Values Overview Values Unit

Introduction Identifying Societal Values New Values? Comparing Societal Values - Value Orientations The Importance and Consistency of Values in Our Society National Values or Subcultures Roper Starch National and World Survey

Introduction and Overview

"One of the broadest and surest generalizations that anthropology can make about human beings is that no society is healthy or creative or strong unless that society has a set of common values that give meaning and purpose to group life, that can be symbolically expressed, that fit with the situation of the time as well as being linked to the historic past, and that do not out rage men’s reason and at the same time appeal to their emotions."

Clyde Kluckhohn

This quote illustrates how important many social scientists think values are.  This is especially true for functionalists (this links to to a short description of this important perspective in sociology).   

Conflict theory argues that power (the threat of force or promise of reward) is what holds society together and is the motivation for human beings.   However, functionalists have emphasized the importance of consensus (based on a common set of values) as one of the major cohesive forces in society and motivation for individuals in  a society.   It sees values as tools used by the ruling class to make domination of the lower classes easier.

Earlier in this course I have talked about how important evidence is for sociologists. Evidence to support statements about values like the one quoted above is sometimes difficult to find. One way that people often try to support statements that deal with whole societies is to look at examples of societies from history.

Another kind of evidence comes from smaller scale societies, subcultures, or groups. In thinking about evidence to support this statement, it occurred to me that there is some pretty good evidence. It comes from the studies of communes or intentional alternative communities that were fairly popular in the late 60' and early 70's in the US.

Quite a few sociological studies were done of these groups and one of the summary findings from the studies was that communes or intentional communities which shared a common core of values tended to last much longer than communities which didn't.

It didn’t seem to matter if the value source was Mao’s Little Red Book, The New Testament, or something else. It was the fact that the group had a clear commitment to a common set of goals and values that seemed to make the difference.

The common value base was most useful when conflicts arose in the group.  The common set of values was a standard for making decisions which appealed to and this helped settle differences of opinion.

One of the reasons I chose the picture opposite the title for this page is that it shows a church and a downtown business district. It would have been even better if it could have included a university and art gallery. For many people think the main sources for the values shared in our culture have their origins in the religion, the commercial world, science (the enlightenment), and the arts.

Indeed one of the long standing conflicts in our society has been the values of the religious traditions and the secular world view. The former has given meaning and moral direction to members in our society and the later opened our culture to reason, democracy, and technological progress. There is also a sense of unease by some in our society, that the values of the commercial world and artistic world are undermining a spiritual discipline and moral order.

The popular press has even picked up the term "culture wars" to describe the political conflicts that arise from competing groups with different values.

 

American Values Overview

Here are the results of an Oregon value survey which give us a starting point for our overview of American core values.

Oregon Values Survey 1993 - Personal Values
Participation in family Career or job opportunity Concern for environment Practice of religion/spirituality Charitability to others Independence of self Being economical or thrifty Seclusion, solitude, privacy Supporting your community Diversity of people	. . . . . . . . . . 30. . . . . . . . 60. . . . . . . .90	This table show the results of survey of the values of Oregonians taken in 1993 by Decision Sciences, Inc. it was published in Clarifying Oregon's Choices. Unfortunately sample size and other info not available.

Identifying National or Cultural Values

It is one thing to measure an individual's values but how can we determine what a society or group’s values are?    Here are some methods that have been suggested and some of the results they have come up with.

1. Add up individual responses (in large numbers).  For examples of this approach here are they results from the - Rokeach survery.   
    
   
2. Look at what activities or goals the culture rewards most highly. (Money, esteem, respect etc.)
   
   
3. Examine art, literature, media. The assumption is that these these cultural items reflect the real values of the society.

What kind of person is portrayed as the hero, the good guy, etc.?

What kinds of goals are conformists striving for?

What are the states of being or styles of life which are presented as being desirable?

These last two methods are basically what we have from Williams and the textbook author. You can read their conclusions in the textbook on pages 45 through 47.

 

 

New Values?

From time to time other authors emerge arguing that there are new values emerging in our society.   Here are examples from two authors who claim that in fact there are two new sets of values emerging in our society.

Read the Yankelovich and Keen tables to get an understanding of their point of view.

Here is an even more recent attempt by Paul Ray  to summarize a new set of core values.  He see the cultural creatives as the result of new changes in society that are similar to the ones that produced heartlanders (conservatives?) and modernists (liberals?).   In this summary and some of Mr. Ray's statements it seems to me that he took off his sociologist's hat and is making value statements?   This will be more apparent if you look at his article for which there is a link on the next class web page.  He uses words like dogmatic, etc. describing heartlanders (traditionals) that seem to me be to be value statements which people holding those views would be unlikely to agree with. 

 

Comparing Societal Values 

If different cultures have different values, how can we compare values between cultures and throughout history?  Below you will find what I think is the best model of values for such comparisons.

Kluckhohn and Strodbeck claim that there are certain basic value orientations centering around universal human problems or issues.

Check out their value orientation chart.

As sociology students you are no doubt wondering how did they measure these value orientations.  So here is a link to some of the questions they used, which I found in their book titled Variations in Value Orientations by Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck.  In the research tradition of the social sciences they included their questionnaire which gives us the possibility of evaluating their methods.  I found a copy of this book at the OSU library.

Be sure to spend enough time with this table to really understand it, since we will use value orientations next week to outline the different political ideologies.

Ask you instructor questions if there are aspects of this table that are not clear to you.

