 71, p < .05). Enjoyment and motivation, however, correlated more highly with flow (r = .60, df = 71, p < .01 and r = .40, df = 71, p < .01, respectively) than presence (r = .26, p < .05 and r = .25, p < .05). These findings suggest the need to further explore the relationship between activity- or task-related states of consciousness, the characteristics of the tasks involved (particularly in terms of their novelty), and the effect on performance and motivation.
Fontaine, G. (2004). A sense of presence and self-reported performance in international teams. Psychological Reports, 95, 154-158.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
In the early days of wide-spread globalization the prototypical policy for staffing upper level management positions in local offices of multinational enterprises (MNEs) was to assign personnel from headquarters. This strategy of expatriation provided a major impetus for the development of the intercultural/international training field which has been the major focus of my own professional activity--someone needed to help prepare and support those “expats” as they migrated from global assignment to global assignment to home again. A decade or so ago expatriation strategies began changing to include much greater emphasis on filling local management roles with local personnel. For example, the Shanghai Daily News (2002) reports on a survey by a global executive search firm which concluded that the localization of executive teams is an irreversible trend in China. Leow (2002) reports that more than 40% of the MNEs in China's manufacturing, retail, banking, finance and telecommunications sectors intend to phase outs their expatriate senior executives. Downes and Thomas (2000) found that expatriation has decreased over time for U.S. subsidiaries in the petroleum/chemicals industry. These changes have been broadly documented in MNEs with headquarters throughout Europe (Bertoin Antal, Stroo & Willems, 2000), Japan (Kochan, Orlikowski. & Cutcher-Gershenfeld, 2002), Singapore (Tsang, 1999), and the U.S. with the latter perhaps making this change most rapidly (Shanghai Daily News, 2002). The basic arguments have been that local managers were more familiar with the local staff, clients, markets, and cultures, were less expensive to support, and doing so assuaged a variety of political, image and even ethical concerns. Additionally those in many MNEs now perceive that (a) there are more trained, experienced and competent local personnel available and/or (b) local knowledge and skills are now more recognized and valued. A plethora of anecdotal evidence indicates that in many respects this change in strategy has had some short-term performance successes.
Fontaine, G. (2003). The “Knowledge Paradox” in Global Management: Local versus Global Assignment Strategies. International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, Vol. 3, 659-669.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
In the Asia Pacific, along with the rest of the world, there has been a rapid expansion in the use of geographically dispersed teams playing pivotal organizational and interorganizational roles. Yet our understanding of the conditions nurturing the task effectiveness of those teams is still embryonic. This article examines conceptual issues associated with the impact of culture, geography and technology in those teams in the Asia Pacific. It identifies the pivotal role played by "a sense of presence" (the feeling of "being there" with team members in different places and often different times) in both the effectiveness of, and satisfaction in, the use of such teams. Current research designed to explore these issues in teams in business and education in the region is described.
Fontaine, G. (2002). Teams in Teleland: Working Effectively in Geographically Dispersed Teams “in” the Asia Pacific. Team Performance Management, 8(5/6), 122-133. Available on line
Gary Fontaine & Grace Chun
University of Hawaii
We all have journeyed to many "strange lands" over the years, miles, and technologies. Co-author Gary has taught traditional “face-to-face” (f2f) courses and training workshops for over 30 years. Over the last decade, however, many of his academic and professional journeys have been to "Teleland." He has taught there f2f using the added support of asynchronous communication technology (at the University of Hawaii using e-mail and various "Web forums"). He has taught courses in which there was a combination of f2f and distant participants using synchronous communication technology (the Hawaii Interactive Telecommunication System based on interactive video). Typically the distant participants in these courses were in several different remote classrooms. And he has taught courses with solely distant participants using asynchronous technology. In these latter courses the participants were not only distant from him but also were distant from each other without any “real” classrooms as such (the Fielding Graduate University's program in Organization Management and Development). Often both the participants and he were mobile, as well, traveling throughout the world on business during the course. Strange lands for sure! Co-author Grace’s career, on the other hand, has emerged more recently in an academic world spanning both China and the U.S. and blending both f2fl and online courses. Her graduate research (at the University of Hawaii) has focused specifically on the challenges in the latter. This chapter describes some of what we have learned thus far from these journeys to Teleland—both from a growing body of research on them and from our own experience in them. Whereas in a chapter such as this there is always the temptation to provide lists of “do’s” and “don’ts,” recipes, we believe it is way too early to identify such with a great deal of certainty—we need still to understand the basic research increasingly available as the backdrop to understanding our personal experiences and designing our courses.
Fontaine, G. & Chun, G. (2010). Presence in Teleland. In K. Rudestam & J. Schoenholtz-Read (Eds.), Handbook of online learning: Second Edition, 30-56. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
This paper first makes the case that effective preparation, support, and training for international assignments to, from or within Asia and the Pacific need to be based on sound models of the skills required to meet the challenges of those assignments for the assignees themselves, their families accompanying them, those managing them, and the hosts with whom they are working. The paper then presents the characteristic ecologies encountered on these international assignments; identifies copying with ecoshock, developing strategies to effectively complete essential tasks in a new ecology, and maintaining motivation as the three key challenges faced in those ecologies; and describes the skills useful in dealing effectively with these challenges. Finally, the implications for intervention programs to assist assignees in acquiring these skills and an illustrative training program outline are presented.
