Change and Stability

A Cross-national Analysis of Social Structure and Personality

Melvin L. Kohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317262619
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In societies that experience rapid social transformation, does an individual's social position have a major influence on their personality? Exploring this, and related questions, Melvin Kohn presents a detailed overview of how social structure relates to personality in a variety of different countries in vastly different political and social contexts. Case studies include the US, communist Poland, Japan, and Poland and the Ukraine during their transition to capitalism.

Chapter 1

Social Structure and Personality under Conditions of Apparent Social Stability

The United States, Japan, and Poland

This chapter is a substantial revision and extension of a paper coauthored with Atsushi Naoi, Carrie Schoenbach, Carmi Schooler, and Kazimierz Słomczynski and published in The American Journal of Sociology (AJS) (Kohn, Naoi, et al. 1990), with some text, tables, and two figures added from Kohn and Słomczynski (1990), other text added from Kohn (1987), and measurement models taken from several of the sources noted below. The AJS paper, and this chapter, build on prior published analyses: for the United States, from Kohn and Schoenbach (1983); for Poland, from Słomczynski, J. Miller, and Kohn (1981 and 1987), Słomczynski and Kohn (1988), and Kohn and Słomczynski (1990); and for Japan, from Naoi and Schooler (1985) and Schooler and Naoi (1988).

I developed the conceptualization of social class for the United States and other advanced capitalist societies; Schoenbach and I developed the criteria for differentiating the social classes for the United States; Naoi, Schooler, and Słomczynski developed the conceptualization of social class and the criteria for differentiating the social classes for Japan; and Słomczynski developed the conceptualization of social class and the criteria for differentiating the social classes for Poland. I did new causal analyses for all three countries, with considerable help from Schoenbach and with considerable reliance on earlier published analyses by all of my collaborators in the publications noted above. I also wrote most of the text, with valuable editing by Schoenbach and with critical commentaries by my collaborators in the research.

I am indebted also to Karl Alexander, Andrew Cherlin, William Form, Alejandro Portes, Erik Olin Wright, and the AJS referees for critical readings of earlier drafts of the AJS paper.

In this chapter, I examine the relationship between social structure and personality in three diverse nations—the United States, Japan, and Poland when it was socialist—all of these countries appearing to be relatively stable at the time my collaborators and I studied them. Our intent was to ascertain whether position in the social structure¹ has similar or dissimilar psychological effects in capitalist and socialist industrialized societies, and in Western and non-Western industrialized societies. My intent in using these analyses as the introductory chapter in the present book is to establish a baseline for comparison to later analyses of the relationship between social structure and personality in nations undergoing radical social change.

In comparing the United States to Japan and to socialist Poland, my collaborators and I did not claim that the United States was typical of Western capitalist countries, Japan of non-Western capitalist countries, or Poland of socialist countries. Our rationale, instead, was that, if we found cross-national similarities in the psychological effects of class and stratification in these three countries, we could have considerable confidence that the findings have generality—not only beyond the boundaries of any one of these three nations, but also beyond any one type of society. If we found cross-national differences in the psychological effects of class and stratification, the deliberate choice of such diverse societies would help us to establish the limits of generality of the findings and perhaps even to understand whatever differences we found (see the extended discussion of these issues in Kohn [1987, pp. 716–724]).

This inquiry subsumes four specific questions: First, is it possible to conceptualize and to index social class in common terms in three such diverse societies? By social classes, I mean groups defined in terms of their relationship to ownership and control of the means of production, and of their control over the labor power of others. I deliberately distinguish social class from social stratification—the hierarchical ordering of society as indexed by educational attainment, occupational status, and job income. There is considerable evidence that social stratification is a quite general phenomenon and that one can index social stratification in much the same way in all industrialized nations (Treiman 1977). The question in this inquiry is whether it is meaningful to employ the concept, social class, not only in a Western, capitalist society, but also in a non-Western society and in a socialist society. Furthermore, can we develop indices of social class that not only are valid for all three countries, each with its own distinctive history, culture, and political-economic system, but also are comparable from country to country?

Second, is social class not only conceptually but also empirically distinct from social stratification? I see class and stratification as alternative conceptualizations of social structure, both conceptualizations theoretically useful, albeit not necessarily for answering the same questions. Class is the more fundamental concept, for it addresses the political and economic organization of the society. Yet, classes are internally heterogenous, each one encompassing a wide spectrum of occupations. In terms of the relationship of social structure to personality, class produces the basic map, but stratification affords a more fine-grained basis of differentiation. In this sense, the conceptualizations are not so much alternatives as they are complementary. Nonetheless, we must ask whether class and stratification are sufficiently distinct empirically that, in actual analysis, there is any utility in differentiating them. My concern here is not with testing the theoretical claims of either the proponents of class or the proponents of stratification, but only with ensuring that what we conclude from these analyses about the psychological effects of social class is not merely a reflection of the psychological effects of social stratification, or the reverse.

Third, does social class position have similar psychological effects in all three of these nations? I hypothesize that it does: I expect members of more “advantaged” social classes to be more intellectually flexible, to value self-direction more highly for their children, and to have more self-directed orientations to self and society than do members of less advantaged social classes in all three countries. By “advantaged,” I do not mean higher in social-stratificational position, but rather advantaged in terms of the very definition of social class: having greater control over the means of production and greater control over the labor power of others.

Since social class is a multidimensional typology rather than a unidimensional rank-ordering, this hypothesis does not imply a single rank-ordering but rather a complex set of comparisons. In terms of ownership of the means of production, for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Social Structure and Personality under Conditions of Apparent Social Stability: The United States, Japan, and Poland
• 2. Doing Social Research under Conditions of Radical Social Change: The Biography of an Ongoing Research Project
• 3. Rationale and Research Design for the Comparative Study of Poland and Ukraine under Conditions of Radical Social Change
• 4. Class, Stratification, and Personality under Conditions of Radical Social Change: A Comparative Analysis of Poland and Ukraine
• 5. Extending the Analysis to the Nonemployed: Part 1. Complexity of Activities and Personality under Conditions of Radical Social Change
• 6. Extending the Analysis to the Nonemployed: Part 2. Structural Location and Personality during the Transformation of Poland and Ukraine
• 7. Social Structure and Personality during the Process of Radical Social Change: A Study of Ukraine in Transition
• 8. Reflections
• Appendix: My Two Visits to My Mother’s Village: A Glimpse at Social Change in Rural Ukraine
• References
• Index
• About the Author