Angela:
Sorry for a delay in my response, but I was away for a week.
I think Harrison's article contains a number of assertions that can be criticised ona number of grounds, but with careful caveats they can also represent generally sound exmpirical statements. It would fly in the face of social science to maintain that culture does not have any effect on individual's adaptation to industrial society.
Sociologists generally accept that certain pre-modern cultures promote behavioral patterns that are incompatible with the incentive system that prevail in an industrial society (cf. Marx Weber's "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" or Thomas and Znaniecki's "Polish Peasant in Europe and America" that are now classics). Of course these are not culturalists rationalizations, but empirical statements that specify certain observable outcomes and conditions that produce them.
For example, Thomas and Znaniecki describe the pre-modern culture of the Polish peasantry as essentially incompatible with a modern industrial society, but they also identify a condition under which that pre-modern culture is likely to prevail: - unsuccessful adaptation to a new industrial environment. Thomas & Znaniecki found that those peasants who were economically successful as immigrants, quickly abandoned the vestiges of their pre-modern culture; only those who were not successful, retreated to the old norms, whhich offerred them some minimal collective security.
So in this explanation, peasant culture is used as an empirical factor that may affect human behavior in many diffrent ways, but whose use by individuals is also dependent on their social-economic cicumastances. That is much different form ex post facto rationalizations to which you so much (and righfully so) object.
In that light, any statement about the effect of culture on economic behavior needs a careful empircal verification. True, Harrison's piece does not offer that verification, but his is just jurnalism, not a research paper.
Moreover, your own position re. capitalism can be criticized along the same line. You tend to to treat capitalism as ex post facto rationalizations of bad fortunes, without specififying conditions under which it can produce those effects. You need that specification because capitalism can also produce beneficial effects (c.f. working class of Western Europe).
In that respect, your own position falls into the same trap of which you accuse Harrison - that is, you posit a convenient cultural factor (capitalist relations of production) which you use as a scapegoat for the observable negative effects, but you do not specify empirical conditons under which that factor will produce the negative effects in question.
regards
wojtek