What is the transformation of culture and social institutions over time?

In many respects the preceding chapters may be regarded as moving from the more microscopic aspects of human existence to the more macroscopic. Chapter 1 emphasized research on individual thought and behavior, paying particular attention to biological and psychological determinants and mechanisms. Chapter 2 focused on motivational determinants and mechanisms in individual behavior, as well as research on the constraining and determining effects of social interaction and social arrangements with respect to behavior. Chapter 3 took up organizational arrangements, especially markets and political and occupational systems, and examined how information, incentives, and other features shape these arrangements.

In this chapter we move further toward the macroscopic and consider research on institutions and cultures, which are those features of social life that serve as the bases of the organization and integration of entire societies. Although the analysis of institutions and cultures is associated primarily with the fields of sociology and anthropology, aspects of these phenomena also relate to and are found in the research of political scientists, historians, geographers, legal scholars, and economists as well.

Research on institutions and cultures has long been an active field, and there is now a vast array of ongoing work. This chapter begins with the most basic questions of human beginnings: What have been the salient characteristics of human evolution that have led to that special type of social bonding that is described as human society? New archaeological studies as well as the comparative study of primate and human societies are now adding major insights on this central question in evolutionary theory. Another major field of study in this area is demography—the study of population dynamics as affected by fertility, mortality, and migration—and this chapter focuses on the institutional and cultural dimensions of both fertility, especially in developing societies, and migration, especially in the United States.

One question has been the preoccupation of nearly two centuries of theoretical thinking in the social sciences: How can the profound institutional transformations that have been associated with the great commercial, industrial, and democratic revolutions in modern Western history be understood and explained? In recent decades this question has been extended to include the study of developing nations as they struggle with change. Study of these institutional transformations has gone under a number of labels, none of them completely satisfactory, but for purposes of convenience we will call it the study of modernization. Within this large and active field, the chapter focuses on the family and religion. It considers a range of research that has significantly altered understanding of how these institutions have changed and continue to change and what place and role they have in modern society.

Science and technology have been among the key features of those institutional transformations and a subject of intense recent research: What cultural, institutional, and organizational features of society are essential for scientific knowledge to rise and grow? What are the conditions that determine whether scientific knowledge will be applied, that is, implemented as technology? And, then, what effect does technology have on communities and institutions and on the quality of life in general? These questions are studied both by historians of science and by other social scientists. The chapter also takes a look at the behavioral and social sciences themselves—also the children of modernization—and on the relations between social science knowledge and public policy.

Lastly, the chapter deals with the most macroscopic level of all, the world as a whole, where the stress is on systems of relations among societies. Some of the developing lines of research are on internationalization—the increased economic, political, and cultural involvement of nations in one another’s affairs—and on the special and timely topics of international security and, more generally, cooperation and conflict among nations.

The Evolution of Human Society

Every society has developed beliefs about the origins of the world and the nature of things within it, including beliefs about human nature and society itself. Since written records are a relatively recent historical phenomenon, the way in which society actually emerged lies in the realm of prehistory (prior to written records). But a wide range of scientific techniques are now making possible an increasingly complete narrative of origins based on the interpretation of material evidence. This evidence enables researchers to look back with increasing clarity to the world of thousands—and millions—of years ago and to visualize the evolution of humans and human society. The outlines of that evolution can be divided into six stages:

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Time PeriodDevelopmental StageBetween 8 million and 4 million years agoDivergence of the hominid line from African apesBy 4 million years ago

Evolution of bipedal gait

Habitation of African savannahs

By 2 million years ago

Larger than ape-sized brains

Simple stone tools

Butchery marks on animal remains

More than one species in the same region (Australopithecus and early Homo)

By 0.5 million years ago

More complex stone tools

Spread into tropical and temperate Eurasia Homo erectus, then archaic Homo sapiens

Between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago

Loss of massive muscularity

Emergence of art, technical ingenuity—an “information explosion,” including extensive stylistic differentiation and change

Probable increase in population densities

Spread to high Arctic, Australia, and, later, the Americas

Between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago

Agricultural transition

Settled villages and towns

Food storage, cultivation, herding

Great increases in population densities

Accumulation of wealth, concentration of power

The first two stages saw the development of biological mechanisms similar to those governing the evolutionary branching of many primate and mammalian species. The last stage, involving the beginnings of farming, witnessed the appearance of populations with all the distinctive mental, social, and technological potentials of contemporary humans. The intervening stages, during which changes in biology, behavior, and culture occurred, are the subject of frontier research on the dynamics of social change.

Social Organization in Prehistoric Times

Direct evidence on the social organization of early human groups is limited, but some tentative conclusions can be drawn. Many archaeological sites dating from 2 million years ago to the beginnings of farming 10,000 years ago are of similar size, and they suggest the existence of day-to-day social groups usually of 10 to 30 individuals. Population densities over large areas were very low.

The firmest early evidence of household or family units within sites dates from 35,000 to 50,000 years ago. Signs of wider and more diversified networks also appeared at this time, as did evidence of long-distance exchange of items such as seashells and obsidian and other prized stones. This stage is also marked by evidence of gatherings at ritually important places, the development of regional stylistic traditions that reflect some kind of ethnic identity, and increases in the volume of organized information being generated and transmitted.

In the 1960s, field investigations of nonhuman primates took some observed baboon societies as the model of early human society. In line with that model, the societies of human ancestors were depicted as hierarchial, with males being competitive and aggressive and females being passive and nurturers of the young. Subsequent primate field research has dispelled a number of these inferences: it has shown that primate behavior varies enormously, both within and among species, and that simple generalizations about sex differences in nurturance, social competitiveness, and passivity in females cannot be sustained. Contemporary field studies, for example, reveal that in various species, females compete as intensely as males and often actively choose their mates. At the same time, in some species, including baboons, males develop long-term bonds with females and participate in infant care.

Along with new evidence and changing views on primate behavior, there are indications that major changes in human reproductive physiology may have occurred relatively recently. There is some evidence that Neanderthal females may have carried their fetuses to 11-or 12-month terms. Other evidence suggests that, about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, when some humans became less nomadic, birth spacing was reduced, which, in turn, was a factor in causing the population increase associated with the beginnings of farming.

With increased wealth in the form of investments in capital improvements to land, signs of warfare appear. The oldest archaeological evidence of organized armed warfare, as contrasted with incidental skirmishes, is a 12,000-year-old cemetery in the Nile Valley. Although signs of warfare follow rather than precede the development of farming, fighting as such goes further back. Present-day monkeys and apes, especially males, fight, as do modern humans; and there is no reason to suppose that human ancestors were different. The question is rather one of scale, intensity, organization, and the use of weapons. Fieldwork on chimpanzees indicates that they may share with humans the dubious distinction that organized coalitions of males engage in lethal intergroup aggression to achieve territorial gains. Studies are needed to confirm the finding and to determine the evolutionary and social context of these patterns.

Food, Tools, and Home Bases

At some stage in evolution, humans joined the class of animals that do not simply consume food on the spot but carry it to central places, called home bases, where it is shared with the young and other adults. The use of home bases is a fundamental component of human social behavior; the common meal served at a common hearth is a powerful symbol, a mark of social unity. Home-base behavior does not occur among nonhuman primates and is rare among mammals. It is unclear when humans began to use home bases, what kind of communications and social relations were involved, and what the ecological and food choice contexts of the shift were. Work on early tools, surveys of paleoanthropological sites, development and testing of broad ecological theories, and advances in comparative primatology are contributing to knowledge about this central chapter in human prehistory.

One innovative approach is to investigate damage and wear on stone tools. Researchers make tools that replicate excavated specimens as closely as possible and try to use the tools as the originals might have been used, such as wood-cutting, hunting, or cultivation. Depending on how the tool is used, characteristic chippage patterns and microscopically distinguishable polishes develop near the edges. The first application of this new method of analysis to stone tools that are 1.5 million-to 2 million-years-old indicates that, from the start, an important function of early stone tools was to extract high quality food—meat and marrow—from large animal carcasses. Some of the earliest tools were also used for shaping wood and for making digging sticks and spears. Fossil bones with cutmarks caused by stone tools have been discovered lying in the same 2-million-year-old layers that yielded the oldest such tools and the oldest hominid specimens (including humans) with larger than ape-sized brains. This discovery increases scientists’ certainty about when human ancestors began to eat more meat than do present-day nonhuman primates. But several questions are still unanswered questions; How frequently did meat-eating occur? To what degree was meat acquired more by scavenging than hunting? What were the social implications of meat-eating patterns?

