The Subjective Foundations of Values Change in Society - A comparative study of social generation dispositions of social justice, work, and trust

This research project explores to which degree the shared experiences of people born in the same period lead to similar identities and values. The project studies how socio-temporal positions influence people’s disposition of identity and values and their identification with the culture and symbols of their social generation.
This will provide new knowledge on why and how values change between social generations – changes that reshape culture and society – and how different values way work to underpin the same welfare institutions.
Differences in values between birth cohorts are well-established scientific facts (Gundelach 2011; Inglehart 1971; 2008). However, knowledge is scarce on why values change. I argue that shared experiences of those born at a specific time in history result in social generations with characteristic ways of perceiving and relating to the social, and in consequence, similarities in identity and values.
A well-known social generation is the post-war ‘baby-boomers’ who turned into the ’68 generation’ and is now being defined as the ‘age bomb’ generation. Specific socio-economic and cultural conditions facilitated the baby-boom, and the cultural experiences of affluence and war facilitated the new shared moral, cultural and socio-economic identity of the youth rebellion (Stitt 1978).
The project addresses the relationship between the dispositional structure of meaning and the temporal stratification of experience by combining the quantitative analysis of population patterns of values and identities with the qualitative study of subjective structures of meaning. This will yield new knowledge on how values and identities concerning work, social justice and trust are built from experiences of specific time slots in the temporal flow of culture and society. Consequently, it will also yield knowledge on the mechanisms at work when values change within society. The first phase of the project is a comparative study of Denmark and Sweden (2*60 qualitative research interviews). The second phase, planned to commence in 2014, is a similar study carried out in the United States of America and China (2*80-100 qualitative interviews).