Post-Materialism

5 Key excerpts on "Post-Materialism"

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  The New Liberalism

  The Rising Power of Citizen Groups

  • Jeffrey M. Berry(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  In almost all policy areas, on issues of varying importance, quality-of-life concerns have become pervasive in the debate over domestic social and domestic economic legislation. Whose Quality of Life? Postmaterialism is an abstraction, a concept that political scientists find useful to describe evolving trends in advanced industrialized democracies. Yet it has no meaning in the real world of politics. No lob-byist ever asks to speak to a legislator about his postmaterial concerns. No representative or senator would care about how the issues were defined for the purposes of coding the data for tables 3-1 and 3-2. 48 The Rise of Postmaterialism Table 3-2. Materialism versus Postmaterialism in Congress, Higher-Salience Issues Issues Material Postmaterial N 1963 63.8 36.2 47 1979 42.9 57.1 42 1991 27.3 72.7 44 The Rise of Postmaterialism 49 Those outside of academe may wonder why this jargon is necessary Since the lobbying groups discussed in this study are clearly to the politi-cal left or political right of center, why not just talk about liberals and con-servatives rather than postmaterialists? Political scientists, while accept-ing the need for theories and their accompanying vocabulary, may still wonder, why this particular theory? Why try to adapt a theory on com-parative politics and attitude formation to a study that is about neither? The use of theories is easy to defend. Theories help scholars to orga-nize data and analysis. Theories give us tools to understand broad, com-plex social processes, including political change. They are helpful for framing the questions to be investigated, and using theories facilitates normal science by providing continuities in research. And continuities in research further cumulative analysis and a deeper understanding of the problems scholars study.

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  The Politics of Downtown Development

  Dynamic Political Cultures in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

  • Stephen J. McGovern(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Inglehart's brand of postmaterialism seems to be confined to a handful of small, middle-class, college towns. In larger cities the spread of postmaterial values has had a much smaller impact on politics. In part this is because Inglehart seriously overestimates the extent to which material values have been in decline. A grow-ing percentage of people may indeed value environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and freedom of expression, but that does not mean that most of these same people do not attach a high level of significance to their material well-being. Job security, a decent income, and upward mobility all still matter a great deal to people who hold postmaterial values, not to mention the majority of individuals who, even according to Inglehart's own research, retain a mate-rialist mindset. 9 The continuing importance of material values and aspirations may impede the radical potential of postmaterialism in the political sphere. In addition, Inglehart may have underestimated the downside of the tran-sition from an industrial to a service- and information-based economy. Al-though millions of individuals have benefited from the increase in high-paying jobs as professionals and business executives, the new economy has also en-tailed an expansion in low-paying, low-status employment. As union-based, well-paying manufacturing jobs have diminished, millions of working-class citizens have been forced to accept significant cuts in wages and benefits in an increasingly polarized workforce. This segment of the population has had little Political Culture and Political Change 19 choice but to dwell on issues of economic security. 10 Nor have more privileged groups been as immune from materialistic worries as Inglehart would suggest.

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  Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science

  Marxism Lite and Its Blind Spot for Culture

  • Dick Houtman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Is Postmaterialism Really Different from Libertarianism? And Can It Be Explained Materialistically? The kinds of intergenerational value change that are taking place in advanced industrial societies are better described as authoritarian to libertarian rather than … materialist to post-materialist value change. —Scott Flanagan, “Changing Values in Advanced Industrial Societies” 4.1 Introduction The importance someone attributes to individual liberty (or so we see in Chapters 2 and 3) cannot be explained by either labor market position or occupational self-direction. In reality it is cultural capital that is decisive: a high educational level and ample interest in art and culture lead to an emphasis on individual liberty. However, this conclusion, based on an analysis of the causes of authoritarianism, is not unequivocally in keeping with the third theory mentioned in Chapter 1. According to American political scientist Ronald Inglehart, an emphasis on individual liberty and self-expression, which he refers to as a postmaterialist value orientation, can definitely be explained by one’s economic position. He does not feel, however, that an individual’s present economic position is important, and in this sense his theory is in keeping with the conclusion drawn in the previous chapters. Instead he feels the economic conditions an individual grew up in are decisive. Ever since the publication of his contemporary classic The Silent Revolution (1977), Inglehart has argued that the increasing affluence in Western societies underlies the increasing support for postmaterialist values such as individual liberty and self-expression. This theory is based on the two straightforward assumptions that people value scarce things most (the scarcity hypothesis) and that their values are shaped during their formative years and remain relatively unchanged throughout their lives (the socialization hypothesis) (Inglehart 1981)