New analyses of animal remains from the stone age are now under way. An important question to be addressed by field studies is how the feeding, ranging, and social interaction patterns of human beings who acquired food by hunting and gathering compare with those of primates and nonhuman carnivores. Some studies need to span the life cycle of identified individual animals, particularly of apes and other species for which there is evidence of repeated strategies and accumulated experience that amount to a protoculture.

Until recently few such studies were undertaken, and they were qualitative. Now optimal foraging theory and other rigorous conceptual frameworks are being used in gathering data on the properties of nonagricultural human and primate foods, notably their spatial and seasonal distribution, associated acquisition and processing costs, energy and nutrient returns, and problems caused by toxins and secondary compounds. A few exploratory field projects have begun on wild tubers, meat and fat in scavenged carcasses, and such problems as coping with tannins and their effects on food choice. Of related interest are claims that control over fire may go back 1.5 million years, much earlier than commonly thought; fire control had definite implications for food selection and gathering behavior. The very existence of extended human social systems may have been determined by the ways prehistoric people learned to exploit widely dispersed, high-quality, portable food products—meat, marrow, large tubers, and, much later, grain.

Evolution of Language

Language, the most important component of culture, is also the most difficult subject to study in an evolutionary framework because there are no living protolanguages and speech does not fossilize. The initial stages of brain expansion and stone-tool manufacture, both suggestive of language facility, began about 2 million years ago. But there is also some evidence of a relatively recent change in the structure of the human vocal tract. This change coincides with the loss of muscularity that distinguishes anatomically modern humans, with modern-size brains, from the Neanderthals whom they replaced about 30,000 years ago. Further assessment of this biological history, including a more thorough investigation both of vocal tract anatomy and brain structure, is needed.

The social and ecological factors that gave rise to the evolution of language are unclear. Competing hypotheses about what made language-like communication useful range from considerations of foraging strategy to problems of mating and infant care. Information sharing could have played a critical role in organizing home-based foraging, in cooperative hunting, in resolving inter-group conflict, and even in maintaining stable mating and provisioning relationships between pair-bonded mates, as well as between different mating groups. These and other hypotheses can only be tested by pursuing archaeological evidence on dwelling and foraging patterns (for example, home bases and tool caches) and integrating these findings with more thorough observational studies of the dwelling and foraging strategies of modern foraging peoples and other primate species. The study of language origins places strong demands on the capacity of scientists to integrate paleontological, neurological, ecological, and behavioral studies into a coherent picture and, to put together the results of biological and historical field methods, laboratory analyses of material gathered by radioisotopic or microscopic instruments, data from experimental techniques, and well-articulated theories of behavior in the wild.

But modern methods can only illuminate the past if there are systematic and well-preserved artifacts available for study. There is a compelling need to protect museum-based research collections against physical deterioration and dispersal and to cultivate international arrangements for scholarly access to worldwide observational and archaeological field sites.

Demographic Behavior

In one sense demography is the study of phenomena that are primarily biological, such as fertility and mortality, which in the aggregate can be analyzed with sophisticated mathematical models and statistical techniques. Yet these phenomena cannot be understood simply as biological processes because they are strongly influenced by social and cultural factors. The major task in studying demographic behavior is to unravel and analyze the complex of causes behind rates of fertility, marriage, migration, morbidity, and mortality. This task calls for a variety of sources of information, including official demographic records and surveys, fine-grained observations in field situations, and careful sifting and analysis of historical records. In this empirical work it has been important to compare detailed data from surveys with theoretical and mathematical work and to compare cross-sectional information from such surveys with personal and institutional longitudinal data. Future understanding will depend largely on multifaceted and sustained research efforts, especially in regions of Africa and Asia where cultures and institutions very different from those in the United States present the greatest challenges to understanding the dynamics of demography.

Fertility and Lactation

Unlike animals, humans control reproduction (directly or indirectly) through cultural mechanisms, such as celibacy outside marriage and abstinence within it. Prolonged breastfeeding is another instance of this kind of control. The physiological effects of breastfeeding are now well understood: the mechanical stimulation of an infant’s suckling triggers hormonal mechanisms that delay the mother’s return to normal fertility. Complex simulations and statistical analyses of these physiological processes have increased the precision of knowledge as to how this effect varies according to the frequency, intensity, and duration of breastfeeding—which are determined by cultural forces. Those forces, manifested mainly in family and community norms, determine how and how long an infant is nursed as well as when and in what manner supplementary feeding begins. Broad social and economic conditions, including work and the mother’s social expectations and health, affect whether and how much she breastfeeds. This web of biological, personal, and cultural forces determines whether the mother or someone else nurses and when she shifts the child to other foods, which in turn affect the survival and health of the child. If a nursing child dies, as frequently happens under conditions of poverty and disease, normal fertility returns, thereby increasing the probability of another pregnancy. And multiple pregnancies may have detrimental effects on the mother’s health.

In some societies breastfeeding is explicitly regarded as a device to lengthen the spacing between births. Fewer births increase the food supply for the existing children, thereby improving their health. In addition, breastfeeding may be accompanied by abstinence from sexual intercourse. Breastfeeding plus abstinence can result in birth spacing of from 3 to 5 years. As societies change, abstinence or breastfeeding or both may be abandoned for various reasons, with a consequent rise in fertility, an increase in infant mortality (due to the lack of enough nutritious and uncontaminated breast milk), and a decline in the health of women through repeated childbearing.

Another cultural force that can affect birth spacing is the value that cultures place on children. Male and female children are often valued differently, and such different valuation may affect the care that an infant receives. Less than a century ago, the survival of female children was lower than that of males in regions of Western countries where females were believed to contribute less to the family economy than males, and this effect can also be observed currently in non-Western countries.

Population Change in Developing Countries

Fertility in developing countries has become and will remain a major focus in demographic research because of policy concerns with rapid population growth. However, scientific interest in the relationship between population change (especially growth) and human life in general (especially economic wellbeing) dates back to the eighteenth century. Research has shown that in modern society large family size is generally detrimental to the health and well-being of families and their members; this effect exists across different economic status. Families that limit their size benefit as families, as do their members as individuals, on a variety of measures. However, the effects of families that limit their size on families that do not, the effects of family size limitation on society as a whole, and the broad social and political consequences of population growth and decline are little understood. These issues will occupy an important place in demographic research over the coming decade.

Many advances have been made in sorting out the biometric features of the fertility process, and further gains in the precision of both measurements and theoretical formulations can be expected. A key to research advance is the careful analysis of specific cases of fertility declines in their social context, which includes family economics, local and national administrative systems, cultural change, and deliberate governmental efforts aimed at reducing fertility. For example, a series of empirical studies have demonstrated how ideological systems imply particular emotional satisfactions in childrearing: in some systems, there are accepted or preferred substitute goods or services; in others, there are not. In the latter case, fertility does not drop off sharply in response to reduced mortality and improved old-age economic security as it does in the former case.

There are several competing theories about the efficacy of various factors in reducing fertility: that declines in fertility result from the elimination of “unwanted” childbearing; that structural factors affect couples’ cost-benefit thinking about having children; or that the decline of fertility is a response to the diffusion of Western ideas through the developing world. The recent work of the World Fertility Survey and the European Fertility Project lends some support to the diffusion theory, but the search to uncover the combination of factors underlying fertility decline continues.

An impediment to research on fertility in developing countries is the inadequate registration of births, marriages, and deaths. Lacking these kinds of data, researchers have devised indirect strategies for estimating levels and trends of fertility and mortality. Questions that can yield such information are included in censuses or surveys. Estimates of levels of fertility and other unobservable demographic variables are also extrapolated from known population features, especially age distribution and growth rate. These methods are valuable for tracing demographic trends not only in the developing countries but also in the United States, where phenomena difficult to observe in aggregate data, such as the durations of marriages, have been built into estimation models. The growth of estimation methods has been so rapid that a 1983 compilation of state-of-the-art methods by the United Nations is already obsolete, and continued development and testing of new estimation procedures is essential for increased knowledge.

Research on urban growth in the developing world is also hobbled by unsatisfactory data. Because of the rate of growth and the fact that most censuses are conducted only every 10 years, data on city size is out of date by an average of 6 years and data on urban rates of growth by as much as 11 years. Urban planning policies that are based on such outdated data are vulnerable and can result in costly mistakes. Yet most developing countries do not have the resources to conduct more frequent censuses, to institute population registration systems, or to develop regional population estimation capabilities, like those developed successfully in such countries as the United States and Great Britain. Indeed, some countries in Africa, such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Zaire, are finding it difficult—because of political conflict and economic strains—even to conduct regular censuses. One ingenious, new way to compensate for the lack of data is to use remote-sensing (satellite photo) techniques, which can provide estimates of the total population of urban areas in developing countries that are practically as accurate as their on-the-ground censuses. Development of this method will require substantial technical support and access to the kind of data gathered by military and intelligence satellites.

