by I’m teaching a class on Social Change this semester in the Houston Futures program. The class was developed by Peter Bishop and is a great favorite of the students (and me, too). In the class, we explore ten different theories of social change, that is, how do societies change, or how does one form of society succeed another? I’ll leave a discussion of the ten types for another post, and focus on the connection to the values changes we’ve been discussing as part of ConsumerShift.
The social change theory best describing the values changes is called “development.” Development Theory states that there is a consistent direction to change in societies over time. Bishop notes that it is related to another set of familiar changes—the cycle of life from birth, through growth and maturity. Newborns of all species develop into adults using generally the same process as all other members of the species. Thus the adults of the species are larger than infants and are significantly more capable of doing whatever that species does—running, climbing, vocalizing, defending, and, of course, procreating.
It suggests that social change is analogous to how an organism develops new capabilities over time — they change in a consistent direction toward becoming more complex, not necessarily better. We don’t say that adults are better than the infants, but they are clearly more developed and possess capabilities and a level of complexity that infants do not. They are just at a different point of development.
The same point holds true for values. ConsumerShift suggests that the development pattern the societies follow — if they are willing and able — is from traditional to modern to postmodern and finally integral values. It is not saying that one type is better than another, but further along in development. A key difference from the life-cycle of an organism, however, is that societies can choose whether to develop or not, whereas organisms cannot. A society may find itself quite comfortable with traditional values and choose to stay there, or with modern values, or with postmodern.
As noted in previous posts, the pattern is that as societies develop economically, their values tend to develop in a similar fashion. Traditional societies, for instance, tend to be rather less developed economically, but as they begin to achieve economic growth, they begin to embrace modern values (which “favor” growth and achievement). This is going on in a big way in China, for instance, as it has grown rapidly in recent years. Similarly, as modern societies develop into affluent societies, they embrace postmodern values. This is especially evident in Northern Europe, where these affluent countries are the most postmodern in the world.
Thus, the development theory of social change underpins the values changes in ConsumerShift—suggesting change in a consistent direction over time, and, as suggested in previous posts, this pattern has been validated by the data in the World Values Survey. Andy Hines
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