 

How important are common values for a society?

The functionalist (or what is sometimes called the consensus model) model of society thinks that values are of great importance because:

1. Values are the glue that holds a society together ( at least along with interdependence).
   
   Example - Leaders are obeyed because of their authority - since we value democracy and they were elected we obey them.
   
   
2. The basic institutions (family, education, etc.) are constructed to lead us to the things the society values.  For example the family helps us achieve the goal of socializing children and regulating sexual behavior.
   
   
3. Values have grown out of the experience of preceding generations and are passed on through the process of socialization.
   
   
4. Common values serve as the point to which one can appeal in attempts to persuade the other side during conflicts or when arguing over issues.
   
   
5. This perspective therefore argues that there has to be a good fit between values and other aspects of a society.  

 

Do we have a good fit between our values and our society?

Daniel Bell in a book titled The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism argues that we don’t.

The corporations where we work value hierarchy, efficiency, and may sacrifice a person's wishes for goals of organization. Like lay them off.

But in the political arena we value equality and believe in the consent of the governed and want people to take responsibility as citizens.

Businesses, popular culture, the media, and art often seem to attack traditional middle class values or religious values.  What they these institutions seem to emphasize is the selfish search for pleasure, self enhancement and personal freedom without social responsibility.  

Finally, capitalism is based on savings yet our advertising and credit cards urge us to consume and thus enjoy the present rather than promoting savings which are the basis for new investment.

 

Summary

After looking at the results of some national surveys and some of the ideas about American values, we come finally to the question, "Are there common American core values that all people in our society share?"

The alternative is to believe that we are a society composed of various subcultures each with their own set of values.  These subcultures might be based on class, ethnicity, religion, and region of the country.  In fact I have found it very difficult to find anyone doing research on national values now, except people who are trying to identify market segments to help companies target populations for advertising.   Their assumption is as follows:

"Is there anything that unites people regardless of culture and lifestage?  Yes, there is.  Personal values turn out to be a primary driver in people's consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and meat.  They are also strongly related to the use of various media and technology.  A combined understanding of nationality, lifestage, and personal values is the most powerful too for strategic marketing in most, if not all, product and service categories."

Even more interesting is that since these companies are private polling and research companies their information is not freely available.  I finally found what appears to be an interesting current study of US values and another on world values.  However, they were done the the Roper Starch company and it would cost me $100 for the US study (ten pages) and $575 for the international study.    I'm still trying to get us the results of the US study through interlibrary loan and if I get it I will share it with you later.

I have just found the results from the USA values study for 1999.  I actually found this in a long advertisement in the October 2000 issue of American Demographics.

American Values as Identified by the Roper Polling Corporation

Some Age Gaps Persist - adapted from American Demographics Magazine (Oct 2000) add by Roper Starch Worldwide -

It is  interesting that there are differences in values based on age.   Is this due to age in the sense that as we grow older our values change (lifestage)?  Or is it that each generation (age cohort) forms their values in a different environment based on the historical moment of which they are a part? 

But even more important is the fact that all ages include family, honesty, health, self esteem, self reliance and freedom.

World Values?

Below you will find the Roper report on world values.   Remember these studies are done to help large corporations develop marketing strategies and the multinational companies want to target consumers in many countries.

Whatever the methodological problems are in doing national studies they can only be much greater when doing cross cultural studies.  Remember our symbolic interaction based query - what does freedom mean? 

World in their study includes - North America, Western Europe, urban areas in Australia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, South Africa,  and Saudi Arabia.   In the developing world it represents the urban areas excluding the lowest socioeconomic households in Korea, Thailand, Philippines, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, Egypt, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. 

Graph above adapted from American Demographics Magazine (Oct 2000) add by Roper Starch Worldwide -

Actually, I find it extremely surprising that the values for the world and those for the US look so similar.   According to the add:

"The end result of this intensive groundwork is that a list of about 60 personal values and their definitions were administered to 30,000 respondents aged 13 to 65, interviewed in their own homes.  Each respondent rated each value as a "guiding principle" in his or her life. 

This raises in my mind a new problem.  For such a study to be published in a sociology journal it would have to be read and evaluated by other sociologists.  The study would have to explain in detail the methods and statistics used.  People who reservations about the methods and results would be invited to respond in the next issues pointing out what they believed to be any errors in the study.

Also it is interesting because it rules out, at least in the "developing markets" all the lower income people.  Why?  Because they don't have enough money to buy the products that the multinationals want to sell. 

When the result is a product to be sold I worry that it is not so much an attempt to arrive at the truth but another way of making money in which any doubts about its validity will reduce the price people are willing to pay for it.   An incentive, in my mind  to over sell the certainty with which its results will be reported.

Since research is so expensive and the government is cutting back on the money available for social research, I worry that increasingly the source of our knowledge will move from the University to the corporation.  Corporations in my mind do not have a good record on truth telling.  

For example what if we had had to rely on the tobacco companies research to tell us if nicotine was an addictive drug.  I used to show a video of the tobacco executives a few years back, each stating to a congressional committee that tobacco was not an addictive drug.

We now know from the forced disclosure of the recent tobacco court cases that they were flat out lying since their own company research for years had been telling them this and they had been using this information to manipulate the levels of nicotine in cigarettes.

Hopefully these last two pages will have given you a more in depth look at a topic from a sociological view.   The next page will give you a chance to think about this topic in a slightly different way.