Advanced Industrial Societies Research Articles

Los lugares cotidianos de la cultura y el arte

El objetivo de este trabajo es multiple: a) Por una parte, proponer una reflexion sobre el que en la vida cotidiana de las sociedades industriales avanzadas esta reservado para la relacion de los individuos con la cultura y el arte. b) Como segundo objetivo, pretendemos formular algunas consideraciones sobre el uso publico y / o privado de esa relacion de los individuos con la cultura y el arte. Para ello, nos proponemos mostrar algunas caracteristicas de la evolucion de ese espacio temporal que denominamos tiempo libre, asi como de las variedades y condicionantes del uso que se le otorga en unas sociedades en las que todos los indicios nos senalan el final de un ciclo, el caracterizado en torno al trabajo, entendido tanto como instrumento de desarrollo como mecanismo de diferenciacion y significacion social. c) Y, finalmente, proponemos un analisis de la insercion de lo cultural en los procesos de diferenciacion social, no solo como resultado de una estratificacion social sino, incluso, como una variable independiente que influye significativamente en la construccion y consolidacion de la posicion social de clase.

French Trends in Social and Educational Opportunities, 1982-1997

French social mobility studies concur with those for other advanced industrial societies and point to deep change in the occupational structure in recent decades. This increases the possibility that children will find themselves in a different social category than their parents (raw mobility). But despite a rise in average educational level and mild steady progress towards equal achievement in school by social origin, mobility has shown no radical change after adjustment for evolutions in the job structure (net mobility).

Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Post-Fordism?

This article examines attempts by Marxist thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to explain the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism by the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. They argue that the movement of advanced industrial societies from standardized mass production to diverse flexible production has created a new culture that stresses difference, superficiality, and ahistoricality. But in their attempts to portray a synchronous development of economy and culture, these thinkers ignore the uneven developments between and within each realm. I argue that in the United States the popular arts like automobile design developed postmodern traits long before the high arts like architecture. Instead of this change in popular culture resulting from post-Fordism, it dialectically influenced this economic change.

The Paradox of Community

The advanced industrial or post-industrial societies seem to have come to a paradoxical predicament. The individualist culture which has favored the modernization process so much, now constitutes one of the most formidable obstacles to the further modernization of societies. Contemporary society seems unable to move toward solving the problems of global interdependence, of environmental risk and of its own internal complexity unless it finds a way of re-creating from within itself some aspects of the life of the community. However, in reappropriating the relevant features of community - especially the concern for the common good - we can't avoid falling back on that normative standard of self-realization, fulfillment or authenticity which in a sense represents the epitome of modern individualism and is often mistaken, by the communitarian critics of liberalism, for a mere garden variety of early-modern atomistic individualism.

The Habermas/Luhmann debate and subsequent Habermasian perspectives on systems theory

The Habermas/Luhmann debate centers on two questions. One is theoretical and one ethical. The theoretical question is: Can social processes be explained in primarily systemic terms? The ethical question is: What does reliance upon systems theory do to an advanced industrial society? Since the original debate, Habermas has developed an evolutionary architectonic that accords a role to systems theory. He continues, however, to voice objections and reservations about systems theory and Luhmann in particular. His criticisms need to be seen in their narrow context and brought into general conversation with the wide sweep of contemporary systems thinking. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Gender Disparity in the Advanced Industrial Society: Female - Male Relations at a Recently Coeducated College

The consequences of structural change in advanced industrial society are examined with regard to male-female relations at a college that, until recently, admitted only men. Special attention is focused on conflicts which emerge as female and male students attempt to cope with the admission of women. In this regard, the struggle for power, both covert and overt, is studied as the men attempt to maintain their position and the newly arrived women try to establish a niche in this formerly all-male world. Such issues as the relative resource base of males and females and the struggle over the utility of ascriptive and achievement criteria in the treatment of fellow students are examined in detail. Data are drawn from participant observation and from student surveys.

State and Party in America's New Deal.

