Edwin Hoffman en Arjan Verdooren - Diversity competence

Foreword

We chose the artwork ‘Coloured Drawings’ for the cover because to us it rep resents one of the main notions of this book. ‘Coloured Drawings’, by South African-born painter Marlene Dumas, consist of portraits of people of various ethnic backgrounds; some in detail, some in sketch. At first glance the portraits seem to clearly depict certain groups, but a closer look reveals the uniqueness of every face. They form a reference to attempts to categorize people through out the ages and, at the same time, to the unlikeliness of meeting individuals who neatly conform to constructed categories. The problem with stereotypical categorizations is that, in the end, they rarely do justice to individual people. This book is itself the result of an international cooperation; it was written mainly in Sweden and Austria, for a publisher located in the Netherlands. The cooperation between ourselves – Edwin and Arjan – goes back several years, when Arjan got in touch with Edwin after having been inspired by Ed win’s earlier publications on the TOPOI model. This led to an intensive coop eration on an ambitious project for a client in the Netherlands. When the op portunity for this book arose, it felt very natural to take it on together. It was a very enjoyable and enriching journey to share and sharpen our ideas along the way, and we can only hope that this mutual inspiration can be felt while reading this book. However, we could not have written this book without the help, support and inspiration from many others during – and even before – the writing process. This also gives us the opportunity to remember and thank Leonel Brug, Arjan’s main mentor when entering this field, who sadly passed away in 2013. Leonel was the first person to make him consistently understand intercultural commu nication primarily as communication between people . Though writing was not among Leonel’s many unique talents, we are confident that some of his ideas and convictions live on in this book. Many others have helped with the creation of this book. First of all, we would like to thank the great people at Coutinho Publishers who contributed in vari ous ways in different stages: Marianne Kruyskamp, Michel van de Graaf, Josée Bierlaagh, Louise Prompers, Simone Baddou, Sjoukje Rienks, Andrea Verbeek, Steffie van der Horst, Lorenzo de Jongh, Asaf Lahat (freelance editor) and Bren-