Welcome to the new Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin

Bill Gabrenya, Editor

I would like to welcome you to the new Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin. This issue of the Bulletin marks another turning point in the evolution of IACCP and appears at what may be the beginning of a new era for the Association, the trajectory of which I have only the vaguest notion at this time.

A new format

As you can see, this copy of the Bulletin was mailed from Sage Publications in California, where it was printed on the same presses used to produce the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and many other Sage journals. This is why it has the same dimensions as JCCP, a size I would not have chosen for a newsletter, but one that various graphics experts have assured me does have some possibilities. Sage has taken over the most onerous tasks that the previous editor, John Adamopoulos, faced four times each year. This arrangement was negotiated by John and Walt Lonner with Sage's Mitch Allen during 1993 and 1994, and I am extremely grateful for their efforts. The style or "look" of the new Bulletin has changed substantially because of this printing arrangement and the availability, free to the Association, of professional publishing services from Florida Institute of Technology's Office of University Publications.

Plans and illusions

I would like to reveal my plans for the Bulletin over the next four years and outline how you can help me carry them out. The ideas I will present reflect my personal feelings about the discipline and are informed by the results of the reader survey that I will publish in the next issue. I view IACCP both as a community of scholars with roughly similar interests and goals, and as a social or cultural organization in which members seek fellowship and self-fulfillment. The Bulletin is an important medium through which the parts of this community-separated by thousands of miles and great culture distance-meet these professional and personal needs. (Of course another medium, our famous-or famously expensive-conferences also meet this need for many members.) Whereas other publications of the Association and of other organizations serve primarily the scholarly goals of the community, the Bulletin serves the community's needs for social and intellectual communication and exchange. Our biennial congresses can provide a useful metaphor: JCCP is attending the paper and poster sessions, presenting data and graphs and making careful, defensible statements; the Bulletin is hanging out in the hallways and the bars, debating rather "tentative" ideas and lamenting life in the trenches of academia. I feel that the Association as a community could not thrive without both venues. The reader survey results seem to support this contrast, if not in quite the same words.

What is being discussed in the hallways and bars? I wouldn't dare speak for everyone (you can't be in all the bars at once), but I think there are several themes with which most of you would agree. One set of themes is intellectual, and the other concerns real life.

Intellectual Issues

1. Epistemology. Our "discipline" (if that word could possibly be used to describe us) seems to have reached an epistemological crisis. The best-attended regular session I witnessed at the Pamplona meeting was the controversial symposium on philosophy of science organized by Pawel Boski. I estimated over 100 people attended, and there was a fair amount of shouting. People are highly invested in this issue, and it threatens to polarize or even split the Association. I would like to see these issues presented and discussed in the Bulletin so all members can participate, if vicariously, in this important debate. I have begun inviting members to write articles for this purpose, and I invite all members to contribute ideas.

2. Indigenization. Indigenization movements seem to be in full swing around the world, and I sense that people in some places are beginning to distance themselves both intellectually and socially from Euro-American psychology and its organizations, and from the use of English as an ad-hoc common scientific language. These movements will ultimately affect the future course of IACCP and are a natural subject for discussion.

3. Social science. The question of the ultimate validity of cross-cultural psychology as it has developed in IACCP over the last several decades seems to be coming up more and more frequently, usually in conjunction with one of the above two points. What do we have to offer that anthropology hasn't already thought of and done better? I feel our relationships to anthropology and other social sciences need to be examined more carefully and perhaps the Bulletin can serve as a venue for discussion of this issue and facilitate exchanges between the social sciences.

Real life issues

Conferences sponsored by IACCP and other important cross-cultural organizations such as the Society for Cross-Cultural Research drive members into an annual or semiannual cycle that has strong cognitive and behavioral implications. I think it would be fair to say that most of our time throughout the year is spent in the activities that help us make a living, mainly teaching and/or administering in universities. The conference cycle engages a great deal of our energy during a small part of the year, climaxing in a few intense, jet-lagged days following which we must hurriedly return to real life: teaching, advising, administering, and worrying about our futures in academia. Side-by-side with brainy talk of epistemology and the integration of the social sciences, another current runs at the conferences that is motivated by the concrete problems of living we all encounter in our real lives back home. Several themes come to mind:

1. Teaching. Most of us teach to eat. Perhaps such a statement is too strong; perhaps some of us would like to deny its truth. In any case, I think our common interests draw us to teaching courses in cross-cultural psychology, so it is natural that the Bulletin should serve as the discipline's primary teaching resource. There are two ways the Bulletin will try to meet this need. First, we will begin to publish an extensive review of the teaching texts now available in cross-cultural psychology. This project is termed the "Megareview," and begins in this issue. Second, the Bulletin will include a section in most issues devoted exclusively to teaching. Harry Gardiner of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse has agreed to edit this section. Harry is the most enthusiastic and effective teacher of cross-cultural psychology I know of and should bring a lot of interesting and innovative material to the discipline. His first column will begin in the next issue. (But, not by coincidence, the first of the "Megareviews" is written by him.)

