Value change in the Western world: the rise of materialism, post-materialism or both?

ABSTRACT

Numerous studies have investigated the changing values in the Western countries. Some studies have found people’s values to be changing towards materialism, others have found that post-materialism is on the rise. The present study demonstrates that different types of values have been changing in different directions in Western Europe and the USA since the 1970s. Political values have become more post-materialistic and work values have become more materialistic. The paper then discusses the possible reasons for such conflicting value trends and makes some predictions about the future direction of these trends.

KEYWORDS:

• Political values
• work values
• materialism
• Ronald Inglehart
• generations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Work values are often measured along the extrinsic vs intrinsic dimension, which is somewhat similar, though not identical, to materialism vs post-materialism dimension (see Ester et al., 2006).

2 I only used the first choice (rather than first two choices, as in political values) because there was only one post-materialistic option for work values.

3 I experimented with alternative definitions of work values (e.g. using ‘high income’ as the only materialistic option, or adding ‘chances for advancement’ as the third materialistic option), but that did not substantially alter the results of the trend analysis.

4 I experimented with somewhat different birth years of the generations, used by other authors (see Woodward et al., 2015), but that did not substantially alter the results of the trend analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by institutional research funding IUT 20–38 of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.

Notes on contributors

Tarmo Strenze

Tarmo Strenze is a lecturer of sociology at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. He has previously conducted research on intelligence (IQ), social stratification and social theory.