ashion industry?
In the same way, it has to be admitted that professional football is in fact a pretty good image of American culture, including its business culture. This is true even when taken in terms of everything that Americans may not like about professional football. Is it tacky and tasteless, mixing invocations of the Almighty with cheerleaders in skimpy outfits, beer ads, and grunting violence on the field? Of course it is. So is the rest of our popular culture. Americans love to criticize their own popular culture. They have been doing it for decades, even as they take in whatever parts of it they happen to like. Even people who say they hate television usually have a few guilty pleasures. Professional football, Gannon suggests, is a bit like all 500 channels rolled together into one show.
What does all of this say about business cultures, and what happens when people do business across them? Is Gammon's model a usable tool? Or is it simply a sophisticated version of those comedy routines in which a nanve American stumbles into an English household, or a German symphony orchestra, or an Italian opera production, and find themselves fascinated and bewildered by all that is going on? The reader does sense that Gannon is onto something, that his images fit the countries he portrays. But does it give us insights into how the British, Germans, or Italians do business?
Comparing Gammon's images, three of the four have something in common: they are performances, public dramas. In that respect, the British example is the odd one out, even though Gannon classes Britain with the US as having a "market pricing" culture (the only two cultures in that group). The British example is not a performance. It is a permanent structure, a house. It is true, however, that while Gannon uses the house as his image, he says much more about how people live in them, what he suggest may be regarded as the quiet drama of Britis...