UNESCO Courier articles from April 1994

UNESCO Courier archives from April 1994

The Arctic, from Stones to Man
April 1, 1994... In 1948, twenty-six-year-old Jean Malaurie embarked on his first polar expedition, to the west coast of Greenland. Two years later he spent a winter with the Inuit, learning their language and hunting techniques and sharing their everyday...

Modern Management and Local Traditions
April 1, 1994... BUSINESS firms, especially big industrial firms, are held up as a model of rationality and organization. Many countries where "traditional" cultures still prevail look to them to play a catalytic role in bringing about change and to challenge...

Business Cultures: Every Organization Has Its Symbols, Rituals and Heroes
April 1, 1994... MANAGEMENT means getting things done through (other) people. This is true the world over. In order to achieve this, one has to know what needs to be done and one has to know the people involved. Understanding people means understanding their...

Togo: Going by the Book
April 1, 1994... A case of efficiency based on scrupulous observance of a rule-book that contains echoes of village traditions IN his account of the 1948 strike on the Dakar-Niger Railway, the Senegalese writer and film director Sembene Ousmane recalls how one of...

Tunisia: They Do It Their Way
April 1, 1994... Sometimes the most efficient management style is to take things as they come "My father always told me: 'When you work, always remain aziz'!" the workman we were interviewing began. Aziz means "dignified", but also has connotations of pride,...

Local Loyalties: A Hidden Asset
April 1, 1994... A modern factory can run smoothly without a highly skilled workforce ACCORDING to an idea so widespread that it has almost become a truism, ultramodern factories that work properly are only to be found in countries with industrial experience,...

The National Park Dilemma
April 1, 1994... NATIONAL parks are universally recognized as places of exceptional beauty and of major importance as regards the flora and fauna that countries are trying to preserve and protect. We should not, however, underestimate the threats to which they are...

Eastern Europe: Voices from the Past
April 1, 1994... Each nation has its own language, history and ways of working SINCE the fall of the Berlin Wall, eastern Europe has been overrun by Western businessmen eager to initiate entrepreneurs in the former communist countries into their methods so as to...

Japan: The New Samurai
April 1, 1994... How is it that a relatively small island country with hardly any natural resources has become such a powerful force in world trade? One simple story tells everything. In 1952 the small Japanese company that was eventually to become Sony...

Preventing Pollution
April 1, 1994... WATER, soil and air pollution is a worldwide problem. We cannot go on taking a piecemeal view of the preservation of our heritage. We must adopt worldwide rules of conduct. A situation in which one country takes appropriate action while its...

The Vallee De Mai: A Paradise Garden in the Seychelles
April 1, 1994... THE granitic islands of the Seychelles archipelago, rising from a large submarine plateau that may have been the legendary land of Lemuria, are like great hanging gardens. Forming, so to speak, a "microcontinent" of their own, they bear little...

Art and the Home
April 1, 1994... After giving his views on the architectural perfection of Venice (see the UNESCO Courier, March, 1994), Le Corbusier invited modern society to devote its art and industry to the service of town planning, starting with the home. I believe that a...

Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer-King
April 1, 1994... FROM his birth in Soltaniyeh in 1394 to his death in Samarkand in 1449, the life story of Mahmud Turgay was one of wisdom and of enthusiasm. A sagacious ruler who has gone down in history by the name bestowed on him of Ulugh Beg, the "great...