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Intercultural Communication

There are many good and obvious reasons for studying cross-cultureal differences, including a conservative estimate that somewhere between 25% and 50% of our basic values stem from culture. Other aspects of workforce diversity, such as age and socioeconomic status, also account fort he variances in our values and attituted, but clearly culture is critical.
When we were originally attempting to develop a cultural metaphor for the United States, we had great difficulty identifying a suitable one, given the geographical and ethnic diversity of the nation. As in so many cases, it is really outsiders who have the best perception of the essence of a national culture.
Indeed, the growing complexity of business makes many corporate managers shy away from baseball as a metaphor. Baseball, more than most other major sports, is structured in ways that promote the emergence of improbable heroes… Many business leaders see their game as more like football, with its image of interdependent players with multiple skills cooperating to move the ball down a long field 10 yards at a time.
In Michael Gannon's Understanding Global Cultures, the chapter entitled "American Football", (Chapter 16), provides an excellent and accurate metaphor for the exploration of American society or culture. Not only is this specific metaphor for American society a good one, but Gannon's favoring of metaphors over traditional didactic exegesis is keen. In the first chapter of the book, Gannon discusses and justifies his use of metaphors, writing that [i]n essence, the [cultural metaphor teaching] method involves identifying some phenomenon or activity of a nation's culture that all or most of its members consider to be very important . . . The characteristics of the metaphor then become the basis for describing and understanding the essential features of the society (p.7).
Explanation and education cannot help but involve the use of metaphors, actually. Whether explicit or not, and whether the...