Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society

by Ronald Inglehart

Economic, technological, and sociopolitical changes have been transforming the cultures of advanced industrial societies in profoundly important ways during the past few decades. This ambitious work examines changes in religious beliefs, in motives for work, in the issues that give rise to political conflict, in the importance people attach to having children and families, and in attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. Ronald Inglehart's earlier book, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, 1977), broke new ground by discovering a major intergenerational shift in the values of the populations of advanced industrial societies. This new volume demonstrates that this value shift is part of a much broader process of cultural change that is gradually transforming political, economic, and social life in these societies.


Inglehart uses a massive body of time-series survey data from twenty-six nations, gathered from 1970 through 1988, to analyze the cultural changes that are occurring as younger generations gradually replace older ones in the adult population. These changes have far-reaching political implications, and they seem to be transforming the economic growth rates of societies and the kind of economic development that is pursued.

Genres: Politics, Sociology, Nonfiction, Academic

504 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1989

About the author

Ronald F. Inglehart (born September 5, 1934) was a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He was director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave was completed in 2014. Since 2010 Inglehart was co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St Petersburg. This laboratory has carried out surveys in Russia and eight ex-Soviet countries and is training Phd.-level students in quantitative cross-national research methods.

In the seventies Inglehart began developing an influential theory of Generational Replacement causing intergenerational value change from materialist to postmaterialist values that helped shape the Eurobarometer Surveys, the World Values Surveys and other cross-national survey projects. Building on this work, he subsequently developed a revised version of Modernization theory, Evolutionary Modernization Theory, which argues that economic development, welfare state institutions and the long peace between major powers since 1945, are reshaping human motivations in ways that have important implications concerning gender roles, sexual norms, the role of religion, economic behavior and the spread of democracy.

Reviews

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book begins with Inglehart saying (Page 3): "The people of different societies are characterized by enduring differences in basic attitudes, values, and skills: In other words, they have different cultures." In this book, the author explores some of the dimensions of culture and considers how these affect political views and society-as-a-whole.

The methodology is a comparative survey research approach, considering the political values in a variety of states throughout the world. One key value is what Inglehart terms the continuum from materialism to postmaterialism. The former speaks to people whose values emphasize material well-being; the latter refers to those who value more self-fulfillment (Maslow's self-actualization, for those familiar with that social scientist).

The book pulls together a great deal of material to make the argument that values structure economic growth and politics. Some of his concepts were under heavy criticism from other political scientists (such as postmaterialism). However, the book does what it does pretty well and leads to considerable reflection.

This is technically written, with a lot of statistics. Buyer beware.

[Leonardo]

Citado en el artículo de M. Vansteenkiste, R. M. Ryan, y E. L. Deci de Capabilities and Happiness.