Providing a needed historical perspective on current debates about industrial and agricultural policy, Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol compare the origins, implementation, and consequences of two similar programs from Franklin Roosevelt s New Deal, each of which committed the federal government to extensive intervention in sectors of the U.S. economy. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and its industrial counterpart, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), had very different fates. The politically and economically successful AAA set trends in American farm policy that continue to the present. The NRA was rejected as an abysmal failure. Why such drastically different outcomes? A historical and institutional approach, Finegold and Skocpol contend, can explain the similarities and differences of the NRA and AAA better than competing approaches of pluralism, elite theory, Marxism, or rational choice. They show that the AAA aided large commercial farmers and increased their power over tenants, sharecroppers, and farm workers. The NRA, however, worked against the interests of its original business supporters and encouraged union organization among their workers. Finegold and Skocpol explain the contrasts in these programs by showing differences in the organization of governmental intervention in agriculture and in industry before the New Deal, and by tracking the differing ways capitalists, farmers, and workers participated in the New Deal political coalition. Both Finegold and Skocpol have been prominent in bringing renewed attention to national political institutions. Their crisp analysis of state and party dynamics contributes to theories of politics in advanced industrial societies and will appeal to political scientists, policy makers, sociologists, historians, and economists in short, all those who must understand how past programs influence present U.S. policies.

A policy for science innovation: the New Zealand experience

This paper explores the characteristics of Science and Technology policy for today's advanced industrial societies. It counterposes two distinct models, the traditional and the emergent, for the production of new knowledge (science innovation) and examines the policy implications of each. Five dimensions are drawn out from this analysis and are then applied to a case study based on recent policy reforms in the New Zealand science sector. The analysis shows that New Zealand's science policy is evolving towards a consistent and coherent expression of the emergent model for innovation. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Globalization and Deindustrialization: Direct lnvestment and the Decline of Manufacturing Employment in 17 OECD Nations

Recent years have witnessed a fairly dramatic upswing in the level of foreign direct investment, a phenomenon which has played an integral part in a larger process of globalization. While sociologists have devoted a good deal of attention to the consequences of direct investment for the developing hosts of foreign direct investment, much less attention has been paid to the implications of direct investment for the advanced industrial societies. ln this paper, I focus on one of the more interesting links that has been drawn between direct investment and its effects: that between the outflowof direct investment - often cast as "capital flight" - and deindustrialization. To examine this link I employ a pooled time-series of cross-sections dataset which combines observations on 17 OECD nations across the 1967-1990 period (N=408) . Random effects regression models, which control for unmeasured country-specific effects, reveal strong support for arguments which link direct investment to the relative decline of the labor force in manufacturing in core societies. ln addition, results show that deindustriali zation across this period is largely explained by a model that combines classic generalizations of the process of economic development with an attention to a range of more immediate factors identified by contemporary students of deindustrialization.

(Mis)Measuring Value Change: A brief postscript

In their rejoinder to our critique, Abramson, Ellis, and Inglehart claim that the four-item Euro-Barometer battery provides a valid measure of the value orientations citizens in advanced industrial societies. We are not persuaded. Our analyses indicate that the battery is seriously flawed, and that the dynamics of response to it over the past two decades provide a classic illustration of what we have termed the "conversations in context" problem in survey research. There is no need to reiterate the details of our argument and supporting empirical evidence here. Rather, we will confine our attention to three larger methodological and theoretical points that may suggest a way forward for those interested in comparative studies of the nature and dynamics of values and related aspects of public political psychology. Point 1 concerns how the structure and content of a survey instrument can interact with the changing context in which the instrument is administered. We have argued that sharp variations in macroeconomic conditions since the mid-1970s have done much to produce the over-time pattern in responses to the Euro-Barometer surveys that prompt Inglehart and his associates to conclude that these data support the materialist to postmaterialist value shift thesis. However, the point is much more general than the present controversy; at issue is the larger question of how social scientists measure the dynamics of political beliefs, attitudes, and opinions, and how they interpret

CONVERSATIONS IN CONTEXT: The (Mis)Measurement of Value Change in Advanced Industrial Societies

One aspect of the multifaceted controversy on value change in advanced industrial societies concerns the measurement of values. Analyses of 1976–86 Euro-Barometer data have indicated that responses to the four-item “materialist-postmaterialist” values index are very sensitive to current economic conditions, especially inflation and unemployment rates and, hence, much of the recorded increase in postmaterialism in eight Western European countries since the mid-1970s is artifactual. Although it has been claimed these findings disappear if more recent data are considered, time series analyses reveal that responses to the values measure are strongly affected by prevailing economic conditions throughout the entire 1976–92 period. These aggregate-level findings are buttressed by individual-level analyses of 1989 Euro-Barometer data.