Much of the knowledge about the biosocial aspects of demography in developing countries derives from the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh (formerly the Cholera Research Laboratory). This facility maintains an up-to-date register of about 200,000 people in Bangladesh, whose demographic characteristics and vital events are recorded and monitored. The Centre has contributed to scientific knowledge of the role of childhood diarrhea in growth retardation and mortality and the importance of lactational amenorrhea as an inhibitor of fertility. It has been the site of the most carefully prepared evaluations of family planning programs and has produced the most accurate demographic tables for South Asian countries, which are used as a model for other populations. The Centre maintains a strong social science emphasis, hosting both resident and visiting demographers, anthropologists, and sociologists. A second institute, the Institute for Nutrition in Central America and Panama, located in Guatemala, has also proved successful, although its staff is less experienced and its functioning has been impaired by Guatemala’s political situation. These institutions serve as a model for developing another facility to gain new knowledge from and about the unique environments in Africa, western Asia, and South America. Demographic investigators now rely heavily on secondary statistical analysis of large data files from these areas, and they need appropriate new facilities to gain in-depth, first-hand knowledge that permits the incorporation of cultural, social, and psychological dimensions into their work.

Fertility and Migration in Developed Countries

Fertility research in developed countries focuses mainly on low levels of fertility, now below replacement levels in parts of Western Europe and North America. Overcoming infertility among childless couples is one area of concern. Other research focuses on government efforts to enhance fertility through incentive programs, which, however, have not been very successful. The social and economic consequences of low fertility and the resulting relatively small population cohorts are also major research topics. Countries experiencing low fertility must rely on immigration to expand or maintain their labor force and so must face the social and economic challenges of accommodating immigration. In addition, the new small cohorts face the costly prospect of supporting earlier large cohorts, who will be retired when the former are in their prime working years.

Low fertility in the context of perceived labor shortages encourages immigration. New migrants are generally young and tend to bring with them the fertility patterns of their previous home cultures. For example, in the United States in the 1980s, 21 percent of all births were among Hispanic and Asian groups, who constituted less than 9 percent of the total population. The characteristics of the Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their preferred destinations often have a significant impact on relative regional growth and demand for public services. Their presence has reraised the great nineteenth-and early twentieth-century issues of cultural and linguistic assimilation, ghettoization, and ethnic discrimination. Explanations and models from those earlier periods, however, may not be applicable: it is not yet known to what extent the processes observed for earlier migrations are general and to what extent they were particular to those immigrant groups. Research must answer questions about the dynamics and prospects of migrant assimilation, the social and economic impact of immigration on receiving areas, the character of the new migratory groups, and the results to be expected from the kinds of reception they receive from communities and municipal governments.

The policy implications of high rates of international migration are evident. If fertility levels remain low, the role of immigration as a means of ensuring population stability or growth is likely to continue. Most recent migration to the United States originates in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. The experiences of these immigrants with respect to schooling, language, and labor-force participation are important in discussions of immigration policy. For these reasons, comparative work is essential on the impact on wage rates of migration from poorer regions, and the effects on capital formation, social welfare expenditures, population growth, and political instability in other developed countries that have had experience with migrants, for example, Sweden, France, Italy, and West Germany.

There are virtually no data on emigration from the United States, and data on net migration to the United States are poor. Consequently, this component of population growth—which may account for half of the total increase—is subject to serious measurement error. In addition, there are scant longitudinal data on the movements of individuals and households within the United States; such data could reveal much about how internal migration decisions are made and how these movements affect regional and community social systems. The greatest improvements in detailed knowledge about both external and internal migration patterns can come from present data bases such as the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and records of the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. But the kinds of information on the locations, movements, origins, and destinations of people that these data bases contain are usually not made available for analysis even in modified form because of confidentiality considerations. Inventive ways can and should be devised to make them available for research purposes while at the same time protecting individuals’ privacy. (This issue is discussed more generally in Chapter 6.)

Modernization: Family and Religion

Until recent decades, most investigators of institutional changes proceeded on the assumption that all societies experience similar kinds of change as they modernize. Among the presumed uniformities in the modernization process were:

• Application of nonhuman and nonanimal sources of power to production, development of large-scale enterprises, an increased division of labor, and a resulting increase in economic productivity.

• Movement of the population from farms and villages to urban centers.

• Development of mass-schooling systems, resulting in greatly increased literacy.

• Decline of extended family systems and the rise of the isolated nuclear family.

• Decline of patriarchy and increase in sexual equality.

• Weakening of traditional religion and the corresponding secularization of society.

• Opening of society’s stratification system, with a person’s place based more on individual achievement and less on inherited familial status.

These assumptions were widely accepted until about 20 years ago, and they guided most empirical investigations of modernization and institutional change; they are now changing substantially. Innovative theories and an abundance of new empirical evidence have deepened the understanding of modernization in general and changes in religious and family institutions in particular.

The Nuclear Family and Social Change

Modernization theory once viewed the family before the commercial and industrial revolutions as patriarchal, based on arranged marriage, extending beyond the procreative couple to include grandparents as well as lateral kin, and gaining legitimacy from the traditions of religion, community, and property. Then, under the demands of geographical and social mobility resulting from commercialization and industrialization, this kind of family was thought to have been replaced by one that was mainly isolated from extended kin, based on romantic love, possessed of greater equality between the sexes and between parents and children, and authorized by a civil, secular contract. Some scholars evaluated these trends as evidence of a serious deterioration of the Western family; others heralded them as a sign of the family’s adaptability and its institutional “fit” with other modern institutions. Whatever the evaluation, however, there was general agreement on the main lines of change.

For the past two decades, however, research on a broad multidisciplinary front has criticized, complicated, and enriched this view of the history of the family. First, new evidence has supported the view that the residentially autonomous nuclear-family type came before rather than after other institutional signs of modernization. The nuclear tendency of western European families as they emerged from the medieval period—a tendency discovered as historians and other social scientists applied new analyses and theories to previously unused or recently reconstructed historical archives—provided an environment in which many children were raised in an emotionally supportive atmosphere to be relatively independent, mobile, risk-taking, and nontraditional. These kinds of families played an active part in originating just those economic revolutions that were previously thought to have spawned the nuclear family. Furthermore, the bonds of the extended family did not everywhere perish as a result of modernization. Studies of how people seek advice, support one another, and give and receive credit show that generational and lateral kinship ties remain vital. Modern technology—automobiles, airplanes, and telephones—often help these ties to persist even when families are dispersed geographically.

Recent historical and cross-national research, using methods and ideas developed in tandem with the behavioral and social sciences to reconstruct the decisions of everyday life and their effects, also shows that the family, far from being a simple “victim” of industrialization, sometimes facilitated industrial development. In sites as diverse as early nineteenth-century England, early twentieth-century New Hampshire, early twentieth-century Japan, and mid-twentieth-century eastern Europe, the family has been an important agency in the accumulation of capital, the recruitment of workers, and the coordination of activities in the workplace.

Comparative historical research has also shed important new light on the ways that societies define and structure the human life span. Research indicates that the stages of life associated in large part with age and family status—childhood, adolescence, youth, mid-life, and old age—are not simply biologically given. They appear and are consolidated as a product of economic and educational forces. For example, the modern idea of adolescence as a distinct phase of life crystallized only in the nineteenth century, as the years between 12 and 18 became especially ambiguous: the family had given up much of its direct control over courtship, marriage, and economic training of the young; personal apprenticeship as an initiation into adult work roles became less common; the factory came to be regarded as an unsatisfactory if not evil place for young people; and age-graded secondary schools had not yet become a vehicle for organizing those years. As a result of these social developments, what became known as the adolescent years demanded new social attention and eventually became a focal point for such concerns as urban crime, immorality, and unemployment.

Finally, diverse lines of research have established that increasing equality between the sexes is not, as it once appeared, an inevitable accompaniment of modernization. Rather, it is a phenomenon dependent on complex economic, legal, social, cultural, and political forces. Certainly the ideology of patriarchy has been weakened by subtle and not-so-subtle changes in family roles, by increased availability of affordable birth control methods, by women’s increased participation in the wage economy, by the extension of legal rights, and by the political accomplishments of women rights movements. Yet even this myriad of forces, all working in the same direction, has not obliterated sexual inequality, which continues to show a certain recalcitrance to change not envisioned by modernization theorists (see “” in Chapter 2).

