Compare and contrast time orientation within different cultures as stated in your textbook. This should be at least one page. You will be graded on content, spelling, grammar, and sentence structure.
From my book:
Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services by Jerry V. Diller
Time Orientation
There is great diversity among the five cultural groups with regard to how they perceive and experience time. European Americans are dominated by an orientation toward the future. Planning, producing, and controlling what will happen are all artifacts of a future-time orientation. What was and what is are always a bit vague and subordinated to what is anticipated. At the same time, European Americans view time as compart-mentalized and incremental, and as such, being on time and being efficient with one’s time are positive values.
Asian and Latino/a cultures are described as past or present-oriented. For both, history is a living entity. Ancestors and past events are felt to be alive and influencing present reality. The past flows imperceptibly into and defines the present. Both Native Americans and African Americans, in turn, are characterized as present-oriented. Focus is directed toward current experience of the here and now, with less atten-tion to what led up to this moment or what will become of it. As a group, and dis-tinct from European American culture, cultures of color share a view of time as an infinite continuum and find it difficult to relate to the white “obsession” with being on time. Interestingly, each of these groups has evolved a term to describe its “looser” sense of time: “Colored people’s time,” “Indian time,” “Asian time,” and “Latin time.” Invariably, time becomes an issue when non-whites enter institutions where European American cultural values predominate. Lateness is often mistakenly interpreted by whites as indifference, provocative, or symptomatic of a lack of basic work skills.
