New book: Social and cultural values. How they arise, how they spread and how they change

A new book "Social and cultural values. How they arise, how they spread and how they change" has been published by Juan Diez-Nicolas, Chair of the Scientific Committee at the World Values Survey Association. 

Juan Díez Nicolás (2020): Valores sociales y culturales: Como emergen, como se difunden y como cambian. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS). ISBN (paper): 978-84-7476-829-9. 658pp.

Each society, at every moment in history, responds with the forms of organization that seem most instrumental to achieve the best adaptation of the population to its natural and social environment. History shows that it has been the expansion of access to greater resources in the natural and social environment (due to innovations in transport and communications technology) that has conditioned changes in political organization, and later in all other forms of social organization, including value systems. Therefore, and as is logical, I consider much more plausible the hypothesis that financial-economic and political power will rejoin, this time in a world globalization, and this will imply an increase in authority, not necessarily authoritarianism, although It cannot be ruled out that recourse to authority, to guarantee the security of nearly 10 billion inhabitants of the planet, leads to new forms of authoritarianism. The balance between the economic and political organization may occur because the new power of financial capitalism imposes its own political system, equivalent to its own, on all or almost the entire planet. But alternatively because a world political power emerges capable of implementing a normative system that imposes limits on the power of financial capitalism. The new generations will have to decide what model of society they want and can implement.

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