Post-Industrial Society

11. Between the late 1960s and the 1990s, the U.S. experienced a major shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Yet during this economic change, as Frances FitzGerald and Barbara Ehrenreich both suggest, socioeconomic or "class" issues became much less important than cultural clashes over "values." Discuss.

As the relative prosperity of America's white middle class became entrenched after World War II, attention to survival was replaced by attention to what comes down to the quality of life. Ehrenreich's discussion of the transformation of American priorities in the decades after World War II leads to an inference that the overall improvement in the socioeconomic condition of the U.S. more or less enabled those not confined to poverty and survival issues to engage in culture clash over values, and that the most important result was a wholesale transformation of the way individual men were likely to view their social roles and social options. FitzGerald's discussion of the behavior of several specific subgroups during the same general period illustrates a range of effects that acting on these various options had.

Ehrenreich's basic argument is that the "breadwinner ethic" and all the social values it entailed collapsed into a male revolt against family responsibility and assertion of "fun morality" (43), at least for men. Social values attached to nonconformity with traditional expectations, whether as male revolt against responsibility or female revolt against

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among better-educated baby-boomer demographics. But baby boomers did not confine themselves to traditional social or political discourse such as that fostered by the civil rights movement. Instead (or in addition) they entered communities "bound together by a set of beliefs and programs" (FitzGerald 19) that differed from or conflicted with traditional expectations. Such community solidarity became conflated with rights discourse, but values more than rights were at the heart of community identity. Now there are vast differences between the concrete reality and values orientation of, say, San Francisco's Castro and Falwell's Liberty Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va. What unite them are two factors: a values-specific orientation and group identity enacted as positive social virtue--partly assertive, partly defensive, partly contentious vis-a-vis competing group-identity alternatives; and a difference from the more diffuse, less assertive, less defensive, less contentious, less group-identity-conscious population. Those who do not share the values of the insular group may be considered outsiders, while the group itself can position itself as outside the values of whatever it (the group) has identified as the mainstream and as champi

Category: Psychology - P