Acts of Faith Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Acts of Faith - Essay Example In this book, the author talks about various identity related issues that young Muslim immigrant generation faces in America. The author tries to find a perfect balance between the life of a Muslim and a fully American person. A person taking birth in America comes usually faces identity crisis because he/she has to cope with the challenge of finding the real identity out of the pool of incomplete identities. In this book, the author has mentioned that in the process of finding his true self, he experienced different aspects of a mixed culture. For example, the author was taking inspirations from people from other religions and had relations with Mormon and Jewish women. Practicing a different religion (Buddhism), having parents from some other religion (Islam), and discovering roots in some other culture (Indian Culture) are the basic elements of this book. This book is mainly for such immigrants who are in despair or feel alienated about their future. In a world full of fundamentalist aggression and noticeable religious division, this book provides a way and hope for people to find their real self, as well as a direction towards their future. I think this book is a good source of hope for people taking birth and growing up in America as Muslim immigrants. In general, such people face difficulty in finding their origin in terms of culture and region because they live in a Western culture that does not hold the same cultural or religious values as of their real cultures and religions. In some cases, they face identity crisis in their whole lives. This book provides them with some hope to find their identities while living in a different society. One of the main challenges for a second generation Muslim immigrant is to find the roots of his/her own religion and culture after facing a series of rejections all through his/her adolescence and early adulthood. This book can help such

A personal evaluation of knowledge and its practical application borne Essay

A personal evaluation of knowledge and its practical application borne of this insight - Essay Example Not everyone in the organisation maintains the same cultural characteristics or sustains the same learning styles, which can conflict the process of effective knowledge transfer and knowledge sense-making. Having identified the role of the self in knowledge management, this paper describes personal understandings of the self gleaned through the curriculum and attempts to apply these lessons, using theories of knowledge management as a template, to my personal role as a future KM facilitator, manager or human resource practitioner. Understanding of the intrinsic self The knowledge management process begins with effective communications processes. Knowledge, whether tacit or explicit, cannot be productively categorised, shared or transformed into practical and useful information without finding some variety of shared meaning within the communities of practice model. Knowledge is neither created, transformed or disseminated within a proverbial vacuum, meaning that knowledge management p ractices will not be successful without direct interaction with diverse organisational actors. This fact requires development of a knowledge culture in which a set of shared meanings or symbols is present throughout the organisational structure, something that can be significantly conflicted by differing cultural values, unique learning styles with individuals, or patterns of ethnocentrism, a type of cultural conflict, that conflicts decoding of knowledge communications. Stover (2004) supports the importance of engagement with others in the organisation to facilitate knowledge transfer, iterating that knowledge conversion can only occur through direct interaction with others. Hence, I learned the importance about understanding my own, inherent learning styles and how this impacts personality, worldview, willingness to engage with others socially and interpersonally, and even how the decoding process in communications would occur. Having completed Kolb’s Learning Styles Invent ory, I discovered that I maintain intrinsic characteristics that are aligned with the Converger. The Converger profile is largely unemotional, maintains narrow interests, and appreciates active experimentation to make the abstract into concrete understandings through practical application of deductive reasoning (Smith 2001). The Converger is, inherently, less interested in abstractions that occur during the socialisation process, thus there is less emphasis on people and more on the scientific approach to problem-solving by legitimately applying theory to experience to make evaluations. The Converger would theoretically be the least social profile among Kolb’s four learning styles. Now, it has been established that effective knowledge management requires interventions with other organisational actors in order to make knowledge transfer productive and relevant to the organisation and its strategic objectives. However, having learned that I maintain much more pragmatic and sens ible characteristics (far and above a social leaning), I realised that knowledge management could be conflicted by having an in-borne preference for self-motivated experimentation whilst others in the organisation might fit Diverger profiles that are more concerned with embracing culture and the social condition.