S ROSS-CULTURAL comparisons of an amateur nature are common { throughout history: novelists, philosophers, travellers and businessmen ^ frequently compare one country with another. Some of these observations have been of use to the social scientist, e.g. de Tocqueville's work on America is a classic of its kind. But the work of the cultural anthropologists and the sociologists who have engaged in community studies have shown us that much careful work is needed before any kind of generalization about {' national character " can be made. The same difficulty arises when the culture pattern of a community or a country has to be examined: research workers have to make use of all the available tools of modern social research, and must undertake the painstaking collection of data from all available sources, the sifting of newspapers, journals, literature and personal documents. The techniques of the questionnaire and of the " participant observer " serve to supplement another form of information, the contribution of local people who have studied the subjectJ or aspects of it, themselves. There have been a number of attempts at describing " the American character" by writers as various as Bryce and Margaret Mead, but it is stsll a highly controversial subject. It might therefore be of interest to sociologists and others to note that seventy Anglo-American Productivity Teams have devoted part of their reports to a description of the American worker in his industrial environment.l The reports, which contain much useful technical information-in addition to that on the American worker-have been given great publicity and could conceivably assist in shaping the future industrial development of Britain. The reports emphasize that the problem of achieving greater productivity in Britain is primarily psychological, not technical: as the teams were made up of managers, technicians and trade unionists, an excellent account is given of the technical siden admission, the less important-and by contrast, very little is said about the { psychological " problem