Partly as a result of this enriched understanding of the historical evolution of the family, contemporary research has addressed the interaction between the family and other kinds of economic, legal, and social phenomena. One example is the effects of separation and divorce on women and children. For a long time sociologists have noticed the general relationship between modernization and increasing rates of divorce, and they focused research on the economic, legal, and psychological factors that might cause this increase. More recently, the impact of statutory changes on the economic position of divorced women has become a topic of intensive interest. In many ways the “equality” of the sexes under no-fault divorce has proven to be a mirage; divorce coupled with the failure of ex-husbands to accept their financial responsibilities leaves many women in positions of economic hardship. Research has also shed new light on the range and length of effects of divorce on children. Longitudinal studies, based on following children through years of postdivorce experience, reveal a pattern of fright, bewilderment, and blame lasting up to 2 years after divorce. Thereafter, these emotions fade, except for a minority of children who experience unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and loneliness for 5 or more years after divorce.

Another major focus of research is on the consequences of three contemporary trends: the proportion of women in the labor force, which has reached new heights in the United States and other industrial countries; the persistence of wage levels for women that are consistently and significantly lower than those for men; and divorce rates in the United States and other industrialized countries, which are at unprecedented high levels. One consequence is that the majority of people in the United States whose incomes are below the poverty line are now living in households consisting of or headed by females who are single parents, often receiving welfare benefits. But panel study data show that the typical period of impoverishment and welfare dependency is a temporary one. Welfare recipiency is generally used in the early stages of recovery from the economic crisis caused by the death or departure of a husband, a process that often culminates in finding more remunerative employment, getting married again, or both. Many but not most of the children of welfare families do not themselves receive welfare benefits after leaving home and forming their own households.

Religion, Social Change, and Politics

The scientific study of religion through historical and cross-national research has followed a path somewhat similar to that of the study of the family. One view prevailing until recently, derived in part from modernization theory, was of an overall trend toward secularization: as societies became more modernized, religion tended to lose its force. Reciprocally, religion was associated with more traditional, conservative societies, and religion itself was considered to be a conservative force, maintaining tradition and stabilizing long-term social and cultural arrangements.

A countervailing perception was inspired by the classical early twentieth century analyses of the role of the Protestant Reformation in the emergence of capitalism in the West. It was argued that a key to the dynamism of Protestant societies lay in part in a religious ethic of revealing and doing God’s will through worldly work in a calling or profession. Believers were strongly motivated toward instrumental advancement in ordinary spheres of activity, and not, for example, toward monastic retreat from worldly concerns. By the same token, it was argued that other major religions, particularly the great Indian ones, which encouraged withdrawal from the everyday world and its material concerns, could not engender the same historical dynamism.

Studies undertaken in recent years in southeastern and eastern Asia, using methods and data far more extensive and systematic than anything available a half-century ago, have demonstrated that Buddhists and people of other faiths have worked just as hard and as instrumentally as Protestants, and, furthermore, that these Asian societies have contained significant entrepreneurial sectors. The fact that they did not “develop” in the same way as did the West cannot be attributed directly to particular economic values that their religions might foster.

The question of the relationship between religion and social change has also been broadened to include the relationship between religion and politics. This shift was a response not only to intellectual developments within the scholarly study of religion, but also to the recent dramatic surge of politically oriented religious movements in the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States. Some of these movements have been radical in ideology and some have been conservative, but in either case they have been highly activist. Although popular movements were previously studied to some extent, they were not at the center of research about religion and social change. Rather, religion was seen largely in terms of “the church” or other established forms, with popular movements as unusual and sporadic occurrences, or in the modern era, as responses to the pressures and stresses of modernization—outbursts of people who had no other effective alternatives for social and political action. A more sophisticated formulation held that such movements were prepolitical, that they represented essentially political behavior among traditional peoples with no experience in secular political action, and that, under appropriate conditions, they would evolve over time into conventional political activities. Both views agreed that the religious impulse would lose force where more “modern” alternatives become available; however, this hypothesis has not been upheld in most cases.

Popular religious movements are now understood as central to religion and important for politics. Much of the current study of religious movements in Latin America, for example, takes into account the interplay between the established Catholic church and liberation theology movements, considering how the church limits these movements, and how they bring about profound revisions in church policy, practice, and theology. Other contemporary studies of movements in the Philippines, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States emphasize the ongoing and enduring mutual impact of religion and politics on one another.

Science, Technology, and Public Policy

The relationship between the growth of science, technological development, and social change has always been a core concern in studies of the long-term transformation of Western societies. These relationships are indispensable to understanding how the modern world came to be, the nature of scientific and technological work, and the policy decisions that affect that work. For a long time the main stress was on the technology of mass industrial production, on tracing the revolutionary implications of advances in science and technology for the organization of the workplace, the labor force, and, ultimately, family and community life. While approach has remained strong, recent research has added other areas, particularly the societal role of scientific ideas and of technological products, such as computers and new reproductive technologies, used by consumers directly.

In the past two decades especially, some of the focus on the relations between science, technology, and society has turned in more policy-oriented directions. Controversy has arisen over the quality and the dissemination of knowledge about environmental risks and economic and human costs associated with agricultural, biomedical, and industrial advances and over the nature of public control and regulation intended to provide the benefits of scientific and technological progress while minimizing the hazards. These controversies about the social responsibility and public accountability of scientists and the uses of new technologies are providing the basis for new perspectives on the research community and on managing technological risks. These new perspectives depend in part on advances in behavioral and social sciences research.

The Shaping of Technology

In earlier periods, historians and other social scientists tended to regard technology primarily as shaping, rather than as shaped by, social organizations and institutions. Research has led to important findings about the reverse side of the technology-society coin: the institutional shaping of technology. On three different levels, the study of social institutions constitutes a crucial link in understanding this relationship. First, the invention of technology takes place mainly in institutions for science and research. Second, the application of technology is influenced by institutional factors, such as the military aspect of the public sector, the organization of commercial firms, and the family and church in the private sphere. Third, the regulation of technology has become an important issue for political institutions.

An accumulation of historical studies have now analyzed the way that dominant forces in society, including cultural settings, values, ideologies, and political and economic structures conditioned the development and introduction of new technology and the emergence of entire industrial systems. A useful early (1960s) case study analyzed the evolution of the Wisconsin dairy industry, including the role of chemical and bacteriological advances and the activities of the University of Wisconsin, the State Experiment Station, and agricultural extension services. A more recent study of the invention and evolution of integrated electric light and power systems in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany pioneered a fully faceted, cross-national approach. The research challenge at present is to develop comprehensive comparative studies of other indispensable technologies. With regard to the twentieth-century history of the exploration, exploitation, and regulation of the radio frequency spectrum, for example: How and why has the spectrum been allocated among civilian and military users and between different commercial users? What has been the relationship between the regulatory environment and technological development?

In the United States, the federal government, often in conjunction with state organizations, has played a major role in fostering innovation (as the agricultural case shows). The military has been responsible, especially since World War II, for stimulating a great deal of research and development. Thus, it is essential to explore the broad range of activities through which the armed forces have promoted, coordinated, and directed technological change and affected the course of modern industry, including the vexing question of evaluating spinoffs from military to civilian applications. On the nonmilitary side, much technological research and development has been produced by a relatively small number of corporations that have institutionalized multistage processes from basic research through applied research, pilot plants, and intensive coordination with corporate marketing departments. Different studies have stressed, respectively, the technical and managerial aspects of new technology, the influence of different cultural settings on the development of technology, and the role of workplace processes in technological change. This multistage process of corporate research and development is among the most important topics for research on the history of science and technology, business history, and economic history. It is intimately connected with the issue of the ability of the United States to compete successfully in world markets.

Comprehensive historical studies of technological development have now become easier because some of the major companies that pioneered in research and development have created archives and hired historical researchers or provided funds for outside researchers to use them. Knowledge in this field will also be advanced with the development of data sets that cover technical manpower, funding, training, employment, and biographies of technological innovators, as generalized resources for research in the field. For all such data, as with government data, it is essential to strike the right combination of free research access and appropriate protection for privacy and confidentiality.

The Development of Science

In the social science study of science, two questions stand out: What social arrangements accelerate the pace and influence the directions of scientific development? Why and how do these arrangements work? Although some people argue that the vitality of any branch of science depends in a virtually linear fashion on the resources invested, careful quantitative cross-national study does not support that claim without modification: money has been a necessary but not a sufficient condition for scientific progress. One cross-national study of the personnel, funding, institutes, and productivity of physics in universities in the United States and western Europe at the turn of the century discovered that financial investment and manpower, calculated as fractions of total national spending, were very nearly the same in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States; however, productivity, as measured by numbers of papers published in the leading journals per dollars or per person, differed greatly, from a high for Germany to a low for the United States. American physicists at the time were claiming that poor funding accounted for their relatively low international standing, but clearly that was only part of the story. Subsequent research suggests that while a supportive base of resource support is essential, the intellectual and social environment sustaining scientific discovery also depends heavily on who designs and controls teaching institutions, specialized research centers, and professional societies and journals. The quality of science is ultimately a product of human and economic resources mobilized within social traditions and cultural contexts that enhance and legitimate scientific research and debate. Recent investigations involving close qualitative scrutiny of the conduct of scientific work in the laboratory, lecture room, seminar, and one-to-one discourse are enriching the understanding of how scientific facts and ideas are brought to light and accepted or rejected.

