(Comparative Charting of Social Change) Simon Langlois, Theodore Caplow, Henri Mendras, Wolfgang Glatzer - Convergence or Divergence_ Comparing Recent Social Trends in Industrial Societies-Mcgill Quee

Convergence or Divergence?
Comparative Charting of Social Change

Series Editor: Simon Langlois
Simon Langlois
With Theodore Caplow, Henri Mendras, Wolfgang Glatzer
Comparing Recent Social Trends in
Industrial Societies
Campus Verlag • Frankfurt am Main

McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:

(Comparative charting of social change,
ISSN 1183-1952)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-1264-0 (McGill-Queen's University Press)
1. Social change. 2. Social evolution.

I. Langlois, Simon II. Caplow, Theodore
III. Mendras, Henri IV. Glatzer, Wolfgang
V. Series.
HN17.S.C66 1995 303.4 C94-900290-9
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Convergence or Divergence? Comparing recent social trends in

industrial societies / Simon Langlois ... - Frankfurt am Main:
Campus Verlag; Montreal; Kingston; London; Buffalo:
McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1994
(Comparative charting of social change)
ISBN 3-593-35189-7 (Campus Verlag) Gb.
ISBN 0-7735-1264-0 (McGill-Queen's Univ. Press) Gb.
NE: Langlois, Simon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Copyright 1994 by Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt/Main
Published simultaneously in Canada and the United States
by McGill-Queen's University Press
Legal deposit second quarter 1995
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in Germany
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to express our gratitude for all the support provided to the
International Group for Comparative Charting of Social Change.
Our warmest thanks go to Kathe Roth for her editing of this book and
for translation of two chapters, and to the personnel of the Institut quebecois de
recherche sur la culture - Johanne Bujold, Ghislaine Marois, and Mariette
Montambault - for preparing the manuscript.
The Group received indispensable financial support from many

institutions; without their help, the meetings necessary to produce the comparative
analysis would have been impossible to organize. We express our appreciation to the
Werner Reimers Stiftung (Bad Homburg), the Berliner Bank (Berlin), the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (Bonn), the Senatsverwaltung fur Wissenschaft und
Forschung (Berlin), and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung
(Berlin), the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and the Observatoire
frangais de conjoncture economique (France), the Institut quebecois de recherche sur
la culture (Quebec), the Council for European Studies, the Cornerhouse Fund, and the
David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies, Brigham Young University
(United States), and the Fundation BBV (Spain).
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments i
1 Introduction. Convergence or Divergence? 1

Theodore Caplow and Henri Mendras
2 Is There a Single Pattern of Social Evolution? 23

Yannick Lemel and John Modell
3 Differing Levels of Low Fertility 43

Gary Caldwell, Karin Stiehr, John Modell,
and Salustiano Del Campo
4 Employment and Labour-Market Change: 89

Toward Two Models of Growth
Heinz-Herbert Noll and Simon Langlois
5 The Changing Bonds of Kinship: Parents and Adult Children 115

Howard M. Bahr, Jean-Hugues Dechaux, and Karin Stiehr
6 Trends in Religion and Secularization 173

Bruce A. Chadwick, Madeleine Gauthier, Louis Hourmant,
and Barbara Worndl
7 The Reduction of Personal Authority 215

Theodore Caplow
8 Conflicts and Conflict Regulation 225

Karl-Otto Hondrich and Theodore Caplow
9 Institutionalization Tendencies 247

in the Ecological Movements
Guy Frechet and Barbara Worndl
10 Comparative Structural Analysis of Social Change 269

in France and in Quebec
Michel Forse and Simon Langlois
11 Lexicon 303
Renata Hornung-Drauss
Author Index 321