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  Theories of International Relations

  • Siegfried Schieder, Manuela Spindler, Siegfried Schieder, Manuela Spindler(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These authors draw not just on the work of Foucault, but also on that of other so-called “poststructuralists”, above all, Jacques Derrida. Their main borrowing from him is the notion that all identity requires difference. In other words, I cannot refer to “a” without simultaneously making a distinction between “a” and “b”, because if we did not distinguish “a” from something else, we would be unable to identify “a” in the first place. So the existence of “a” presupposes “b” and vice versa – each gains its significance only through the discourse in which they are distinguished. This is not a new argument as such, having already been put forward by structuralists such as Ferdinand de Saussure. But where the poststructuralists differ from Saussure is that they do not regard differences as firmly anchored within a linguistic structure but as discursively reproduced and thus, at least potentially, in constant motion. This is why I referred earlier to the impossibility of permanently fixing meaning. Instead meaning is subject to a process of constant (though never arbitrary) shift (see Frank 1983: 94–95). In significant part, political disputes consist in attempts to articulate meanings and differences in meaning and establish them as universally valid through discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Connolly 1993). One of the central aims of postmodern approaches is to depict such political disputes and question semantic hegemonies, in other words explain temporarily successful attempts to lay down meaning, to reconstruct those semantic alternatives that have been lost because they were “defeated”, and shed light on the practices that have marginalized these alternatives.

  Once we have accepted the basic features of such an approach, it is not hard to understand how it is applied to international relations. Most conventional theories of international relations presuppose the existence of a system of states and draw a clear line between the anarchical character of international politics and a hierarchical domestic politics that is viewed as regulated or at least as potentially amenable to regulation. On this view, there is an opposition between state sovereignty and international anarchy, between the order of the “internal” and the dangers of the “external” sphere. Again borrowing from Derrida, postmodern writings show that these two concepts not only determine one another and consequently that the sovereign state emerges largely through its delimitation from the anarchical international sphere, but that both spheres are value-laden: sovereignty is good, anarchy is a problem (see Ashley 1988). So danger always comes from outside, justifying measures that oppose this external world. From the perspective of postmodern theorists, however, we cannot presuppose the existence of the state, which only gains its identity when we draw the boundary between the “internal” and “external”, constructing a state (or even national) identity that is opposed to the external world. Many postmodern writings focus on the analysis of texts in which such boundary-drawing between “internal” and “external” always implies a danger emanating from outside (see, for example, the work of David Campbell, which I will be discussing later). Conversely, a number of authors have emphasized that we do not necessarily have to construct identities in opposition to threatening others, but that we may also conceive of others as equally valid, or have asserted that we construct difference through a temporal understanding of our own past (see Rumelili 2003; Diez 2004; Hansen 2006: 38–54). For example, German identity after the Second World War was constructed in significant part by marking it off from past excessive nationalism, while European identity was largely constructed by emphasizing its difference from the ceaseless armed conflicts that occurred before 1945.

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  Postenvironmentalism

  A Material Semiotic Perspective on Living Spaces

  • Chiara Certomà(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Pivot

    (Publisher)

  Most importantly, material-semiotic postenvironmentalism is not something to come, as it already exists because, regardless of the institutional, philosophical, or academic crisis of environmental thinking, people and their nonhuman counterparts continue to search for their own way to practice what they believe to be the right way for inhabiting this world. That is to say, postenvironmentalism is as much a practice as it is theory, performed in local places by social agents that are not necessarily interested and knowledgeable of environmental thinking disputes. This also helps to explain the frequent use in the media of inappropriate words and categories of traditional environmentalism when reporting innovative practices, which could be easily ascribed to the domain of postenvironmentalist (Santolini 2012). The increasing diffusion of postenvironmentalist practices is easily understandable. For quite some time now, social agents worldwide have faced the everyday evidence of their progressive entanglements with diverse hybrid materialities in a world that is increasingly mediated, produced, enacted, and contested through technological, cultural, and ecological networks (White and Wilbert 2006). This complex but fascinating postmodern world is described better than any other by material-semiotic approach, and some of its key concepts are of particular help in disclosing the character and functioning of (material-semiotic) postenvironmentalism. Consequently, the findings of various material-semiotic scholars have been adopted in the analysis of some of the most disparate environmental issues, ranging from the very specific such as the papaya trade (Cook 2004), to more broader and innovative themes such as the problem of electronic waste (Gabrys 2011 ; Parikka 2011), and including more traditional ones dealing with the formation of environmental regimes such as the convention of biodiversity (Bled 2010)

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