To further test and consolidate these kinds of findings, comparative quantitative research is essential. Quantitative studies can provide data concerning growth rates in the respective sciences, the differential productivity of practitioners and institutions, and differences in recruitment into science. Such quantitative results research must then be informed by the findings of qualitative cultural and institutional studies. For example, numerous studies have shown that certain minority groups in the United States—Jewish Americans historically and later Asian Americans—participate in science to an extent far greater than their proportion in the population, and the opposite is true for other minority groups and for women. Explanations of the uneven participation of women and minorities in science requires study of the cultures of the groups themselves, their histories and opportunities, and the policies, practices, and cultures of educational and scientific institutions.

How is the scientific community organized? How are research priorities established? How do these affect what work gets done? Recently it has come to be acknowledged that a great deal of contemporary scientific and technological research is the creation of research teams, either at specific locations or as dispersed “invisible colleges.” A lone scholar can readily study Galileo; the lone researcher whose subject is the Brookhaven National Laboratory or genetic engineering faces a more formidable task. What teams of scientists, engineers, technicians, and managers have created will take teams of historians, sociologists, economists, and other researchers to analyze. The study of modern science and technology requires long-term collaborative interdisciplinary effort, and current funding patterns and scholarly practices, based on individual projects over limited time periods, have not been conducive to such long-term collaborative effects.

Behavioral and Social Sciences Knowledge and Public Policy

An important trend in research on the development of science is the inclusion of the behavioral and social sciences as subject matter; that is, study of the emergence and institutionalization—including modes of recruitment, career incentives and patterns, and influences on intellectual preoccupations—of the modern disciplines and professions of the behavioral and social sciences. This research, which benefits from cross-national comparisons among the United States, France, Great Britain, and other countries, has been stimulated by an interest in the relations between behavioral and social sciences knowledge and the wider cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts.

Early studies of the application of behavioral and social sciences knowledge to public policy making proceeded on the model that knowledge use was “instrumental/decisional,” in other words, that empirical research findings could be applied to the straightforward solution of well-defined policy problems. Recent empirical research on how political agendas are set and political learning takes place challenges this model. The emerging view stresses the complexity of public policy making and the importance of indirect effects of scientific knowledge on it. Rather than producing engineering-type solutions to narrowly bounded social problems, behavioral and social sciences research more typically provides facts, empirical generalizations, and critical and innovative ideas and perspectives that inform, and sometimes transform, the thinking and, ultimately, the actions of policy makers and the public. Such effects sometimes occur in the near term and sometimes in the long term.

For example, both policy makers and their political supporters and opponents may be more affected by research knowledge as filtered through the media than by data or conclusions directly from research itself. Moreover, the teaching of the behavioral and social sciences to growing cohorts of middle-class American college students may have profoundly affected public policy making throughout the twentieth century by shaping educated people’s sense of what social problems could be addressed by governmental action and how they could be addressed. This social science education may also have influenced more general societal phenomena, such as the rise of merit selection as a principle of organizational design and social mobility and the shifting patterns of race relations in the United States.

Current research is focusing particularly on the role of intermediary institutions in bridging the academic and policy worlds. These institutions include governmental units, such as staff offices, agencies, or commissions that draw upon or conduct academic-style research, and nongovernmental organizations, such as philanthropic foundations, think tanks, schools of public policy, and contract research firms. A major contribution could be made by research that traces the full array of interconnections between behavioral and social sciences findings and policy making over considerable periods of time. Such research could carefully follow the concrete processes by which social science knowledge affects the framing of issues and the making of particular policies. It should pay attention to concepts and findings that were potentially available but did not actually influence policy making. Moreover, policies should be traced through their actual implementation and the subsequent assessments of their effects by policy makers and the public.

In addition to questions concerning the application of social and behavioral sciences to policy, other questions surrounding the development and role of these sciences are drawing increased attention. Research is needed on the history of the social science professions, both in the United States and in other countries, with a concentration on the periods in which the major disciplines were founded, the processes that forged new university-based career patterns and new definitions of professional conduct for producers of knowledge about society, and the mobilization of behavioral and social scientists for particular national efforts, such as World War II. Another important topic is how the adoption of nineteenth-century positivist science as a model for the new disciplines—rooted in the profoundly ahistorical sense of “American exceptionalism” that pervaded American culture—generated authority and legitimacy for these professions in the United States. In particular, how did the interests and funding policies of private foundations (especially in the 1920s and 1930s), the policy choices and funding patterns of government (especially since the 1950s), the emergence of think tanks, and the evolution of universities mold the development and carrying out of behavioral and social sciences research agendas.

Most of the studies to date have been conducted in limited settings: one nation or perhaps one agency. More recent work is considering cross-national and comparative-historical dimensions, such as the differences in the structure, function, and uses of social science by governmental commissions in Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. The international diffusion of prestigious ideas—for example, economic theories such as mercantilism, free trade, Keynesianism, Chicago school monetarism, and various models of modernization, as well as the use of analytic techniques, such as cost-benefit accounting, by the World Bank and other international bodies—has created broad international linkage between intellectuals and social-science-trained “technocrats” in the West and governments in developing nations. Comparative-international studies that track and lead to understanding such intellectual transfers on a global level promise to enrich understanding of national singularities and cross-national regularities in the processes and people that link social science knowledge and policy makers. They can also serve a critical self-reflexive function for behavioral and social scientists, and open the door to more sophisticated future relations between them and other sciences.

Internationalization

The study of institutional and cultural change within the modernization tradition of research has until recently concentrated on the individual society or nation-state as the basic unit of study. Within this tradition it was widely assumed that the fortunes of different nation-states would be similar during the process of modernization and that each nation’s destiny was within its own control. Accordingly, social change was regarded as resulting from the interaction of a number of forces pressing toward modernization (entrepreneurship, generation of savings and capital, labor mobility, enlightened state policy) and a number of opposite forces pressing toward the maintenance of traditional structures (kinship, tribal and communal loyalties, religious beliefs, and loyalties toward localities).

About two decades ago the nation-based focus came under critical reexamination from two sources. The first, largely theoretical in character, came from a number of Latin American and other scholars. Puzzling over certain anomalies in South American history relative to North American history, they argued that the development process in those countries could be better understood not as autonomous and within their control, but as governed—and in some cases deflected or defeated—by the power of external capital emanating mainly from the United States and other developed countries. Parallel theoretical criticism came from scholars who insisted that the long-term structure and short-term pertubations of the worldwide economy dominated the strategies and histories of individual nations, developed or not.

The second source of criticism of the nation-centric approach came from new data from research on contemporary events. The increasing internationalization of the world is a fact that has dominated countless data series and cross-national analyses. There is increasing internationalization of finance and production, largely through the penetration of multinational corporations; labor, as increasing numbers of firms develop the strategy and capability to direct their activities to areas of the world where labor is most economically hired and as laborers migrate more across borders to “informal employment” sectors that are of increasing importance; technology, as nations strive for advantages in the competitive struggle; and culture, as increased interaction among nations spreads new stylistic, political, and business understandings and protocols along with the penetration of television, radio, and written media.

International Finance and Domestic Policy

A particularly active line of research involves the relationship between international finance and the domestic affairs of nations. The increased transnationalization of finance has had contradictory results. While it has clearly limited some of the options of nations, it has made it easier for governments to attract capital for investment purposes or to finance budget deficits. The perceived inability of nations to regulate the Eurocurrency market has meant a partial loss of their control over monetary policy, as has the international debt crisis resulting from loans to developing countries during the 1970s. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the introduction of floating exchange rates has meant greater volatility and increased the impact of international investors on domestic economies. For example, capital flight in France undermined the Mitterand expansion attempt, and the high value of the U.S. dollar in the early 1980s played havoc with U.S. trade. The evidence has led numerous analysts to the view that monetary policy can no longer be pursued nationally but must explicitly take into account policies of all major industrialized countries—an analytical result that has been taken very seriously by the central bankers of those countries.

But this is not to say that countries and their agencies are no longer key actors in international finance. Transnational banks continue to depend on core nation-states to maintain the currencies in which they do business. Floating exchange rates provide somewhat more leeway for differing macroeconomic policies than did the previous fixed exchange rates. Even in developing countries, where the power of the international financial community has grown substantially over the past decade, the effects on state agencies have been paradoxical. Much more than in developed countries, state policies in developing countries have become constrained by the exigencies of international finance. Yet at the same time increased availability of international finance helped place state controlled agencies in a central position vis-à-vis the organization of domestic economies and in certain respects has increased these countries’ capacity for autonomous action.

