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.

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.

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

The cultural sector is gaining increasing importance in our economies, consistantly registering growth rates above average GDP. This book presents insights on how cultural institutions can find new perspectives in their management and provides ideas to hasten culture's role as an economic developer.

Concerns the management of creativity and innovation. This book provides serious analysis of the cultural industries - media, entertainment, film, music, and the arts -from a business perspective. It covers as many industries as possible from many different perspectives. It is a useful primer on cultural industries for students and scholars.

Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive. In this book, Flamholtz and Randle define culture, identifying and explaining the five key dimensions that determine it: a customer orientation; a people orientation; a process orientation; strong standards of performance and accountability; innovation and openness to change. They explain why culture is a critical factor in organizational success and failure—a key determinant of financial performance. Then, they provide a theoretically sound, highly practical, and field-tested method for managing corporate culture—presenting a set of international and domestic cases that show how actual companies have leveraged culture as the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to well-known companies such as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, IBM, and Toyota, the text presents lesser known culture stars, such as Smartmatic and Infogix. While other titles on culture have focused too heavily on the organization as a psychological being, or on academic studies of culture as a business lever, Corporate Culture draws on empirics to present a go-to, must-read guide for leveraging corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage and as a means of impacting the bottom line.

While historians have explored the impact on workers of changes in American business, the broader impact on other cultural forms, and vice versa, has not been widely studied. This anthology contributes to the debate at the intersection of business history and the study of cultural forms, ranging from material to visual culture to literature.

Management strategies to help you profit in the international realm! What is the most effective way to help an expatriate employee learn to function in the host country? How well do we understand the formation and performance of multinational alliances? Should you threaten to sue your Chinese distributor, or is friendliness a better tactic? These questions are among the issues tackled in Culture and International Business, a practical look at a complex topic. Increasingly, corporations and businesses are transnational or multinational in scope and culture in a way that was unimaginable a generation ago. Employees may be assigned to work overseas or deal with customers, suppliers, distributors, or factories across the globe. Even in domestic offices, employees from several different countries may work side by side. If you want your business to prosper in this new global economy, you must understand the effects of cultural differences on business practices or else risk making costly, potentially disastrous errors. Culture and International Business offers practical ideas and tested research on such vital topics of concern as: defining the moral, ethical, and legal implications of multicultural management attracting and retaining key personnel persuading employees in the host country to mentor an expatriate overcoming divisive cultural differences working within the guanxi relationship networks of China creating sustainable development strategies becoming aware of different attitudes toward change, gender, and risk-taking A genuinely multinational effort, the seven chapters of Culture and International Business were written by authors representing five nations on three continents. This important book is designed to help you understand a wide range of issues from several geographic areas that affect everyone doing business in the new global economy.