Societal development, social stratification and power- and achievement-values Inglehart’s scarcity hypothesis and the theory of the social production functions in the comparative study of values

ABSTRACT

Power- and achievement-values are seen to be important for productivity and societal stability. But what exact factors drive the forces to adhere to power- and achievement-values? In this study, the focus is on societal development and social stratification. Research on values in general often is not very careful in the distinction between different levels of analysis although the necessity has been outlined in several contributions to theoretical thinking in sociology. That is why this article comes from the position of methodological individualism and highlights explicitly the different levels of analysis and their assumed interrelations. It is shown that Inglehart’s scarcity hypothesis as an explaining mechanism has some weaknesses. As an alternative, the theory of social production functions is suggested that is capable to provide a framework of compatible societal- and individual-level mechanisms. The empirical analysis is based on data of the fourth round of the European Social Survey containing about 50,000 respondents in 31 countries. The comparability of power- and achievement-values across countries and across the societal and the individual level is tested by using two-level confirmatory factor analysis. The results show that comparability across countries and across both levels can be confirmed. Furthermore, opposing relations for societal development and social stratification are found: The higher the societal development, the lower the priority of power- and achievement-values; the higher the social stratification position, the more important the power- and achievement-values. Therefore, the scarcity hypothesis is rejected and the need for an alternative explanation is reinforced.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytical sociology
• methodological individualism
• human values
• structural equation modeling
• multilevel confirmatory factor analysis
• European social survey

Acknowledgements

I want to express my gratitude to the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung) who supported the present research with a grant. Further thanks go to Andreas Hadjar, Elmar Schlüter, and the anonymous reviewers that gave highly valuable feedback to earlier drafts of the paper. Parts of the research were conducted during the employment at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Osnabrück.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dennis Köthemann is Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat auf Zeit) at the Department of Sociology at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. His main research interests focus on international comparative social research, social inequalities especially regarding values, political participation and education, and quantitative research methods.

Notes

1 For the societal level, Schwartz’s (2006) Theory of Cultural Value Orientations with a different terminology could be applied. However, as ‘substantial structural similarity […] across individual and country levels’ (Fischer et al. 2010: 145) is empirically confirmed, the present study uses equal terminology for power- and achievement-values at both levels. In the empirical analyses in Section 7 the assumption of ‘cross-level invariance’ (Zyphur et al. 2008: 127) is tested.

2 In Inglehart’s and Welzel’s revised theory of Modernisation, the term Postmodernisation no longer is used. As there are more rich information about power- and achievement-related differences in the importance of values in the writings of Inglehart (1997), those ideas and therewith the usage of the term Postmodernisation is maintained here.

3 Social stratification is conceived ‘as the hierarchical distribution of power, privilege, and prestige’ (Kohn and Schooler 1983a: 6).

4 Such arguments raise the question if not only people with high priority in power- and achievement-values reach higher social stratification positions. As for the present study only cross-sectional data are available, the importance of values or occupational possibilities of the respondents before the survey cannot be considered. However, Kohn and Schooler (1983b) show impressively with panel data, how occupational conditions impact the importance of values substantially while controlling for a lot of different factors such as educational level, importance of values years before, and so on.

5 The level of social inequality also can play a role in this context. If there is high social inequality, a countries’ prosperity can be high but not all people within the society gain from it. Köthemann (2014) shows that social inequality does not substantially impact the relation of societal development and the priority of power- and achievement-values. Thus, social inequality is not focussed here.

6 Middle-range theories

are theories that lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance during day-to-day research and the all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behaviour, social organization and social change. (Merton 1968 [1949]: 39)

7 More details about the countries analysed are shown in the supplementary material.

8 The detailed descriptive distribution can be seen in the supplementary material.

9 Equal factor loadings across countries and therewith measurement invariance of the indicators are also confirmed by means of multigroup confirmatory factor analysis as reported in more detail in the supplemental material.

10 Detailed results of the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis are documented in the supplemental material.

11 Analyses are conducted using Mplus 7.4.

12 The model without cross-level-equivalence-restrictions can be found in the supplemental material.

13 For the χ²-difference-test the Satorra–Bentler scaling correction is taken into account because models are run with robust maximum likelihood estimations.

14 Suggested cut-off values: CFI closed to .95, RMSEA closed to .06, SRMR closed to .08. Although the overall fit measures are good, the SRMR for the between level is slightly above the suggested criterion. However, a large number of countries, preferably greater than 50, is needed to correctly detect issues of cross-level equality (Fischer et al. 2010). As the present analyses only can use 31 countries, the slightly higher SRMR at the between level is accepted.

15 By having only 31 countries the MLR lacks power (Meuleman and Billiet 2009). However, analyses with ML estimation leads to slightly higher standard errors but the coefficient for the Human Development Index still is significant. Following Hox’s (2010: 33) suggestions, all slopes of the exogenous variables were fixed as there is no strong theoretical or empirical justification to estimate random slopes. The model without cross-level invariance yields a lower coefficient (−4.377) that statistically does not differ meaningfully form the coefficient in Table 1, proved by overlapping confidence intervals. Thus, the cross-level invariance restriction does not change the results meaningfully.

16 Just for clarification: The higher service class includes higher-grade professionals, administrators and officials, managers in large industrial establishments and large proprietors. The lower service class includes lower-grade professionals, administrators and officials, higher-grade technicians, managers in small industrial establishments and supervisors of non-manual employees. The routine class includes non-manual employees in administration and commerce, sales personnel and other rank-and-file service workers. The petty bourgeoisie includes small proprietors and artisans, etc., with and without employees (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992: 39–40).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation [PhD Grant].