EUROPE

In this class we talked about the ancient empires and cultures of Europe:

• Greece: The Greeks belonged to a number of tribes with different languages. Sporting contests were held every four years in his sanctuary at Olympia in honor of Zeus, the Father of the Gods, they stated that the people, that is, the city’s inhabitants, should decide the city’s affairs themselves, two thing united the Greeks: their religion and their sport.
• The Romans: They never gave up. Not even when their city was captured and burnt to the ground by tribesmen from the north called Gauls, in 390.
  By 395 CE, the Roman empire didn’t only have two capitals, it had two states:
  *the Western Empire, consisting of Italy, Gaul, Britannia, Spain and North Africa, where people spoke Latin
  *the Eastern Empire, consisting of Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece and Macedonia, where they spoke Greek.
  In both states Christianity became the official religion from 380 onwards.
  -The western empire falls.
  -Dark Ages? This is the name given to the period which followed the collapse of the Roman empire when very few people could read or write and hardly anyone knew what was going on in the world.

The rebirth:
Suddenly, in about 1420 CE, the Florentines noticed that they were no longer the people they had been in the Middle Ages, people suddenly felt they were witnessing a rebirth or Rinascimento of the ancient.

QUESTION: What is the challange of the European Union companies?

The real challenge for these companies is face the diversity challenge,
Europe is in a much more complex situation that all the companies in the world that also face this challenge.
"Diversity issues, according to any human resources management or organizational behavior textbook, traditionally include local minorities, gender, disability, sexual orientation and the like. Obviously, Europe faces all of these, but if we see Europe as a single economic entity, unlike other economies, it also faces diversity issues in several additional dimensions.
There are significant differences in national culture across a wide spectrum of issues, including perspectives on time, individualism versus collectivism, tolerance of uncertainty, emotional expressiveness and gender-role differentiation.
There are also important religious differences a dominant religion has an unavoidable impact on the way people work in organizations, affecting values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior.
Europe is also multilingual, and there is still no common language that can be used with equal ease in its different parts."

Bibligraphy: Vries_Insead_Korotov_2006,The future of European buiness leadership, pg 3.