The target group of the EU-CAB project are about 45 students coming from the participating countries France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Portugal. The overall objectives are: The students shall acquire a high level of competencies in working together in a pan-European team. They shall gain in-depth understanding and a solid knowledge base of other European countries and the functioning of Europe as a whole. They shall support each other while working in a foreign country and respect eventual differences in behaviour and culture. They shall strengthen their competencies to learn together, take decisions in unstructured situations, solve conflict in a mutually respective work atmosphere and reach goals as a team. In order to realize these overall objectives the students’ will conduct an empirical scientific study in the area of social sciences under the supervision of their professional staff. Their understanding of national and/or European identities and similar or different behaviour in the countries participating will be fostered. Students will learn how to differentiate between observation and judgement and between neutral data collection and clichés. Their curiosity to learn more about Europe and its various nations will be reinforced and their willingness to travel and to learn about other nations will be strengthened. Students will collect self-concept in all of the participating countries data using the “Self-Concept Grid”-technique in order to measure collective identities (Orlik, P. 1979; 2006). To measure behaviours, they will create a pool of qualitative and quantitative data stemming from the structured observation tool “SYMLOG” (Bales & Cohen 1982). They will observe behaviour in business and every-day situations in all respective countries. As results several “atlases” will be delivered that show how near or far, behaviour in the six participating countries is as of 2018 and whether or not a kind of shared European identity is already existing. All data and results will be shared open source, access will be offered to the scientific community, to political organisations on EU-, national and local levels and to the private economy in all the participating countries. The project is intending to start a broad discussion on Europe and on ways to accept national differences, to create synergies from difference and at the same time benefit from cross-national similarities.
The target group of the EU-CAB project was about 35-40 students per ISP from the participating countries France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Portugal. The general objectives were: Students should acquire a high level of competences for working together in a European team. They were to acquire a deeper understanding and a solid knowledge base about other European countries and the functioning of Europe as a whole. They supported each other when working in a foreign country and learned to respect possible differences in behaviour and culture. They were able to strengthen their communication and social skills to learn together, make decisions in unstructured situations, solve conflicts in an appropriate working atmosphere and achieve goals as a team. In order to realise these overall goals, the students conducted an empirical social science study on collective European and/or national identities and behaviours in business and everyday situations under the guidance of the participating professors. Their understanding of identities, differentiated by generations, and similar or different behaviours in the participating countries was enhanced. The students learned to distinguish between observation and judgement as well as between neutral data collection and stereotyping. Their curiosity to learn more about Europe and its different nations was strengthened and their willingness to travel and learn more about other nations was promoted. Students collected data on self-concept in all participating countries using the Self-Concept Grid technique to measure and describe collective identities (Orlik, P. 1979; 2006). A pool of qualitative and quantitative data was created to capture the behaviours, which were collected using the structured observation instrument "SYMLOG" (Bales & Cohen 1979). These results can be accessed and shared in Google Drive, where the data entries and allocations can also be viewed and tracked. If there is interest, all data and results will be available to the scientific community, political organisations at EU, national and local level as well as the private sector in all participating countries. 3 of the total of 6 ISPs could be conducted in presence, but 3 ISPs unfortunately had to be conducted online due to corona. Interest and motivation to participate remained high even under online conditions, but the intended systematic observation of behaviour was only possible to a limited extent under these conditions. Valid observation data of high quality could therefore only be collected in the 3 face-to-face ISPs. The results are briefly summarised: 1) Behaviour in business and everyday situations in the participating countries can be described as very similar on the basis of the data available. Only 2 minor differences stand out: In Portugal, more communication is expected than in the other countries and one's own influence on the given situation is assessed somewhat higher in France than by other nations. 2) A common identity that can be called "European" exists. However, it is not very pronounced and can be described as follows: somewhat more friendly than dismissive, somewhat more emotional than rational and characterised more by passivity than activity and avoiding of conflict. In general, the baby boomer generation seems to be different from the other generations. However, the data basis from this group is comparatively small, which is why this statement would have to be subjected to a review. It should be critically noted that since there is no comparative data from other continents, we are not dealing with a "European" identity with certainty, but with an identity common to the countries involved. Since the data collection took place in the respective university cities, strictly speaking the results can only be related to these regions in the respective countries.