The extractive industries provide a good example of these phenomena. Research has clearly shown that transnational mining corporations are likely to frustrate national development plans by their reluctance to invest their returns in the expansion of local operations, especially when there might be an upward shift in the host country’s position in the international division of labor. Yet the same research also shows that countries might diminish their chances of realizing other objectives (for example, access to stable markets) by eliminating such corporate participation in their economies. Other research has shown that it is possible for countries with political will and technocratic competence to induce transnational corporations to conform more closely to certain local goals.

All the research to date reinforces the conclusion that individual countries not only remain important actors in the new internationalized organization of production but also, precisely because of the necessity of bargaining with multinational corporations, have become more rather than less important. Better theoretical models of how state agencies function are needed in order to understand why some countries but not others are able to develop effective institutions for dealing with the new international economic environment. In turn, this success or failure shapes the structure of the international economic system itself.

Cultural and Political Diffusion

Recent research suggests that some developing countries may actively attempt to reorganize their social arrangements around world models as they enter the international system. This possibility challenges theoretical models that have emphasized national uniqueness and the intrasocietal coupling of institutions and models that view the evolution of societal institutions as produced primarily by uniform adaptive responses to the political and economic environment.

Cross-national data on education systems have shown that the expansion, structure, and content of education systems reflect the diffusion of world models as much as the economic or political situation of the country in which they are located. National constitutions have been shown to be remarkably similar in prescribing the rights and duties of citizens, with the similarities becoming greater in the mid-twentieth century. Welfare-state institutions (or, at least, their legal principles) spread rather quickly throughout the entire nation-state system and have evolved in roughly common directions in the most disparate countries. In the economic arena, occupational changes in the contemporary world system have been surprisingly similar; the service sector and its professional component have expanded in parallel ways in countries at different levels of development. Even the responses of states to transnational corporations are derived in large measure from a global culture of bargaining norms. For example, the bargaining position of Papua New Guinea vis-à-vis international copper companies has been found to reflect a global culture created by the accumulated experience of other developing countries as much as its own political history or economic circumstances.

The International Division of Labor

Some developing countries have shifted their position in relation to the international division of labor dramatically. The movement of newly industrialized countries, like Korea and Taiwan—away from the export of traditional, labor-intensive, light manufactured goods toward the export of highly sophisticated high-technology products (such as video cassette recorders)—or like Brazil—away from the export of coffee to steel, automobiles, and airplanes, exemplifies the process. The consequences for trade patterns have been documented, but the institutional dynamics of the process itself have not been well analyzed.

Explanations of the institutional bases of change in the international division of labor are central to theories both of national development and of the international economic system. Fifteen years ago it was assumed that core countries that were “home” to transnational corporations (for example, the United States) would be the beneficiaries of the expansion of those corporations, but subsequent research raised serious questions as to the validity of that assumption. That research contributed to the anxious policy reassessments that have dominated consideration of the new international economy in the United States in the 1980s.

The question of whether the position of the United States in the international division of labor may be slipping has both theoretical and policy aspects. To date, most work on developed and developing countries has been conducted by quite distinct sets of scholars; distinct conceptual frameworks have evolved for studying “development” in contrast to the concept of the political economy of “advanced” industrial countries. In addition, the quality of data available on developing countries is significantly lower than that on developed countries. Scientific norms of methodological rigor tend to discourage researchers from testing their theories beyond the range of cases, usually limited, in which the quality of available data is commensurate with the rigor of the models. Advances in knowledge therefore require sustained and improved access to material and sites, to governments, firms, and banks that are inclined to be secretive on many scores, and in areas of the world in which the political problems facing behavioral and social scholars attempting to do research are particularly delicate.

Past attempts to circumvent these obstacles to comparative research have focused on the support of area studies. The institutional character of area studies programs and centers tended to reward those with a detailed command of specific local knowledge and not to reward those taking approaches that are more broadly theoretical. Allocation of new resources—or modest reallocation of resources currently defined exclusively in terms of geographic or disciplinary categories—into organizational structures explicitly designed to facilitate work that moves across such boundaries would have a major stimulating effect on research on the international division of labor.

Productivity

Another active line of inquiry focuses on the measured slowdown in the growth of productivity, which has been a worldwide phenomenon since about 1970. Productivity growth began to decline somewhat in the late 1960s in the United States and has since been about 2 percent a year less than during the previous 20 years. Europe and Japan have witnessed slowdowns at least as large as in the United States, though starting from higher levels. Particularly large declines in all these countries were noticeable in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks.

It has proven difficult, however, to determine what has been causing these declines. Neither regulatory interventions, higher energy prices, nor changes in rates of capital formation seem to be direct causes. And the declines were not uniform: productivity increased in agriculture and manufacturing, but not in the service sectors. An influx of “baby boomers” into low-wage service jobs may account for part of the productivity slowdown in the United States, but it would not apply elsewhere.

Several lines of research have emphasized the social dimensions of productivity. One series of important studies finds, for example, that in many settings unionized establishments are more productive than nonunionized ones because of lower quit rates and absenteeism and, perhaps, better treatment of grievances. Other cross-national comparisons suggest that physically comparable plants in Great Britain, Japan, and the United States operate at very different levels of productivity, which also argues for much more intensive consideration of social factors. The very different responses of the American, European, and Japanese economies to the oil shocks have also attracted attention: since 1973 the United States has created more than 20 million new jobs;

PRODUCTIVITY What is the nature of international industrial competition? How is productivity related to economic competitiveness? Is the United States in the midst of a major crisis presaging economic decline? The recent history of international economic relations has been volatile, challenging scientists to understand what drives the global movement of products, facilities, and money. This figure displays some important international trends in labor productivity, which is the value of product generated per hour of work, for the five major Western industrial countries.

From the outset and throughout the period since 1950, the U.S. economy has been better at converting labor time into outputs of goods and services than were the economies of other mature industrial nations, particularly in manufacturing. All countries have shown strong gains in this period, especially in manufacturing; the United States still leads in labor productivity, but that lead is now much slimmer.

Overall, the United States remains the most productive economy in terms of output per work hour. The Japanese economy is still relatively low on this measure, at just over half the U.S. level. In contrast, hourly labor productivity in the French economy is high, nearly approaching the U.S. level. However, this performance is less impressive in terms of output per person. The French work a little more than one-half as many hours per capita as the Japanese, due to a shorter work week, more vacations, lower labor-force participation, and higher unemployment. The U.S. population works two-thirds as many hours per capita as the Japanese. The recent great success of Japan in international trade is due not to generalized gains in hourly labor productivity or longer hours, but to other factors, such as greater capital investment, lower real wages, and specific efficiencies in the export-oriented manufacturing sector.

while employment in Europe has been completely stagnant. In Europe it appears that real wages are rigid so that reductions in the standard of living due to oil shocks are transmitted to workers by increased unemployment: that is, when wages rise relative to productivity, unemployment increases. In the United States and perhaps in Japan, it is nominal rather than real wages that are rigid; increases in price levels effectively reduce real wages, which in turn result in maintaining relatively higher levels of employment. The overriding question for research concerns the reasons for the observed differences in the apparent behavior of wages and prices in different countries.

International Conflict

The four decades since the conclusion of World War II have witnessed a great growth of interest in international politics and security, but the number of active researchers is surprisingly small, partly due to alternating periods of feast and famine in support for researchers. While the world situation dictates a focus on the potential of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, research also focuses on more general causes of cooperation and conflict. The following kinds of questions are under systematic scrutiny: What is the relationship between national attributes and the domestic and foreign policy of nations? What is the evolving structure of the international political system? What are the causes of international crises and wars? What are the dynamics generally of interaction among nations?

To answer these questions effectively, a systematic research approach is essential. Social and behavioral scientists need, first, to focus on posing the right research questions; second, to develop the right kinds of research designs to address the questions; and, third, to retrieve and generate the most relevant quantitative data bases and qualitative evidence that can generate explanations about them. Above all, the research should be historically and internationally informed.

Superpower Relations

The world has not seen a nuclear exchange and has seen only a handful of major confrontations between the superpowers. Thus, there is no direct evidence bearing on such crucial questions as whether nuclear war can be limited, how decision makers would behave on the brink of war, and the influence of the strategic nuclear balance on the outcomes of confrontations. But there have been 40 years of Soviet-American interaction as superpowers. Despite constraints on access to data that would help illuminate how U.S. and Soviet policies and Soviet-American interaction have evolved, especially at turning points in the Cold War, important studies have been conducted.