Biological Diversity and Political Equality

In the present work we deal with the political and social dimensions of modern technologies of genetic diagnosis. In the first place we review the literature on the subject, using the usual distinction between genetic diagnosis in clinical and non-clinical contexts. Then we show the way in which the interaction between these diagnosis techniques and their social context can lead to a redefinition of the concept of illness. Then we examine the political implications that these redefinitions cause. The paper ends with a reflection on the possibility that the use of genetic diagnosis may lead to questioning how the solidarity that is characteristic of advanced industrial societies is organized.

Catholic social teaching and the allocation of scarce resources.

Catholic Social Teaching and the Allocation of Scarce Resources John Langan S.J. (bio) I shall approach the issue of justice in the allocation of scarce resources from the viewpoint of Catholic social teaching, as developed over the last century. This teaching is found primarily in the social encyclicals issued by popes from Leo XIII (1878–1903) to John Paul II (1978- ), but also in the pastoral letters of the various bishops’ conferences, especially in the United States and in Latin America. These documents, which enjoy a high standing in Catholic teaching but which are not taken as binding in all their particulars, form part of a tradition of moral and social theorizing that a contemporary American would regard as “communitarian.” On social questions, this tradition also has shown itself to be historicist in that it is capable of modifying itself in significant ways in response to changing political and economic situations. It normally approaches issues from a universalist perspective, though it has shifted from a preoccupation with the concerns of the industrial societies of Europe to an advocacy of much of the reform agenda of the Third World. Rooted in classical and biblical sources and modified in the course of the last [End Page 401] century to include a principled acceptance of religious freedom, of human rights, and of democratic political institutions, the Catholic social tradition proposes a number of ideas that can serve as the basis for significant criticism of currently dominant liberal modes of organizing and interpreting advanced industrial societies. These ideas do not form a countertheory to liberalism so much as they indicate ways in which a religious organization that includes both hierarchical and egalitarian elements in its structure and that has both moral commitments and practical responsibilities with regard to health care can draw on its intellectual resources to develop alternative strategies for the reform of health care. I shall survey six ideas that figure prominently in Catholic social teaching and that are relevant to the allocation of scare resources in American health care. Space constraints require that I present them in a very condensed fashion, without tracing the complex development they have undergone in the internal Catholic debate or subjecting them to much criticism. First, Catholic social teaching, especially the great encyclical of John XXIII, Pacem In Terris (PT 1963), affirms the full range of human rights recognized in such modern documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949). In addition to the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights added to the original U.S. Constitution (1791), the Universal Declaration includes rights “to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life; these are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services” (PT 11). Catholic social teaching has not committed itself to one particular way of institutionalizing these rights, but it effectively endorses the comprehensive West European welfare states that the Christian Democratic political parties helped to construct in the period after 1945. Second, Catholic social teaching has accorded a central organizing role to the notion of the common good, the realization of which “is the whole reason for the existence of civil authorities” (PT 54). The common good, however, is not to be understood as identical with the interest or the power of the state; rather, it “embraces the sum total of those conditions of social living whereby men are enabled to achieve their own integral perfection more fully and more easily” (PT 58; quoting Mater et Magistra). John XXIII is particularly anxious to affirm that the common good cannot be construed so as to exclude some groups or to violate the rights of individuals and that it must include both physical and spiritual goods (PT 55–61). The notion of the common good has both an inherent attractiveness and a vagueness that cries out for specification and clarification. But in the contemporary situation it serves to remind us that “individual citizens and intermediate groups are obliged to make their specific contributions to the common welfare” (PT 53). Third, while an insistence on the primacy of the common good and on the [End Page 402...

Redistribution of Assets Versus Redistribution of Income: Comments on “Efficient Redistribution” by Bowles and Gintis

In this comment we compare the asset-based approach of Bowles and Gintis with the alternative approach associated most closely with social democracy but followed in all advanced industrial societies to some extent.

Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century.

Young adults in the modern era face a completely differently set of challenges from previous generations. Tracing historical constructions of adolescence and their role in maintaining social order, James E. Cote and Anton L. Allahar persuasively argue that young people today constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups in society. Today, for the first time, teenagers and young adults in the United states, Canada, Japan, Scandinavia and Western Europe can expect to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Youth are conditioned to stay young linger and have, as a result, become socially and economically marginalized. Many young people amass credentials regardless of employment prospects and continue to live at home, often dependent on their parents, into their thirties. With fewer jobs available, young people are ironically targeted increasingly as consumers, rather than as producers. As new technologies continually reduce the work force and alter the social fabric, an entire generation of young people has struggled to keep up. What then does it mean to come of age in an advanced industrial or post-industrial society?

