This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how the value systems play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions - and that modernisation brings coherent cultural changes that are conducive to democratisation.

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Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

Two processes at work in contemporary society are the secularization of religion and the sacralization of the secular. Consumer behavior shapes and reflects these processes. For many, consumption has become a vehicle for experiencing the sacred. This article explores the ritual substratum of consumption and describes properties and manifestations of the sacred inherent in consumer behavior. Similarly, the processes by which consumers sacralize and desacralize dimensions of their experience are described. The naturalistic inquiry approach driving the insights in this article is advanced as a corrective to a premature narrowing of focus in consumer research.

The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey

Much social theory takes for granted the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors—individuals, organizations, nation states—are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded in culture. Accordingly, while there is much abstract metatheory about “actors” and their “agency,” there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an “actor,” and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their in...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/223284.pdf

The “Actors” of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency

This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, emancipative cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social progress - a syndrome whose common focus has not been properly specified by classical modernization theory. We specify this syndrome as 'human development', arguing that its three components have a common focus on broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development gives people the objective means of choice by increasing individual resources; rising emancipative values strengthen people's subjective orientation towards choice; and democratization provides legal guarantees of choice by institutionalizing freedom rights. Analysis of data from the World Values Surveys demonstrates that the linkage between individual resources, emancipative values and freedom rights is universal in its presence across nations, regions and cultural zones; that this human development syndrome is shaped by a causal effect of individual resources and emancipative values on freedom rights; and that this effect operates through its impact on elite integrity, as the factor which makes freedom rights effective.

/pdf/the-theory-of-human-development-a-cross-cultural-analysis-mksrg4e1ib.pdf

The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis

The culmination of more than ten years of research carried out in over 50 countries around the world, this volume shows how the forces of modernization on the developing countries change the attitudes and behavior of men acting in their roles as husbands and fathers, as members of ethnic communities, and as citizens of emerging nation-states. The research gathered here demonstrates that the impact of modern institutions on individual psychic adjustment is much less severe than is often imagined and the book explores the meaning of modernization in human terms. In addition, for the first time the theory and method for studying individual modernity are applied to the so-called socialist countries. Inkeles et al. highlight the implications of individual modernity for understanding contemporary and future social change in both developing and advanced countries. "Exploring Individual Modernity" completes the portrait of "modern man" first sketched in "Becoming Modern", the first book to report on the findings on Social and cultural Aspects of Modernization.

Alex Inkeles

Papers

Exploring individual modernity