CULTURE SHOCK: Psychological Reactions to Unfamiliar Environments

A stultifyingly complete, conscientious look at the professional literature on the problems of aliens in new environments. Furnham and Bochner have cited so many studies in their text that their own book will no doubt be the first stop of those in search of a bibliographical reference. But the well-nigh unreadable academic double-speak here (the kind that announces what a chapter will be about, gives the chapter, then describes in a conclusion what the chapter has said) seems particularly obtuse when the authors are not concluding much. They describe the difficulty of their study, and the necessity of ""teasing"" conclusions out of the material. The basic conclusions reached are that all travel is stressful to some degree because the stranger has not learned the cultural codes of his new country and does not know how to act. To arrive at these common-sense assumptions, the reader must wade through mushy generalizations like ""Tourism has been a vast multinational enterprise that is the backbone of many a country's economy."" Recommended only to professionals who cannot escape the responsibility of reading it. Others will bewail the waste of a catchy title. Exhaustive bibliographies make it valuable for academic libraries, though.