In discussing these things with friends tonight I discovered one of those threads that makes sense. There is a model of doing business which has its roots in the earliest Stone Age barter; you could call it bazaar mentality. To do business you must go one-on-one, mano-a-mano with the stall owner. He knows you will try to rip him off; you know he will try to overcharge you. Ruthlessness, mendicancy, double-speak, exaggeration of wrongs are all part of the deal.

In Western Civ we graduated from the bazaar model of interaction to the mercantile model -- organized the lines of supply and backed them up with some law and order, and produced dry good stores, Woolworths, the early Sears and the town market or supermarket. The mercantile model gradually grew more complex and became the corporation busines smodel. In each of these phases of development we have learned a new series of social steps, a more sophisticated and less brutal (on the face of it) approach to the bedrock phenomenon of exchange; we have learned highly abstract but ultimately workable concepts like building long term relationships with customers, win-win negotiations, and the concept of what goes around in business comes around.

However I beleive that many people from the Middle East are just beginning to deal with things in the marketplace on the mercantile basis and that for many of them, the instinctive method of dealing with other humans is the bazaar model. The earmarks of the bazaar model are unyielding fighting for advantage, little sense of long term or futures, and consquently a tendency to try to take everything you can get in the current transaction.

I think there is something to this notion in trying to understand the critical cultural gaps between --for example -- the rock strewn, desperately poor surrounds of Kabul and the engineered random busyness of Tribeca, Manhattan.

I could be blowing smoke -- it's been known to happen -- but I think there is a clue here.

FIW. YMMV.

Regards,

Amos