Mapping values and world views

We need to pay more attention to our mind - and to the different patterns of meaning we create in our efforts to make sense of the world.

In my youth, I was aware of a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists and liberals. Not for me the Manichean approach of insider/outsider or left/right. There was always a third way – be it green or ecological.

 The blog has, of course, had regular posts about cultural values – discussing the work of people such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; FransTrompenaars; Richard Lewis (of When Cultures Collide fame) and Richard Nesbitt – a body of writing which emphasises the distinctiveness of national values most graphically illustrated in the Inglehart cultural map of the world and best explained in this brochure. It was, of course, multinational companies who funded a lot of this work as they tried to understand how they could weld different nationalities into coherent and effective teams. Those were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency” was raising important questions about how “sticky” cultural values were…viz how difficult national behavioural traits are to change

It was only in 2000, however, that I became aware of the four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known as “Cultural Theory”. I came across Mary Douglas’ theory only in 2000, thanks to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” which uses her typology brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks of these various world views. 

It’s interesting that many people now assume that this exhausts the number of world views. One book-length study compares and contrasts these various models “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and lifestyles” – a rather disjointed dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday (2009) an introduction to which is here.

But I’m just learning that I’ve been missing some important perspectives. A Futurist called Andy Hines has just sent me a copy of what is (despite the title) a quite fascinating book he wrote in 2011 - Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape which is actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….

This reflects a lot of work which companies had been funding to try to get into the minds of their consumers - but which international charities suddenly realised a decade or so ago could also be used to prise money out of all of us for their (more altruistic) purposes (see below) – a politicisation of which Adam Curtis' documentaries have made us much more aware.

Hines’ book in turn took me to Spiral Dynamics – mastering values, leadership, change; produced by Don Beck and Chris Cowan in 1996 which the link explains was inspired by the work of their teacher - an American psychologist, Clare Graves. Both books have crucial explorations of the very different levels of explanation needed for discussions of behaviour and the values which underpin it. 

And lead into recent books by Jeremy Lent - the earliest of which is “The Patterning Instinct – a cultural history of man’s search for meaning” which 

is filled with details about how the brain works, how patterns of thought arise, how these shared symbols (language, art, religion, science) give rise to cultural metaphors such as “Nature as Machine” and “Conquering Nature,” and how these worldviews in turn lead to historical change. However, different cultures have different metaphors, and it is our culture, according to Lent, western (now global) culture, which is largely to blame for the damaging ways in which our root metaphors have manifested themselves on the planet.

I get the sense that psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists have approached the question of cultural values completely separately and at different times - making few attempts to engage one another in discussion? It's such a critical issue that it's time they reached out to one another.....

Further Reading

-       The Web of Meaning; Jeremy Lent (2021) an important follow up to his 2017 book

-       Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common 2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

-       Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ; Ronald Inglehart (2018) Inglehart, a political scientist, has been at the heart of discussion about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarise that work.

-       The Patterning Instinct; Jeremy Lent (2017) how worldviews develop and can change history

-       Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive

-       “A Cultural Theory of Politics” (2011) a short article which shows how the grid-group approach has been used in a range of disciplines

-       Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010) a useful little manual for charities

-       Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto

-       Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful article by an academic

-       The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; Ricard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book

-       Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s mantle

-       When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book which introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange habits of almost all countries of the world