“Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing,” is what the legendary Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi used to say when asked about his attitude to American football, if not sport more widely. Lombardi's words (and in fact they are often attributed to “Red” Sanders of the UCLA college Bruins and are even repeated in the John Wayne film, Trouble along the Way, a good decade before Lombardi adopted the saying) have passed into common usage and they are the lingua franca of sports – and work – psychologists the world over today. They are also repeated here, in Francesco Duina's fascinating new book, Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession. Duina's thesis is a simple one: that Americans regard themselves as being better at things than others is a view that is hotwired into their DNA. It explains the formation of the republic, Manifest Destiny and superpower status, and, oh yes, in his amusing introduction it also outlines for Duina the reason why America is not like Denmark!

The author rightly accepts that there are two mitigating factors which go hand in hand with any methodical determination of where winning fits into the American psyche. First, along with winning comes losing and Duina is, of course, suggesting that when other people remark on Americans' insatiable need to win at things, what they really mean is that the people/nation is often not very good at losing. Second, he also accepts that winning and losing are “very messy concepts” and are less “endpoints” than “gateways” towards some broader intuition. A “portrait” of the ideology behind winning is thus what is in order, and what an entertaining and thought-provoking picture it is.

Duina starts by conceiving of the notions that seem obvious and yet provide the groundwork for winning at anything. Competition and the rules of engagement mark out the territory on which winning is subsequently plotted. Participants and spectators revel in competition, hate one-sided affairs and like all of this to be conceived within a codified set of rules that subscribe to the type of engagement being undertaken. In other words, the binary distinction between triumph and disaster is not all that is up for grabs. Defining one's destiny, the pleasure of watching others grapple and suffer, and the tension that arises from close-fought events, all demonstrate why competition and the belated winning of things are a serious matter, whether that be sport, business, politics or life in general.

Duina's book – and this is no criticism – is quite American-centric in its attitude to winning, when comparison of other national cultures might be fruitful too. American team sports, for instance, like American (or gridiron) football, baseball and basketball possess unending categories of individual success almost like no other sporting nation. In Europe, meanwhile, the team spirit garnered from winning performances, it is fair to say, is rated almost as highly as any individual achievement. And in a few cases the manner of winning is nearly as important as the end result itself. Even the most casual, if not biased, of football fans would be hard-pressed not to admire the prowess of Barcelona and the mesmeric patterns of passing and movement conjured up by players such as Xavi, Iniesta and Messi. When required to explain what makes this most unlikely of teams so brilliant and artistic (unlikely because in the modern game you are expected to be big, powerful, and athletic, which this team generally is not), individual talents often take second place to comments about the work ethic of the players when they do not have the ball, or the amount of ground they cover on the field for other team members. The look of the team, the attitude, the camaraderie, is therefore almost as important as prevailing after ninety minutes, and that is something not often replicated, arguably, in American conceptions of collective triumph.

One could, of course, make this a debate about transatlantic attitudes, ideologies and contests won and lost on both continents, but let's not get too reductionist about it all. What Duina professes in his brief but superb book is that winning can be about everything, and everything that is not necessarily served up as unsavoury in our modern, competitive, barely-pause-for-breath world. Honour, esteem, humility, even representation – the “collectivity of winning,” Duina calls it – can be in the service of better and more refined traits. Linguistically inquiring, sociologically penetrative, and culturally fascinating, Duina's book is part self-help manual, part critical inquiry into the American psyche, and wholly an essential guide to a misunderstood obsession.