Interculturality: the power of words

Editor’s note

Secularism, racism, community, universalism, stereotypes, but also rootstock, creolisa­tion, wokeism…, this A to Z comprising fifty entries gives a firmly committed interpre­tation of concepts structuring, questioning or underpinning reflections on intercultural issues. Without claiming to be exhaustive or objective, it complements and updates a number of definitions, commenting on them briefly in an easily accessible way.

Readers are free to immerse themselves in these various concepts as they wish, so opening doors to other viewpoints and examining their own perceptions.

A must-have book at a time when extremism is gaining ground all over the world, so we can imagine what could at last be a fairer and less discriminatory society, reconciled in its diversity…

Philippe Pierre campaigns for closer ties between the theoretical outlook and aspects of practice in multicultural environments (www.philippepierre.com). He has a doctorate in sociology from Institut d’études politiques de Paris (IEP – Paris Institute of Political Studies), was a human resources manager for nearly twenty years (Total and L’Oréal), while continuing to work as a lecturer and associate researcher at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCI – Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences) of the CNRS (France’s National Centre for Research). He is the author of fourteen books and some sixty scientific papers published in international journals specialising in the fields of human resources and corporate sociology. He co-directed the master’s degree in intercultural management at Paris-Dauphine University for nearly ten years, and currently advises companies, associations and NGOs. He has recently published, with Jean-François Chanlat, Le Management interculturel. Évolution, tendances et cri­tiques [Intercultural Management. Developments, Trends and Reviews] (EMS, 2018) and, with Michel Sauquet, L’Archipel humain. Vivre la rencontre interculturelle [The Human Archipelago. Living Intercultural Encounters] (ECLM, 2022). His most recent research is focused on cultural identities in a globalised world, the socialisation of mobile manag­ers, the protection of talented people, learning organisations, intergenerational issues…

Michel Sauquet spent more than forty years of his working life in the field of inter­national and cross-cultural cooperation within international organisations, NGOs and foundations. Having lived for several years in countries in the Global South (Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Brazil) and travelled extensively afterwards on all continents, he took an early interest in intercultural exchange issues and chose to present and put forward his analyses for discussion in a number of books and articles, while leading university sem­inars (École centrale Paris, Ponts et Chaussées, Inalco, Paris-Dauphine University, and Sciences Po Paris, where he was a lecturer for seventeen years). Among his thirty works of fiction and in the field of the humanities, five deal directly with intercultural matters: L’Intelligence de l’autre [The Intelligence of Others] (ECLM, 2007), L’Intelligence inter­culturelle [Intercultural Intelligence](ECLM, 2014), Le Culturoscope [The Culturoscope] (ECLM, 2016), L’Archipel humain [The Human Archipelago] (ECLM, 2022) and Le Pari de l’interculturalité [The Gamble of Interculturality] (Éd. Jésuites, 2023).