Modernization, Culture Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

Citation

Hines, A. (2006), "Modernization, Culture Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence", Foresight, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 65-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680610668081

When forecasting, I suspect most of us are most comfortable with demographic projections. There is a fairly high probability that, barring a disaster or wild card, the projections will play out relatively as expected. I also suspect that we are not nearly as confident in any other realm.

Is that situation changing? It may be that the realm of values changes becomes a second area of greater‐than‐average forecasting confidence, thanks to the yeoman's work of Professor Ronald Inglehart and colleagues of the World Values Survey. Their work finally seems to be getting the greater attention it deserves, but I want to take the opportunity of reviewing Ingelhart's latest work – a collaboration with Professor Christian Welzel – to do my part in raising awareness of his work to futurists, as I think they are doing us a tremendous service.

Having been a fan of Inglehart and the World Values Survey for several years, I recommend a visit to their outstanding web site (www.worldvaluessurvey.org/). For those who really want to get at the key theoretical ideas that have resulted from this 30+ years worth of survey work, I recommend Inglehart's 1997 book Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. It is not light beach reading, but the compelling ideas make it worth the ride.

1 The theory

A quick summary of the theory follows. Socioeconomic development is driving changes in values, which come in clusters dubbed traditional, modern, and postmodern.

• •

  “The poor nations have traditional values” focused on survival needs, including respect for authority, religious faith, national pride, obedience, work ethic, large families with strong family ties, a clear sense of good and evil, and respect for parents.

• •

  “The middle‐income nations have modern values” focused on achievement, including high trust in science and technology, faith in the state (bureaucratization), rejection of out‐groups, appreciation of money, hard work, and determination; and a belief that women need children and children need both parents.

• •

  “The rich nations have postmodern values” focused on self‐expression, including an emphasis on individual responsibility and decision‐making, imagination, tolerance, life balance and satisfaction, ecology, leisure, free choice, and good health.

He then plots nations on this scale of values. The most postmodern nations, which will probably come to no surprise to futurists versed in this realm, are the Northern European countries. Sweden is right at the top, in some sense vindicating the extensive use of Sweden as a social bellwether by futurist Graham Molitor. The USA, interestingly, is more traditional than would be predicted by its socioeconomic status. The middle‐income nations fall squarely in the realm of modern values, with their desire for economic growth and strong belief in the power of technology. The poor nations predictably are characterized by traditional values characterized by a strong respect for authority and acceptance of the existing order.

What is a key driver of the change in values? Inglehart points out that rising levels of existential security enable people to emphasize goals that were previously given lower priority, such as the pursuit of freedom. Cultural emphasis shifts from collective discipline to individual liberty, from group conformity to human diversity, and from state authority to individual autonomy. Indeed the data overlays well onto Maslow's hierarchy of humans needs, and I have done this for several presentations.

This theory of intergenerational value change is based on two key hypotheses:

1. 1.

   A scarcity hypothesis, in which material sustenance and physical security are the first requirements for survival. Thus, under conditions of scarcity, people give top priority to materialistic goals, whereas under conditions of prosperity, they become more likely to emphasize post‐materialist goals.

2. 2.

   A socialization hypothesis, the relationship between material scarcity and value priorities is not primarily one of immediate adjustment, a substantial time lag is involved because one's basic values to a large extent reflect the conditions that prevailed during one's pre‐adult years.

It is important to keep in mind that it is one's subjective sense of security, rather than the objective economic conditions per se, that dictate the presence of postmodern values. Ten or 15 years after an era of prosperity begins, the age cohorts that spend their formative years in prosperity begin to enter the electorate, and another dace or two later they begin to play elite roles.

2 What's new

The book at hand draws on a new “wave” of survey data completed from 1999‐2001, which includes data from eight‐one societies containing 85 percent of the world's population and supplements earlier data going back to 1981. Inglehart is a political scientist and devotes the second half of his book to implications of the findings for democracy, which may appeal to those with an interest, but will not be covered in this review aimed at futurists.

The book sets out to integrate socioeconomic development, cultural change, and democratization under the overarching theme of human development. What is exciting in this book is their taking a position on a causal relationship, an advance over early work that merely posited a relationship. Clearly, as the survey and analysis has gone on, Inglehart has become more confident in what the data is saying and has been making bolder assertions.

Their data suggest that socioeconomic modernization, a cultural shift toward rising emphasis on self‐expression values, and democratization are all components of a single underlying process: human development. And the core of the human development sequence is the expansion of human choice and autonomy.

