Reflective Essay: Alice in Wonderland -- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson Lewi

There and back again with Alice I gasp my hands on my knees, bent over, out of breath. I can feel my lungs compressing and pushing hard against my chest in an effort to fit just a little more air. My palms are wet, beads of sweat trickle down my forehead, making my hair feel wet and sticky. My shirt is drenched in sweat. I stare at the ground and see the stalks of grass, standing tall like trees to the tiny ants that scurry among them. What I must look like to those minuscule creatures, like a giant, so big that I block the blazing sun and give them shade. I wonder if they are afraid of me? I lift my eyes and glance ahead. I’m almost there, only a couple more meters. I hear footsteps behind me, they’re catching up quickly. It’s now or never. I push off with my back foot and go into a sprint. My heart speeds up, almost as fast as I’m running and I can hear its pounding in my head, like a prisoner beating on locked doors, wanting to be free. If it had feet of it’s own it might run alongside me and race me to the fort, but that’s silly, hearts don’t have feet. I swing my arms back and forth to help me run faster and I try to take longer strides. I’m running so fast now, I feel like everything around me is standing still, as if I’m the only thing in the world that is moving. I don’t want to stop running, I want to keep going, faster and faster, forever. Now I understand why my heart pounds so hard, why it tries to push out of my chest and run on its little feet and never stop, never look back. But I canno t keep on running forever, I have to stop. My legs finally give in and I plop onto the stiff ground. The dust sticks to my sweaty clothes and turns into mud. I take big, loud breaths but I cannot hear myself because my heart is sti... ...in a scientific experiment. Everything is set to provide you with the perfect living conditions, the right amount of food, water, the right temperature, etc. And while you’re in that perfect, controlled environment you feel safe, you feel happy and yet, somewhere lingering in the depths of your mind is the gnawing sensation that at any given moment someone will unscrew the lid on your jar and let in the wrong air, that you will be forced to wake up from your perfect world and dragged, kicking and screaming into the world that everyone else lives in. That is my fear. That I will wake up one day and not be able to return to the world in my dreams but that I will have to learn to survive in the real world. Much like the adventuresome Alice, my wish is to live somewhere between the non fiction and fantasy of daily life, to allow the lines to be blurry. But how blurry?