For example, some research has focused on the differences between declared American military policy and actual war planning. While the former has often stressed the concept of assured destruction of cities, the latter has always stressed the need to hit a wide variety of military targets. Over time there has been greater consistency in war planning, for which operational requirements and difficulties play a larger role than they do in policy declarations. Researchers have also learned that U.S. presidents are torn between regarding nuclear weapons as extraordinary and divorced from international politics and seeing them as merely very powerful bombs. President Eisenhower, for example, seems to have begun his presidency with the latter perspective and shifted to the former by the time he left office.

In incorporating modern technology into their military establishments, the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies have transformed their military organizations, instituting many surveillance and intelligence operations that were neither necessary nor feasible in earlier times. Many of these activities are conducted daily on a global scale and constitute continuous sources of international tension. Theories of organizational behavior generate a number of empirical questions about both the internal operations of current military establishments and the interactions among them. Those questions concern the type and frequency of operational interactions between military forces, the responsiveness of different levels of the organizational hierarchy, the flexibility of operations, and the differences between normal peacetime and crisis operations.

Decision Making, Beliefs, and Cognitions

Progress that has been made in recent years in understanding decision-making processes (discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3) has extended to the study of how national leaders think about national security issues. For example, work on cognition that stresses the importance of beliefs (called scripts or schemata) helps explain both specific intelligence failures (for example, Pearl Harbor, the Iranian revolution) and the general tendency for leaders to be very slow to change their images of other countries. More generally, decision makers, like all people in their daily lives, use shortcuts to making decisions, which conserve their cognitive resources by oversimplifying the world. But this mode of information processing also leads to errors and biases as they use information that is readily available and relatively easy to grasp even if it is not the most relevant for the task at hand. Leaders who are under great pressure to follow a particular course of action—for example, to challenge or try to block the action of another country—are likely to develop an unwarranted belief that the course of action will succeed. The result may be unexpected conflict.

Researchers need to develop a fuller understanding of how policy about national security issues is made. Useful starting points for study include how and why nations perceive others as threats, how images of other states are established and altered, the ways in which conflicts among important values are treated, how statesmen decide that certain threats are so implausible that they can be safely dismissed, and the biases and methods of simplification that characterize adversarial identification and group decision making. The examination of such processes, both within a country and between countries, offers a way of clarifying how and how much international conflict and war can be explained by systemic factors, such as balances of power; by domestic factors, such as specific national capabilities, needs, and demands; by decision-making factors, such as beliefs—including ideologies—and changes in leadership; or by interactions among the three.

One very active research area is the impact of the domestic characteristics of a country on its security-related policies. Internal politics often influences if not dictates, external choices. Historical research into the interwar period, for example, has uncovered the deep disagreements between Great Britain and France on how strong Germany should be permitted to become before being considered a military menace and found that the passivity of political leaders in both countries could be traced to their weakness in the face of conflicting internal demands. At the present time, for example, many security-related issues in the United States—arms control, nuclear deployment, the transfer of technology—are highly partisan political issues. At the same time, of course, international forces shape domestic economic and political life as well. Whether or not a state introduces strict internal political controls, for example, depends in part on the degree to which its security may be threatened by other nations.

Cooperation and Conflict

International politics combines cooperation and conflict, and the analysis of international politics must do the same. The example of the prisoner’s dilemma, which incorporates these features, has led to a great deal of work in the field. In its most pristine form, the dilemma is this: in a particular transaction, each person has two options, which can be characterized as to cooperate or not to cooperate. If everyone cooperates, everyone receives a positive but modest return. For each person, however, the temptation not to cooperate is very strong because a noncooperative strategy greatly increases that person’s return if most of the other people cooperate. But if no one cooperates, everyone’s return is very negative. What is so compellingly perverse about the situation is that, for each individual in each transaction, the noncooperative alternative is at least as good as the cooperative one, regardless of what the others do. So over a series of short-term transactions, self-interest leads everyone to act noncooperatively. But the return from that strategy yields less benefit to every participant than would one of general cooperation.

A formally comparable problem in international politics has been referred to as the security dilemma, in which efforts by one country to maximize its security by arming more heavily have the effect—whether intended or desired—of decreasing the security of other states, which are likely to react by increasing their arms, yielding mutually damaging arms races.

Experimental studies have yielded valuable insights about the ways that modest shifts in payoff influence strategy, the conditions under which the third best outcome occurs, and particularly the conditions under which adversaries are able to and most likely to cooperate with each other. The time perspectives and the relative values of the payoffs to the participants are clearly important: cooperation is most likely when participants expect to have a long series of interactions, not one of which will be decisive; when the gains for exploiting the other and the losses for being exploited are relatively small; and when mutual competition is much worse for both sides than is mutual cooperation. Cooperation is facilitated by contingent strategies such as reciprocity, which is based on the principle of cooperating with another participant when and only when that participant cooperates. Cooperation is also more likely when participants can determine with some certainty whether or not other participants are cooperating, when they are willing and able to reply in kind to the others’ behavior, and when the other side realizes this. Under these circumstances, attempting to gain unilateral advantage is less tempting because it is seen as likely to provoke a negative response.

These research findings are promising, especially since a number of alternative hypotheses about the causes of conflict and war have been contradicted by evidence from quantitative studies. Attributes such as a nation’s power or its governmental structure have not been shown to be directly related to its involvement in war. Being rich or poor, big or small, and densely or sparsely populated also does not seem to make a country more or less prone to war. And a country’s internal political difficulties do not appear to make it more or less likely to engage in conflict. Arms expenditures do tend to be positively related to the incidence of warlike activity, although arms races do not invariably produce wars. The very concept of an “arms race” is undergoing reinterpretation. Arms races have typically been defined as accelerating military expenditures in the face of a potential enemy who is doing likewise, but it has become increasingly clear that the domestic pressure for military expenditures can be a more important factor than imminent international conflict.

Relative power, particularly between bordering nations, has also been shown to be a factor that influences the probability for war. However, contrary to arguments that have been advanced under the theory that a balance of power reduces the likelihood of conflict, significant evidence indicates that wars are most likely between nations with equal rather than unequal power. The common view that wars are typically the consequence of accumulative, escalatory hostile interactions is not supported by analyses of numerous crises and small wars since World War II. Extensive work on the relationship between various structural attributes of the international system—alliance configurations, polarization, power distributions, and status ordering—show that these attributes do affect the level of conflict between the nations in the system, but the patterns are complex.

Because research on international and national security issues is so important for public policy, it is now receiving major funding from private foundations. But most of this funding is aimed at bringing research perspectives to bear on current security policy questions. While these objectives are important, there is a real danger that basic research on cooperation and conflict is being neglected. Furthermore, funding for the development of quantitative data and documentary resources has been sporadic at best. The data sets that do exist are largely the work of a few individual researchers with no guarantee that they will continue to be updated and no clear opportunity for extending and developing the compilations in response to the evolving needs of the research community. Although data collectors are generally aware of each others’ material, there is no mechanism to integrate and compare their results. Much of the relevant information that has been produced or gathered by the U.S. government is classified and not readily accessible to scholars. Although many documents are so sensitive that they should remain secret, many are not. For declassified information, a system of coordination and sharing of information is required.

Support for other approaches is also needed. Documents themselves rarely tell the whole story and need to be supplemented by structured interviews, especially with the lower-level officials who have played crucial roles in such areas as American war planning and the analysis of Soviet military posture—and, of course, their Soviet counterparts to the extent possible. More extensive declassification and structured interviewing is in the interest of the government as well as the research community. It would generate research that civil servants, even intelligence specialists, do not have the time or skills to conduct. The greater understanding of current problems that results from careful analysis of earlier situations would benefit the government as well as the research community. For this work, it is especially important to develop efficient means of communication (preprint series, electronic mail and bulletin boards, teleconference systems) and to make arrangements for extended interchange among people who are working on similar problems.

Opportunities and Needs

Research on institutions and cultures, like most of the research areas covered in the previous three chapters, calls for a diversity of theories, techniques, and data collections. The study of fertility and migration, for example, uses sophisticated models of decision making, complex statistical analysis of demographic time series, ethnographic study of individuals, families, and communities, and archival investigations. Despite this diversity, however, nearly all areas of research on cultures and institutions, including the areas cited in this chapter, call for historical and cross-national studies: the evolution of human characteristics, changes in family structure and in the major world religions, science and technological competition, nations and transnational corporations, and superpower conflict and cooperation.

