Culture Is Our Business

Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.

Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.

This remarkable new work reconciles two distinct disciplinary fields; the study of culture and the study of markets, to expand our understanding of the world of markets and business enterprise.

The business of culture is the business of designing, producing, distributing, and marketing cultural products. Even though it gives employment to millions, and is the main business of many large and small organizations, it is an area that is rarely studied from a strategic management perspective. This book addresses this void by examining a wide range of cultural industries--motion pictures, television, music, radio, and videogames--from such a perspective. The articles included in this book will be helpful to individuals who seek a better understanding of organizations and strategies in the entertainment and media sector. But it should also provide valuable insights to managers and entrepreneurs who operate in environments that share the creative uncertainty and performance ambiguity that characterize most cultural industries.

Short Course books are written from an international perspective for an international audience.

As the level of globalization in business relationships rises, the importance of questions and problems pertaining to intercultural communication increases more and more. This gives rise to new tasks for the social sciences, which can only be successfully performed through interdisciplinary cooperation in the sense of area-studies. Between 1995 and 2002 for area, the Bavarian research network for area-studies, drew together numerous members of the scientific community who are specialized in the social sciences to pursue previously unresearched topics in areas of overlap of business and culture as exemplified in non-European regions. The most important results are collated here.

Why do different groups of people behave in different ways when dealing with the common challenges of human life? The answer often lies in their cultural attitudes, values, and consequent behaviours. The study of human culture has been deemed a key contribution to understanding human life for many centuries. Explanations and descriptions of cultural characteristics abound, but in the field of business, none have been more influential and warmly embraced than those developed by Geert Hofstede and the GLOBE group. These models of national culture, which characterise Japanese, Americans, French, and may other nationalities in terms of common characteristics such as collectivism, masculinity, and power distance, are most widely cited and applied in business research, teaching, and recommendations for practice. But this seminal work needs a careful reality check. The authors of this book point out a range of problems associated with the Hofstede and GLOBE national culture measures which bring into question their accuracy and usefulness in meeting the expectations of management culture researchers and students. This book explains in detail why the measures developed by Hofstede and GLOBE are of dubious validity and why they should be viewed with caution by those looking for answers to the complex questions of culture.