Organizational Culture Essay

This essay/assignment is a solution paper on Organizational Culture. It reviews the Hofstede Model and Schein Model as well as tries to understand the the dynamics which influences the occupational cultures. This is a sample paper. The definition of culture remains quite ambiguous with researchers assessing it utilising different methodologies. The common understanding of culture is a way of doing things, or the norm by which a society organizes its tasks. However, the terminology tends to be classified more distinctly when looked upon in the aspect of organizations and their systems of performing actions. Two of the most prominent researchers on this aspect of organizational behaviour are Geert Hofstede and Edgar Schein. Each has presented the concept of organizational culture using a paradigm based on the values and thinking exhibited by the workers of an organization, but has assessed different levels of adaptation and integration that bind this aspect of culture. According to Hofstede, ‘culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one group from another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values’. On the other hand, Schein has taken a slightly different approach and states ‘culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization that operate unconsciously and define in a basic â€Å"taken for granted† fashion an organization’s view of its self and its environment’. The common notion among researchers is that every organization exhibits certain values and norms in the business environment and a company will likely end up portraying two things; organizational culture and corporate culture. The former is based on what the company ‘is’, while the latter principle is an embodiment of the vision and character of the company, making up what a company ‘has’. Both Schein and Hofstede showed similarities in their presentation of the concept of organizational culture by applying a focus on the mental assumptions that shape the ideology of culture and give rise to the norms and values that end up being regarded as the primary character of an organization. However, the anthropological approach adopted by them towards organizational culture varied greatly. Hofstede favoured the ‘etic’ or dimensional approach, where the description of behaviour is very neutral and can be applied to various cultures. A key reasoning for this is the linkage he presented between the national culture  prevalent in the business environment that an organization operates in, and its resulting effects on the shaping of the norms that are applied by the organization itself. On the other hand, Schein looked upon organizational behaviour with an ‘emic’ approach, describing the dimensions that affected companies by viewing it from the aspect of a person within the culture. Hofstede undertook an extensive research process within IBM, to understand the behaviour it and its employees exhibited across the many offices it had in the world. His ideology was that organizational behaviour was greatly influenced by national and regional cultural groupings. The conclusion from the research conducted allowed Hofstede to present five characteristics of culture that he believed were exhibited by organizations in one way or form across the world. These included power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, long vs. short term orientation, and individualism vs. collectivism. Schein’s organizational model looked at culture from the standpoint of an observer and presented three levels to describe the complex workings involved in a company. At the first level were the observable artefacts, pointing to those attributes which could be seen, heard or felt by the observer. The second level was the exposed values, which referred to the professed culture of the organization by its members. At the third level lie tacit assumptions, which are made up of the unseen elements of culture of an organization that become the unspoken rules of the company. While Hofstede’s model of organization culture relies on the tried and tested ideology of cultural theorists by underlying the determination of culture in an organization from core values and assumptions of a given national culture, Schein’s model brings about more functionality to the subject area by delving into a deeper understanding of the factors that influenced the exhibited culture in the organization. Hofstede’s IBM study developed linkages between personality and culture, by relating to individuals as components of societies, and organizations a resultant of both. Schein presented the notion of learning as a part of the organizational culture, and one of the building blocks that courted different operators in its assimilation and establishment. In both models, the common factor remains the individuals who form the organization, and in many ways are responsible for providing the behavioural traits to the company in order to portray a sense of belonging. The divergence in its  initiation relates to the variance held by Hofstede and Schein, with the former attributing the national culture being the driving force, while the latter focuses on the various actors who play a role in the creation of the organizational entity as the contributors to the culture of that establishment. While personality will play a part in the integration between the original and acquired culture, the need for understanding the dynamics which influence the occupational cultures is important in order to become aware of the human factor and its role in the process. References Hofstede, G. & McCrae, R. (2004) ‘Personality and Culture Revisited: Linking Traits and Dimensions of Culture’, Cross-Cultural Research, Volume 38, No. 1, pp. 52 – 88 Schein, E. (1996) ‘Culture: The Missing Concept in Organization Studies’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 2, pp. 229 – 240

How The Tempest Shows The Human Condition - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 1 Words: 377 Downloads: 2 Date added: 2019/07/30 Category Literature Essay Level High school Topics: The Tempest Essay William Shakespeare Essay Did you like this example? The Tempest begins with a ship caught in a storm on its way to a wedding. It crashes on an island whose only inhabitants are Prospero, his daughter Miranda, his slave Caliban, and a number of spirits. Prospero actually orchestrated the storm through Ariel, a spirit who owes Prospero service because Prospero saved his life. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "How The Tempest Shows The Human Condition" essay for you Create order One of the ship’s passengers is Prospero’s brother Antonio, who usurped Prospero’s dukedom and had him banished to the remote island . By shipwrecking Antonio on the island, Prospero intends to get his dukedom back. Raw human nature as well as the things that influence the characters personalities are very visible as Shakespeare strips away all normal social structure. The first example of this raw look at human personality in The Tempest is during the shipwreck. The nobles and sailors have a very well defined social hierarchy. This hierarchy is destroyed when the ship wrecks on Prospero’s island. When the storm begins the Boatswain says â€Å"What cares these roarers for the name of king?†. This statement indicates that class doesnt matter in a dire situation, and is something that would not be acceptable to say to a noble under normal circumstances. But because the king and his nobles are putting their lives in the hands of the Boatswain, they have no choice but to accept it. The second example is the way Prospero hides his intentions and is often not truthful. When Prospero causes the storm, he doesn’t tell his daughter why he needed to cause the storm. As a reader, I wondered why he did this. He also has never told his daughter of their past, as seen in this quote: â€Å"You’ve often started to tell me who I am, but then suddenly stopped, leaving me asking questions that never get answered, telling me, â€Å"Wait. Not yet.†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ This is interesting because it implies that her father is keeping the truth from her. What could Prospero have gone through in the past to feel it imperative to lie? In summary, The Tempest shows the human condition (what makes and shapes a person) through getting rid of normal social structure and causing the reader to wonder about a character’s backstory and what causes their behavior and feelings.