Trends and Contexts: The Principle of Singularity

Abstract

Introduction This paper deals with certain aspects of the major social trends observed in the six largest North Atlantic nations (France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, Canada, United States) since 1960. It is largely based on data assembled by the Comparative Charting Group, an international organization of social scientists who have been meeting semi-annually since 1987 to develop comprehensive profiles of social trends in their respective national societies and to subject them to comparative analysis. The Group has produced or stimulated an entire shelf of published reports(1) and more are in preparation. The North Atlantic societies covered in this paper differ slightly from those in the Comparative Charting Group; I include the United Kingdom and all of Canada, rather than Quebec alone.(2) One of the tasks the Comparative Charting Group set for itself was to examine trends in cross-national perspective in order to ascertain whether these national societies are following common or separate paths of development. As it turns out, there are far more shared than unshared trends in this subset of national societies but that finding must be qualified by the principle of singularity which, in barest terms, states that the sharing of trends by two or more national societies does not imply shared outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the shared and unshared trends observed in these six national societies since 1960(3) and to explain the principle of singularity. Shared Trends In all of these highly modernized national societies, modernization continued without interruption after 1960, as reflected by continuously increasing volumes of goods produced and goods consumed, steady increases in the volume and speed of internal transportation and communication, extended life expectancy and diminishing infant mortality, rising levels of education and dozens of other familiar indicators. At the same time, they drew closer together with respect to these measures, erasing most of the previously existing differences among themselves. Perhaps the single best indicator of modernization level is the telephone index - the number of working telephone lines per capita. Unlike measures of GNP or GDP, this index requires no questionable currency conversions, and because telephone systems can not operate without an accurate directory, the validity and reliability of the telephone index is superior to most other measures of modernization, although it shows high correlations with virtually all of them. The following table uses the telephone index to show how the differences in modernization level among our six national societies narrowed between 1960 and 1990. Table 1 Telephone Lines per Capita(4) 1960 1990 United States .410 .502 Canada .320 .554 United Kingdom .157 .430 France .095 .519 West Germany .108 .470 Spain .059 .303 The convergence of modernization levels among these six societies was accompanied by a great increase of traffic in goods, ideas and persons among them, so that their mutual dependence and their mutual visibility increased concurrently. In the sphere of work, there were massive shifts from blue-collar to white-collar employment and from agriculture to industry to service. By 1995, the agricultural component of the labor force had been reduced to numerical insignificance in all of these societies while the distinctive peasant cultures of France, Germany, Spain and French Canada had disappeared. Married women - especially women with small children - entered each labor force in unprecedented numbers and began to appear in occupations and management positions formerly monopolized by men. Many dangerous and strenuous occupations were mechanized or eliminated. Labor unions declined in membership and influence. …