Ineffectiveness and inefficiency of intercultural meetings

Membership in a society produces the phenomenon of acculturation whereby the individual acquires that society's frames and terms of reference, its presuppositions and its internal values and world view. Intercultural meetings solve linguistic dissimilarities by translation and interpretation; but semantic problems arising from the different cultures' perceptions and premises remain a major problem. Even when intercultural meetings are ideologically unified, for example on a theme for world socialism, cultural dissimilarities inevitably introduce misunderstandings and argument. The ineffectiveness of intercultural meetings due to semantic problems can be illustrated by the difficulties in coming to a common understanding of terms such as: human rights, democracy, progress development, justice, equality, etc. On a behavioural level, meetings are almost inevitably convened without adequate time for delegates to be acculturated, at least temporarily, to the special intercultural milieu. The science of conference management has not developed sufficiently to remedy this and the other factors contributing to the inefficiency of such meetings.