Federal and foundation support for historical and cross-national research has been particularly sparse for the past two decades. The Ford Foundation’s massive support in the late 1950s and early 1960s was both unprecedented and helpful, but it was short lived; congressional passage of the International Education Act of 1966 was promising, but funds were never provided. There have been no new major initiatives since then. We believe it is time to bring support for this type of research fully back into the research picture, both to build on the innovations made in recent years and to develop new capacities to answer the increasing number of complex questions being raised about institutions and cultures. Overall, we recommend new annual expenditures of $51 million for strengthening research on institutions and cultures.

The biggest need in these areas is for an expansion of support for investigator-initiated grants. As we have discussed above, such grants have been among the most fruitful mechanisms for research progress throughout the behavioral and social sciences; however, there is a particular additional need in the fields discussed in this chapter. Many of the topics discussed above could now take advantage of a major expansion of collaborative work. In the study of inter-nationalization processes, for example, it is very important for small groups of scholars to work together for continuous periods of 1 year or more or to meet periodically for several weeks at a time during 2 or 3 years. In the area of international security, these mechanisms, in conjunction with expanded methods of rapid communication, are particularly important to make better use of quantitative and qualitative data resources and to coordinate research efforts. In the study of science and technology, a fundamental opportunity is emerging to develop the comparative study of public and private institutions through team efforts involving senior and postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.

There are tangible costs associated with the augmentation of these kinds of collaborative research. Not only must more than one researcher be supported, but increased travel is also needed to coordinate research efforts, an expense that is even greater when the collaboration is international. (We note that increased support for international collaborative research may make it necessary for federal funding agencies to reconsider and perhaps change existing rules that hinder or preclude extensive collaborative arrangements with foreign research agencies.) We recommend that, at a minimum, a total of $13 million be added to annual expenditures for investigator-initiated grants on institutions and culture, and that at least $3 million of that increase be directed specifically toward expansion of collaborative research.

There is a substantial need for more graduate and postdoctoral fellowship support to restore the flow of new and talented young researchers into these fields. This requirement is especially marked at the postdoctoral level. We recommend that $6 million be added to annual support of postdoctoral fellowships for research on institutions and cultures and that $2 million be added to support of graduate students.

There are unusually strong opportunities for research workshops and advanced training institutes to be effective in ensuring collaboration, dissemination of developing knowledge, and the use of new techniques in research on institutions and culture. A particularly important opportunity is to train more researchers in the most effective methods of retrieving, coding, analyzing, and synthesizing widely different kinds of information from historical archives and less systematic records and artifacts; this kind of training is often provided to historians during their graduate work, but it is seldom part of the training given to other kinds of scientists. Institutes and workshops are the best mechanisms to develop and upgrade such skills and combine them with other research approaches. We recommend an additional $3 million yearly for research workshops among researchers working on related problems, and $1 million for advanced training institutes.

Equipment needed for research on institutions and culture consists mainly of computer hardware and the associated development of software for individual and group investigators. Two special equipment needs are in archaeological studies, for which dating and other techniques have become complex and demanding, and in demographic studies, for which expanded technological capabilities for data-base management, analysis, and dissemination are needed. We recommend additional annual support of $6 million for equipment, $5 million of which should be for computer-related expenditures.

Studies of institutions and cultures very often require the creation and assembly of diverse kinds of empirical information: economic and other time-series data; survey and other interview data; institutional and cultural products, such as legal codes and documents revealing religious beliefs and practices; and documentary, calendrical, and quantitative materials relating to historically important events such as assassinations, political successions, and wars. This information often presents problems of access.

A similar problem arises in the study of how human institutions and populations evolved: a full palette of continuously improving methods, from radiochemical assays to anatomical imaging and reconstruction to symbolic interpretation are used, but overriding all is the need for sustained access to the geographical locales where rich archaeologically accessible traces of the past and relevant ethological and ecological comparison sites can be systematically probed. First-hand geographic access is also needed for the study of fertility and migrational changes in the developing countries of Africa, the interaction between political change and religious movements in Latin America, and the development of state-based institutions for managing relations with transnational corporate enterprises and developing international market strategies in eastern Asia. Continuity of contact, including the ability to host and visit across national and regional borders on a regular basis, and a sharing of contacts and expertise among researchers, are instrumental to sustaining geographical access, and these capabilities require explicit underwriting. Geographic access also includes photography from aircraft or satellite platforms for archaeological and geographic canvasses.

Many facets of these efforts are in the diplomatic arena, involving agreements between the U.S. government and other governments, American universities and foreign governments, American universities and foreign universities, and individual scientists and other governments. These diplomatic activities are a critical adjunct to the increases in research support that we recommend for grants, fellowships, and workshops to advance cross-national and historical research on institutions and cultures.

A different kind of access problem involves privileged information that has been unavailable to researchers because of respondent privacy or anonymity, national security, or trade secrecy. Classified data of the U.S. government, acquired at great expense for primarily military or national intelligence purposes, could significantly contribute to substantial advances in the study of international security and conflict. Procedures of declassification do not now take into specific account the analytical benefit that may accrue as a result of opening data resources to research scholars. A joint inquiry by the relevant agencies and researchers should consider how to build such considerations into an active declassification procedure. Costs involved at the early stages of this process would be mainly administrative, but subsequent efforts to process previously classified information for research would be significant. We recommend allocating $3 million annually to this effort.

A related kind of data-oriented opportunity is expanded research access to microdata files held by government agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Bureau of the Census, and to university-based research files, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. There are substantial research programs that depend on research access to certain portions of the accumulated data (and we have recommended expansion of such programs; see Chapter 3). However, relatively precise locational information about individual respondents over time, which is critical for the study of migration and a variety of regional socioeconomic questions, is generally suppressed or withheld in order to ensure the anonymity of respondents. We recommend a research program to make this locational dimension usable for social science research, and we estimate that $1 million annually is needed for this effort.

To facilitate high-quality comparative research on demographic behavior, it would also be very useful to develop a central-library-type facility in the United States, with demographic data bases available on computer tapes. Some demographic data files are available at only one institution and are largely unknown to researchers located elsewhere, at the same time that many data sets are duplicated in a dozen or more American institutions. Some centralization of data is desirable; such a center could also develop into a disseminator of software and technical expertise on a wide variety of computer-related subjects in population studies. This is basically a matter of coordination of existing resources and may be achieved with relatively little net cost.

A final data-access opportunity concerns the historical records of corporations regarding their proprietary research and development activities, which comprise a resource of great importance to understanding the development of modern science and technology. The precedent established by several corporations in enabling these records to be treated as archives and used for research under professional auspices is a very encouraging initiative. An expanded program of record retention, sampling, codification, and structured interviewing to supplement the archival record is highly desirable. At early stages the cost for the release of these kinds of information would be mainly administrative, but we recommend that a regular extension of this process, including translation of the relevant data into forms usable for research, be undertaken at the level of at least $1 million per year.

Another data resource is the longitudinal, international, quantitative data file developed explicitly for cross-national studies of industrial, commercial, or public sector productivity, international security relations, trends in family and population structure, shifts in religious participation, or the growth of scientific and technological capabilities. These files can be developed from a variety of primary and secondary data sources and linked in various ways depending on the nature of the research questions posed to them. The primary issues concerning these data are stability of support, quality control, standardization across different sources, completeness across periods and parts of the globe, and sheer practical experience in using the data by a large enough set of researchers applying the relevant technical and conceptual tools.

Time-series data over long periods are particularly difficult to find or reconstruct. Although the need for such data was first recognized by scientists in the nineteenth century, and there have been sustained efforts over the last 40 years by the United Nations and other organizations, it has been only partly met. A particular need is to strive for improvement of standardized historical series in censuses, surveys, and medical and educational records. Support for data collection, documentation, and dissemination are essential to ensure that a strong factual base is available for the next steps in comparative research on global processes. We recommend that $8 million be allocated annually to develop, order, and analyze such data sets.

The final category of new research opportunities is the creation of research centers. International scientific centers are a major avenue for stabilizing access to overseas sites and enabling the continuous testing and upgrading of theories and methods in cross-national, historical, and longitudinal research. A new international center with a strong demographic emphasis, to complement those in Bangladesh and Guatemala, would be a valuable spur to research. We recommend support for the planning of such a center, with a requirement for detailed proposals as the basis for full-scale evaluation. The study of modern science and technology, including the behavioral and social sciences and their application, is also ripe for the development of one or more research centers. These kinds of initiatives can involve substantial costs. The establishment and the assumption of basic operating expenses for an international center of the type envisioned could run into several millions of dollars per year, though costs can be shared with other nations. Taking the various possibilities into account, we recommend an annual investment of $7 million in new research centers devoted to the study of cultures and institutions.

What is a transformation of cultures institutions and functions?

What is the transformation of a culture over time called?

What are the transformations on the social change?

How social institution are important for transformation of society?