Economic→Cultural→Politicalchangechangechange(existential(self‐(democraticsecurity)expressioninstitutions)values)

Some of the insights will seem intuitively obvious, but the authors have the data to back it up. For instance, “economic growth, rising levels of education and information, and diversifying human interacts increase people's material, cognitive, and social resources, making them materially, intellectually, and socially more independent.” First, reduction of poverty diminishes material constraints on human choice and nourishes a sense of existential security. Second, socioeconomic development tends to increase people's levels of formal education and to give them greater access to information through the mass media … fueling a sense of intellectual independence. Third, socioeconomic development increases occupational specialization and social complexity, diversifying human interactions, which frees people from fixed social roles and social ties, nurturing a sense of social autonomy.

Modernization theory has long suggested that socioeconomic development has a powerful impact on values, but this work emphasizes a strong role for a society's cultural heritage in shaping beliefs and motivations – in particular its religious traditions and colonial history.

They take a strong position that fears of cultural homogenization due to globalization are over‐blown. Inglehart suggests that while “the value systems of different countries are moving in the same direction under the impact of powerful modernizing forces, their value systems have not been converging”. Thus, while there are structural similarities in the types of values driven by socioeconomic development, their particular expression remains under the sway of local culture. Religion and other aspects of society's traditional cultural heritage are not dying out and will not disappear with modernization. He is generally supportive of Huntington's ideas of cultural zones as part of his Clash of Civilizations, as his value maps correspond to a degree.

Indeed, the publics of poor countries have retained their emphasis on survival values (given their socioeconomic position has not improved), while the rich countries have been moving toward self‐expression values. Consequently, the differences between the worldviews of the people living in rich and poor countries have been increasing rather than decreasing. He also makes a very strong point that modernization is not equivalent to westernization and other countries are not following a US model – as suggested above, the US is a deviant case, exhibiting much more traditional and religious values than other rich countries.

He also takes a strong position that a supportive culture is more important to building a democracy than democratic institutions. His data suggests a supportive culture of self‐expression and freedom of choice values are fundamental. This in turn suggests that the US effort to instill democracy in Iraq, which lacks a supportive cultural heritage for democracy, is in trouble, which Inglehart does not shy away from suggesting. “the causal arrow flows mainly from culture to institutions rather than the other way around.”

3 Implications for futures

In futures terms, we are perhaps fortunate to live in times of great intellectual ferment around ideas values and human development. Don Beck and Chris Cowan's spiral dynamics system is gaining increasing notoriety as a tool for explaining human development. Richard Slaughter and colleagues at The Australian Foresight Institute have been at the forefront of bringing in the work on philosopher Ken Wilber and his integral theory of human development to futures. The empirical base of Inglehart's work further strengthens the case for changes that they and others, such as Paul Ray with his “cultural creatives” and Richard Florida with his “creative class” are describing.

Inglehart takes up Karl Popper's challenge that in order to be empirically validated, theories must be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of future events. He creates a predictive model of a country's values based on two modernization factors:

1. 1.

   Real per capita GDP fiver years before the survey.

2. 2.

   The percentage of the labor force employed in given sectors.

And two historical heritage factors:

1. 1.

   How many years of communist rule the society experienced.

2. 2.

   A constant for each of the eight cultural zones that reflects the extent to which that zone's cultural heritage causes it to deviate from simple economic‐historical determinism.

The prediction position was within a small radius of the actual position – within a circle that occupies about 2 percent of the map's area. While this is not enough evidence to suggest prediction is now routine, it is a step in that direction, suggested above, that demographics has been able to take.

The rise of self‐expression values, currently most prevalent in affluence societies, reflects a common human orientation toward human emancipation.

One finds a highly significant correlation between individual's life satisfaction and their perception of how much choice they have in shaping their lives.

Self‐expression values (individualism) prevail over survival values (collectivism) based on levels of socioeconomic development; as external constraints on human choice recede, people and societies tend to place increasing emphasis on self‐expression values or individualism. The pattern is not culture‐specific – it is universal.

The rise of post‐materialism does not mean that materialistic issues and concerns are vanishing, but that publics in post‐industrial societies have developed more sophisticated forms of consumerism, materialism, and hedonism. New forms of materialism no longer function primarily to indicate people's economic class – as they are in modern nations – but increasingly are a means of self‐expression.

I first used this data in my work as an internal futurist at the Kellogg Company in working with teams doing new product development. The data provided insight into understanding evolving consumer needs in our different markets around the globe. For one project looking at creating a premium brand focusing around the eating experience, I created a character “Postmodern Pete,” which the team interviewed for insight into creating a brand that tapped into a postmodern sensibility. It was extraordinary how effective that session was in tuning the team into how values changes would influence consumer perspectives. Recently, I gave a talk to a chapter of the American Society of Training Development on their implications for the globalization of the training and human resources functions.

I think futurists will increasingly rely on this data and the theories emanating from it in the years ahead. My hats off to the pioneering work of Inglehart, Welzel and their colleagues who have toiled long and hard to provide this work.