Shift In Cultural Values Research Articles

Stability and Variability Across and Within Cultures: Implications for Cognitive Theory

Ethnic diversity is widespread in the modern world, but nations differ in their policies toward ethnic minority groups. Where assimilation of ethnic minorities is allowed or encouraged, a shift in cultural values from those held by the ethnic group to those held in the mainstream is typically part of the assimilation process. Differences in value systems between ethnic groups will affect that process, but so will differences within groups, since individuals will differ as to the extent of their identification with a given ethnic group’s values. Differences between and within groups will affect the ways parents transmit cultural values, whether traditional or mainstream, to their children. A factor is this regard is parenting style, which some theorists contend is also important in the facilitation of children’s cognitive development. Research findings are equivocal on the role of parenting style, including its interaction with parents’ ethnic identification, especially with respect to mediational parenting. It is evident that mediational parenting can facilitate children’s cognitive functioning, but other parenting styles may dominate in successful intergenerational transfer of cultural values.

If I had a song: The culture of digital community networks and its impact on the music industry

Technological innovations have always influenced the ways in which music is made and consumed in societies. Now that music has entered the digital realm a new revolution is underway, one in which fundamental changes in nearly all aspects of the culture of modern music experience are being driven by the interaction between technological innovations and the social impacts of those innovations. The Internet enables the development of widely dispersed, interactive audiences for musical products and services, and therefore the emergence of highly fragmented and highly specific niche markets for any conceivable form of music. One striking effect of the transformation of music from an analog to a digital entity has been a shift in power from the large and established music industry institutions to digital community networks. These new virtual communities of individual technology users, both as artists and as consumers, have evolved as dynamic and self‐organizing entities based on patterns of electronic information interchange. The effects of this redistribution of power are manifesting themselves as shifts in cultural values: in behavioral changes, attitudinal changes, and even fundamental shifts in ethical judgments.

Batswana 1 Adolescents’ Interpretation of American Music Videos: So that’s What that Means!

Understanding the impact of mass media communication from developing countries on Black populations continues to be an important research topic. This study assessed the impact of television, specifically, music video programming from the United States, on 191 Black adolescents from Botswana, a developing country located in southern Africa. Results indicated that television programming originating in America has a significant impact on the Batswana youth, with greater than two thirds of adolescents having weekly exposure to this form of American culture. However, the majority of African youth failed to demonstrate accurate perceptions of culture-specific language and images contained in the music videos. Findings also suggest that American entertainment figures are replacing the influence of African entertainers on the Batswana youth. Relations between media technology and shifts in cultural values of developing countries are discussed.

Beliefs about work in the Middle East and the convergence versus divergence of values

In this paper, 365 managers and employees from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman are queried about their work-related beliefs to determine the extent to which any of these countries may be experiencing a shift in cultural values. Results from the testing of various convergence versus divergence based hypotheses suggest that Saudi Arabia is more steadfast in its work beliefs while Kuwait and Oman appear to be more susceptible to influences by external forces.

Singing stone: a natural history of the Escalante Canyons

Integrating personal narrative and natural history, Fleischner presents what he calls a guide to understanding the relatively unknown landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.Like a bright blue seam incised deep in solid rock, the Escalante River binds the fir forests of Utah's High Plateau with the barren deserts of the canyonlands region in the newly designed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. To this wild landscape, naturalist Thomas Fleischner brings both emotional engagement and a wealth of knowledge. With unabashed passion and patient and learned observations Fleischner presents this relatively unknown landscape.Singing Stone is ideal for curious visitors to the national monument as well as students of environmental studies. Fleischner's background as a conservation biologist and former park ranger, a professor of environmental studies, and a naturalist in the Escalante Region for almost twenty years has provided him with a deep reservoir of experience and knowledge.The book's first three chapters survey the unique geology, flora and fauna, and human history of the region. Chapters four and five trace the more recent impacts of human activities--grazing and wilderness recreation--and explore the shifts in cultural values and public policy that have occurred as a result. Examining these topics in the context of a specific landscape offers a lens through which these changes, now the topic of examination and controversy throughout the New West, can be clearly seen and, hopefully, re-evaluated.

Seasons of Death: Aspects of Mortality in Imperial Rome

Within the last decade significant advances have been made towards a better understanding of the fundamental demographic regimes that characterized the Mediterranean world of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Coincident with this improvement in our knowledge has come a renewed interest in the rituals and cultural practices associated with death and burial in the societies that were part of the Roman Empire. These divergent interests are reflected in two distinct approaches to the analysis of death in Roman society. The cultural method, which finds significance in reading the quality of a given death and burial, has tended to concentrate on eliciting connections between the archaeological remains of burial, the ritualistic celebration of death, and the social values of the living. The other approach to the phenomenon of death is more directly concerned with the crude biological facts of life and death: the historical demography of human mortality that has emphasized the analysis of quantitative data. In almost any consideration of death, however, the two approaches are pragmatically inseparable. This interdependence of the evaluative and quantitative aspects of death is apparent from the fact that it was a dramatic shift in cultural values that produced the consciousness and the recording of the temporal ‘quantity’ that made the writing of this study possible. What I propose to do is to track the seasonal variations of mortality in Roman society. Pronounced seasonal fluctuations in the demographics of any given human population are one of the most fundamental and enduring aspects of its characteristic profile. This applies not only to crudely biological processes such as birth and death, but also to practices, like marriage, that are apparently culturally driven. These annual oscillations rarely alter very much over the long term; they are one of the ‘deep structures’ that identify the main environmental and cultural factors that form a given population. As such, they mirror the interplay between the bare biological forces and the human decisions that give any population its peculiar shape. The delineation of a central diagnostic feature of a given population, in this case that of a vanished population of one and a half millennia ago, is something that will enable us better to understand its basic demographic structure.

Seasons of Death: Aspects of Mortality in Imperial Rome

Within the last decade significant advances have been made towards a better understanding of the fundamental demographic regimes that characterized the Mediterranean world of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Coincident with this improvement in our knowledge has come a renewed interest in the rituals and cultural practices associated with death and burial in the societies that were part of the Roman Empire. These divergent interests are reflected in two distinct approaches to the analysis of death in Roman society. The cultural method, which finds significance in reading the quality of a given death and burial, has tended to concentrate on eliciting connections between the archaeological remains of burial, the ritualistic celebration of death, and the social values of the living. The other approach to the phenomenon of death is more directly concerned with the crude biological facts of life and death: the historical demography of human mortality that has emphasized the analysis of quantitative data. In almost any consideration of death, however, the two approaches are pragmatically inseparable. This interdependence of the evaluative and quantitative aspects of death is apparent from the fact that it was a dramatic shift in cultural values that produced the consciousness and the recording of the temporal ‘quantity’ that made the writing of this study possible. What I propose to do is to track the seasonal variations of mortality in Roman society. Pronounced seasonal fluctuations in the demographics of any given human population are one of the most fundamental and enduring aspects of its characteristic profile. This applies not only to crudely biological processes such as birth and death, but also to practices, like marriage, that are apparently culturally driven. These annual oscillations rarely alter very much over the long term; they are one of the ‘deep structures’ that identify the main environmental and cultural factors that form a given population. As such, they mirror the interplay between the bare biological forces and the human decisions that give any population its peculiar shape. The delineation of a central diagnostic feature of a given population, in this case that of a vanished population of one and a half millennia ago, is something that will enable us better to understand its basic demographic structure.