Integration Nature and Requirements (part 2) – How?

Dear friends,

After reasoning about some conditions that make integration desirable, we should now target the question of ‘how’ this process should be conducted.

Integration processes between two or more parties should be carried out in a way that it results on maximizing the positive features of all involved parties, while minimizing their flaws.

Taking again the example of companies A and B of our previous post, we remember that the advantage of A is being a bigger company, thus being economically stronger; while B’s strength is having a new promising product in the market. Let us then suppose that, for being economically stronger, A wants to impose certain restrictions on B’s production chain, leading the given product to have great quality losses. Consequently, this could lead the product to become less acceptable from the market. In this case, despite the fact that the situation involving A and B suggests that their merge could be profitable, this could result in general losses for both A and B.

In the case above, company A has acted as ‘oppressor’ because of its economical advantage. This is very common in integration processes because there is usually one party that is stronger than the others. For example, when immigrants are integrating in their living countries, this country’s society may sometimes oppress them, by not giving them the chance to express who they really are. Consequently, this society is loosing a great opportunity to profit from the integration in its full potential. Immigrants are often attracted because of their work force, or some other advantage to the country that receives them. However, they may provide much more than new workers. They may bring new ways of thinking and experimenting life to that society. On the other hand, immigrants must definitely make firm steps towards adjusting to their new land, learning what people there know or do best. Embracing culture diversity has many advantages, such as:

• Allowing people to rethink their points of view, taking other cultural perspectives;
• Diminishing prejudice;
• Profiting from different solutions applied in different cultures, so that innovative ways to resolve conflicts and problems may be found.

These are only a few examples of good things that might emerge from true integration. There is a last important observation I’d like to make before I rest my case on our discussion, and this is: being open does not mean that the society mentioned above should allow all types of behavior and attitudes. It is important that some cultural values are preserved, being them those that guarantee the well-being of citizens, such as not accepting violent behavior, giving equal rights to all human beings despite gender and race, and not imposing religious beliefs and cults. I guess this statement is more debate-motivating than a closure… So, although I here declare our integration discussing week over, please do not be shy as new ideas and thoughts on this issue are always of interest in this blog.

Cheers to all,
Renata