Ghiţa Ionescu 1913–96: Freedom and Politics

Ghiţa Ionescu's Formal Academic Career Began When He reached the London School of Economics in 1963, at the age of fifty. Within three years he had published three books and become the founder-editor of Government and Opposition. He went on to edit the journal for the next thirty-one years and to bring the total number of his books to fourteen, five of them comprising a brilliant series on the East European communist states and the rest mainly on the challenges, both internal and external, facing the liberal democracies in advanced industrial society. He became Professor of Government at the University of Manchester and chairman, for over two decades, of the Research Committee on European Unification of the International Political Science Association. He inspired and energized countless students and colleagues. The main purpose of this article is to explore the significance of these achievements. But first, a word about the motive forces behind them.

Trappers and trapping in advanced industrial society: Economic and socio cultural values of furbearer utilization in the northeastern united states

The purchase of trapping licenses in the northeastern United States has been declining for several years. Despite the decline in trapping activity, participation by a core group of trappers persists. To elucidate the economic and sociocultural values associated with present‐day trapping activities in the northeastern United States, several state and federal agencies and two academic institutions cooperated in a multistate study of trapping attitudes, values, motivations, and behavior. Results suggest that trappers continue to participate in trapping for a variety of sociocultural values and motivations, including the multiple satisfactions derived from involvement in an enduring recreational central life interest. Trapping to procure income and to provide in‐kind contributions to the household economy represent important motives and meanings to a smaller segment of the respondent population.

Spanking and the Making of a Violent Society

Most of the world's societies are violent in the sense that they have high rates of physical assault, homicide, and war. The United States (US) is the most violent of the advanced industrial societies. The current US homicide rate of 8.5 per 100 000 is three times the Canadian rate of 2.3 per 100 000, and about eight times the rate of Western European countries. Nevertheless, many societies are even more violent. The Mexican homicide rate of 19.4 is more than double that of the US, and the rate for the cities of Columbia (110.4 per 100 000) is more than ten times higher. Most of the world's societies also bring up children violently through the use of corporal punishment. Perhaps the correspondence between the preponderance of violence and that of corporal punishment is just a coincidence. Obviously, corporal punishment and assaults and murders differ in severity, and also in the cultural definition that makes one legitimate and the other criminal. However, there is also a correspondence between the behavior involved in corporal punishment and the behavior involved in criminal assaults and homicides that is seldom perceived. Everyone understands that corporal punishment is carried out to correct or control misbehavior. What is not understood is that almost all assaults by adults and about two thirds of homicides are also carried out to correct what the offender perceives as misbehavior. Typical examples include a confrontation between two men over a loan of $50 that is to be paid back in 1 week.

Disintegration or Transformation: The Crisis of the State in Advanced Industrial Societies, Edited by Erik Jones and Patrick McCarthy

The Crisis of the State in Advanced Industrial Societies P.McCarthy & E.Jones - America's Federal Nation State: A Post-Imperial Crisis? D.P.Calleo - Craving Normality: The Japanese State After the Cold War M.J.Green - Italy: The Crisis of an Oligarchical State S.Fabbrini - A Crisis of the State? The French Case J.W.Friend - The Crisis of German Power D.Allin - Fin de Siecle Canada: The Federal Government in Retreat G.P.Marchildon - The Transformation of the Belgian State E.Jones - Britain: the Melancholy Pleasure of Decline P.McCarthy - List of Tables - Index

Inglehart's Materialism‐Postmaterialism Concept: Clarifying the Dimensionality Debate Through Rokeach's Model of Social Values1

This paper addresses an ongoing debate concerning the dimensionality of Inglehart's (1971, 1977, 1981, 1990) concept of materialism‐postmaterialism. According to Inglehart, this concept is unidimensional, distinct from the traditional left‐right political belief continuum, and central to explaining the changes taking place in the values of advanced industrial societies. To date, the debate has sought answers in different item sets, factor analytic solutions, and rotations. This paper approaches the problem through psychological models of social values. Materialism‐postmaterialism, it is argued, involves a prioritizing of values from two orthogonal value orientations which have grown out of the work of Rokeach (1973): national strength and order and international harmony and equality.