2. The state of the discipline. For most members, our positions as cross-cultural psychologists in our local labor markets are a more pressing concern than the position of cross-cultural psychology in the social sciences. The general issue of the state of cross-cultural psychology within local psychologies is an important one, and I invite commentary on this subject. Speaking for my own labor market, the question of how the multiculturalism movement will affect cross-cultural psychology is very important. The Bulletin has tried to address the employment issue over the last few years by maintaining a listing of jobs in the area. The listing has received mixed reviews, and is clearly a highly limited endeavor for various reasons, including its irrelevance outside North America and its lack of timeliness. Beginning with this issue, I will only publish position announcements contributed directly to the Bulletin that can appear in time to be useful to members. (A summary of the data obtained by producing the jobs column will be published in a future issue.)

3. Local events, conditions, trends, politics. We all live in a social milieu that extends beyond academia to a national and social system that affects our lives in many ways, including professionally. I would like to encourage readers to contribute short articles discussing such local and regional issues. I will pursue this course in two ways. First, I will lean heavily on the IACCP Regional Representatives to contribute to the Bulletin on a regular basis. By the time you read this, I will have sent letters and/or E-mail to all the Regional Reps outlining what I hope they will do for us. Second, I will return to a practice that was common many years ago in the Bulletin: inviting members to write short (about one page in the current format) articles about themselves. I am especially interested in obtaining such material from young members, and I will press contributors to include photographs of themselves or of something interesting in their locality. Articles that include solicitations (e.g., for collaboration) are welcome. To facilitate this process, I will use the fine IACCP Directory published last year by Deborah Best to send letters to members around the world asking for contributions. If you receive such a letter, please understand that it reflects no deep meaning; I just happened to find your name in the Directory. I will also try to bring back the "Inforum" section that was set aside for miscellaneous personal, self-reported news. I have set aside one page for printing the Inforum report form.

Status of other existing features

Empirical research reports. The reader survey results suggest that readers are not interested in a formal, JCCP-like newsletter, but nonetheless, consider empirical research reports highly interesting. Based on our experience with such articles over the last several years, I have decided to discontinue accepting them for publication except when they are too short for JCCP but otherwise reflect JCCP's quality criteria. I will forward unsolicited submissions that are too long for the Bulletin to John Williams for consideration in the journal. I believe that there are now sufficient publication outlets for regular-length articles in the field (two new journals have started up this year alone).

Best of XCUL. I will continue to publish the "Best of the Cross-Cultural User's List" column in some form. Response to the column has been generally positive, although occasionally readers ask if it's some kind of gossip column. If anyone would like to take over the care and feeding of this column, please contact me for details.

Electronic Bulletin

I suspect that I will be the next-to-last editor of a printed version of the Bulletin. In a far-flung organization such as IACCP, postal communication is a continual challenge. As many of you are aware, the major portion of the Bulletin's budget is mailing, particularly air mail outside of North America. The Bulletin of the future will probably be published on the Internet in a form similar to the printed version, but with multimedia capability and instant access. This technology is evolving rapidly throughout the world, and the form it will take by the early 2000s is hard to predict. The IACCP Publications Committee is currently discussing whether or not to begin posting the Bulletin on the World Wide Web, in parallel with the printed version you are reading. Comments about this idea should be forwarded to Peter Smith. For examples of this kind of publishing, look at the magazines listed at the following WWW sites:
   http://www.acns.nwu.edu/ezines /
   http://www.loria.fr/~charoy/zines.html (in French)
Some specific magazines of widely varying contents:
   http://www.awa.com/w2/ (Webster's Weekly)
   http://www.internex.net/axcess (Axcess Magazine)
   http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/contents.all.html (Postmodern Culture)

Contribute to the Bulletin!

The Bulletin is a medium for communication among the IACCP membership. If you wish to communicate with your colleagues in this way, send me something! I will publish a variety of informal or semiformal materials, including:

Contribute Soon!

As you read this, I have (hopefully) finished putting together the next issue. The new publication process is a long one, so send your contributions with as much lead time as possible-especially if you are submitting time-critical announcements.

Thank you John Adamopoulos

I would like to thank the outgoing editor, John Adamopoulos, for his hard work and dedication to the Bulletin and the Association over the last five years. John brought to the Bulletin a high level of quality, consistency, and elegance during his tenure. As a semi-insider to the publication process over the last few years, I came to know the amount of work John had to do in handling all aspects of the Bulletin's publication, from soliciting and editing articles to lugging boxes of envelopes to the post office. John had to contend with difficulties and frustrations at all stages of the process, from bearing with procrastinating Association officers to worrying over arcane postal rules. But as you know, every issue of the Bulletin has arrived every year since he took over. To whatever extent the next few years are successful, much of it should be attributed to the high standards John has set.

IACCP" 1995 Issue

March 1995 TOC