Fontaine, G. (2000). Skills for successful international assignments to, from, and within Asia and the Pacific: Implications for preparation, support, and training. In U. C. V. Haley (Ed.) Strategic management in the Asia Pacific: Harnessing regional and organization change for competitive advantage. Oxford, England: Butterworth-Heinemann, 327-345.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
This paper first describes the characteristic ecology encountered on international assignments to or within the Asia and Pacific region. It then identifies copying with ecoshock, developing strategies to effectively complete essential tasks in a new ecology, and maintaining motivation as the three key challenges that must be dealt with effectively for assignment success to occur. Finally, the implications for training of personnel destined for assignments in the region and an illustrative program outline are presented.
Presented at the International Symposium on Pacific Asian Business, Bangkok, 1994. Available online.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
The state of consciousness referred to as a sense of presence has received significant attention in research on teleoperator and virtual reality systems. There has apparently been, however, little theoretical development or empirical research associated with the experience of presence. In that regard, it is useful to look at another very different context in which it has received attention. This paper reports on a study recently conducted on the experience of presence in international and intercultural encounters that may have theoretical significance beyond this limited context. Overall, the results indicated that the experiences of "realness, vividness, and feeling very much alive," "attending to the immediate situation," "a perception of thinking and acting in new and innovative ways," and "a broad awareness of everything around" clustered together as a single factor and that a sense of presence in this context is a state of consciousness with at least these characteristics. There was also evidence that the experience of the state is related to the perception of quickness in the passage of time, the recall of details of encounters, their enjoyment, and the motivation to repeat them.
Fontaine, G. (1993). The experience of a sense of presence in intercultural and international encounters. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1(4), 1-9. Available online.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
International assignments--whether in business, diplomacy, technology transfer or whatever--typically involve journeys to strange lands. That is, they are encounters with new ecologies; new and diverse social, physical, and biological environments. Those ecologies present several significant challenges. To the degree that personnel are able to deal effectively with these challenges, their assignments will be successful. To the degree that personnel are unable to meet one or more of these challenges, their success will be less than optimal--perhaps they will fail altogether. Thus the idenfication of these challenges and training in the skills required to deal with them, should play a critical role in the training for all international assignments.
Fontaine, G. (1993). Training for the three key challenge encountered on all international assignments. Leadership and Organization Journal, 14(3), 8-14. Available online.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
International assignments in business, diplomacy, foreign study, scientific exchange, or whatever, involve journeys to "strange lands" or new ecologies, i.e., new sociocultural, physical, and biological environments. That is both their bane and their lure.
There are several characteristics common to the ecologies of most international assignments (Desatnick & Bennett, 1977; Fontaine, 1989). For instance, assignees confront differences associated with people (e.g., culture, language, physical appearance, crowdedness); place (seasons, climate, topography, built facilities, sights, sounds, smells, or simply being far from the home to which their identity is attached); travel (getting there takes longer, is more complex, and requires more preparation); time (it usually takes longer to get things done internationally); communication (language can make communication with others abroad difficult and time-zones can do the same for communicating back to the "home office"); structure (assignees are often more responsible for structuring activities themselves); and support (separation from the social and organizational support groups left home, disruption of those accompanying them, and difficulty in developing new ones). These characteristics essentially define what "international assignments" are and set them apart from their domestic counterparts.
Other ecological characteristics differentiate one international assignment from another (Fontaine, 1989). For instance, the specific character of each of the above will differentiate between assignments (i.e., assignment to an Asian or American culture with a temperate or tropical climate, etc.). In addition, assignments may differ in organizational context (e.g., business, diplomacy, or foreign study); degrees of power assignees have relative to their hosts; the standard of living they find; and the type and novelty of the communication, transportation, manufacturing, educational, or other technologies needed to get tasks done. Of particular importance to this chapter can be differences between assignments in duration (e.g., three days, three months, or three years), whether the destination is a cosmopolitan urban area with a plethora of resources for support, entertainment, recreation, and so forth or a provincial one with very few; the availability of a supportive expatriate community; and a culture/language that eases or hinders entry into host country support groups.
The new ecologies encountered on international assignments confront assignees with significant challenges to success in terms of their adjustment, performance, and satisfaction (Black, Mendenhall & Oddou, 1991; Dunbar, 1992; Parker & McEvoy, 1993). I have earlier (Fontaine, 1989 & 1993a) identified three key challenges as: (1) coping with ecoshock (assignees' physiological and psychological reaction to the new ecology); (2) getting the job done by dealing effectively with diversity; and (3) maintaining the motivation to continue in spite of almost inevitable frustration, fatigue, ecoshock, and failure. To the degree that assignees deal effectively with these challenges, their assignments will be successful. To the degree that they are unable to meet one or more of them, their success will be less than optimal--perhaps they will fail altogether. Improving the skills required to deal effectively with each challenge should be a central objective of training for all international assignments. As we will see, meeting that objective significantly requires understanding the roles social support plays both in producing the challenges and in providing options for dealing with them.
Fontaine, G. (1996). Social support and the challenges of international assignments: Implications for training. In D. Landis & R. Bhagat (Eds.), Handbook of intercultural training--second edition (pp. 264-281). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Gary Fontaine
University of Hawaii
The present study assessed the motivational profiles of selected groups of travelers in international business and foreign study contexts. A previously developed "Reasons for International Travel" questionnaire was administered to U.S. foreign study students (n=26), U.S. managers training for assignment to Japan (n=26), Japanese managers training for assignment to the U.S. (n=40), and division directors for two large U.S. multinationals in Southeast Asia (n=11). The results revealed that motivational profiles were generally similar across subject groups with motives based on exploration, recreation, and presence seeking most important. There were, however, several significant differences between groups in the importance of specific motivations. The results are discussed in terms of the need for studying both intrinsic and extrinsic components of motivational profiles in the context of better understanding the role of motivations on assignment adjustment, performance, and satisfaction.
Fontaine, G. (1993). Motivational factors of international travelers. Psychological Reports, 72, 1106.