Subject Index 325
The Authors 327
1
Introduction
Convergence or Divergence ?
Theodore CAPLOW
Henri MENDRAS
The publication of this volume opens the second phase of an intellectual enterprise
begun in May, 1987, when a dozen social scientists from France, the United States,
West Germany, and Quebec met in Paris to organize the International Research
Group on the Comparative Charting of Social Change (CCSC). All of us had
previously been engaged in the study of social change in our respective countries,
and as we compared our separate bodies of work, we had the impression of seeing
the bits and pieces of a new theoretical model waiting to be assembled, a model that
would not view social trends as predestined and that would take account of the
interplay of objective and subjective factors in modernization. Our first task was to
put the bits and pieces into manageable form, and so we undertook to prepare a
profile of recent social trends for our four societies, each following the same outline
and using the same criteria for data.
A RESEARCH PROGRAMME
Social change is, of course, too large a topic to be discussed without further
specification. We were specifically interested in the period from 1960 to 1990,
industrialized or partly industrialized nations, and the social structures and
institutional patterns that characterize the behaviour of mass societies, especially
1
Convergence or Divergence
those associated with the family, voluntary associations, work, leisure, education,
religion, government, and politics. Our unit of analysis was a trend - a series of
values representing the incidence of some item of social behaviour in a given
population at consecutive points in time. Most of our work was to be done with time
series, ending as recently as possible, and covering such matters as family income,
household expenditures, employment and unemployment, working conditions, the
informal economy, marriage and divorce, household composition, kin networks,
housing, migration, educational achievement, criminality, leisure patterns, health care,
social movements, and so forth. Each national profile would have the same table of
contents, based on a list of 78 trends and indicators.
In the scholarly literature, a few trends have received the lion's share of
attention: economists have looked very closely at trends in economic growth, prices,
and wages; political scientists have studied twentieth-century trends in voting and
party affiliation; demographers have scrutinized trends in fertility and mortality. It is
no coincidence that these areas of social life lend themselves most readily to
quantification and offer the longest time series. However, a description of social
change that limited itself to trends in economic development, voting, and population
would be incomplete indeed. Even though quantification is initially more problematic
in other institutional sectors, many of the difficulties have been overcome in recent
years, and the quality of data in those sectors has been steadily improving.
Our national profiles are insistently empirical. Most trends are based on
numerical data that can be verified with reasonable confidence, and no directionality
is asserted without calculation. When only quantitative data are available, they have
been used very cautiously. Where possible, we have located studies of the same
tendencies by other scholars and used them to challenge our own interpretations. At
all times, this predilection for reasonably hard facts creates the possibility that what
we find may surprise us. And, indeed, it often does.
Our preference for relatively hard data restricts most trend reports to recent
decades, since many interesting statistical series do not go back very far and others
lose reliability as they recede to earlier years. But with the progress of the work, it
became increasingly clear that a sharp focus on the period 1960-1990 was
appropriate as well as expedient. For reasons that vary somewhat from one national
society to another, an astonishing number of social trends showed a point of
inflection close to 1960, when the immediate effects of the Second World War had
receded, and another point of inflection close to 1990, when the Cold War ended.
Our group is divided into national teams that include historians, economists,
demographers, and sociologists. The participation of individual scholars in the
national teams, and of the national teams in the international group, is entirely
voluntary. Each national team is responsible for its own funding and internal
operations. The Quebec team has provided the project with an efficient secretariat,
2
Introduction
but there is no executive authority at all. Work is assigned and deadlines are set by
consensus at semi-annual work sessions. This loose arrangement has worked so well
that we are tempted to propose it as a model for other international projects of social
research. The original group was enlarged by the addition of research teams from
Spain and Greece, in 1989, a team from Russia, in 1991; and one from Italy in 1992.
Others are proposed.
The original programme of the Group was to prepare a comprehensive
description of recent social trends in each of our societies; to identify similarities and
differences among these societies with respect to ongoing social trends; to develop
an innovative model of social change to accommodate these findings; and to establish
benchmarks for future tracking of social trends.
The first of these assignments - the preparation of a national profile of social
trends - has been completed in fine style by the original teams. Four thick
volumes - Recent Social Trends in the United States, 1960-1990; Recent Social
Trends in Quebec, 1960-1990; Recent Social Trends in Germany, 1960-1990; and
Recent Social Trends in France, 1960-1990 - have preceded the present volume,
which is volume 5. The sixth volume in this series, published jointly by Campus
Verlag of Frankfurt-am-Main and McGill-Queen's University Press of Montreal,
Recent Social Trends in Spain, 1960-1990, will be in press soon. Volume 7, now in
preparation, will present cross-national analyses of inequality and stratification.
COMPARATIVE CHARTING OF SOCIAL TRENDS
The cross-national analyses in the present volume are based on the four national
profiles already published, except for the chapter on fertility, which includes some
information from Spain. They mark the Group's arrival at the second stage in its
research programme - the identification of similarities and differences among these
societies with respect to ongoing social trends. Herein, we cover only a few aspects
of this large assignment, with chapters on fertility decline, intergenerational relations,
religion and secularization, ecological movements, employment and labour-market
changes, the decline of personal authority, patterns of social conflict, and on two
wider questions: whether there is a single pattern of social evolution among these
four societies and whether there is a single pattern of causality among their respective
trends.
The topics of these papers were chosen by their authors and reflect the
priorities of individual scholars rather than a collective decision about which trends
ought to be examined first. Some of the important topics omitted here are to be
covered in volume 7 of this series, which is now in preparation. Although the choice
of topics was not systematic, the results of these analyses, taken together, are
coherent. The decline of fertility, the entry of women into the labour market, the
3
dimunition of class conflict, the weakening of personal authority, and the increasing
vulnerability of the environment turn out to be salient features of the advanced stage
of modernization at which these societies have arrived. The convergence is
unmistakeable, except in the domain of religion. But when we look at the
interconnections of these trends within each national society, we encounter
unexpected divergence.
The prolonged historical experience that we call modernization has been under
way for more than three hundred years, and no end is in sight. In its temporal
dimension, it involves the application of an increasingly competent technology, based
on a continuously expanding body of scientific knowledge, to a variety of human
purposes. In its spatial dimension, it involves the gradual diffusion of that technology,
and of the social forms associated with it, from the countries of western Europe,
where the technology originated, to the rest of the inhabited world.
The progress of science-based technology has been continuous, cumulative,
and irreversible since the mid-seventeenth century. In every single year since 1650,
for example, the accuracy of physical measurements, the efficiency of combustion
devices, and the maximum speed of vehicles has increased, and during that time no
significant advance in technology has been lost. The social consequences of
technological progress, however, are not so easily understood. Indeed, the social
changes induced by modernization - beginning with great increases in population and
production — were not clearly perceived until well into the nineteenth century,
presumably because of the paucity of demographic and economic enumerations. Even
so acute an observer as Alexis de Tocqueville did not visualize modernization as an
ongoing process. Not until mid-century, when railroads and steam-powered factories
were ubiquitous in western Europe and North America, did theories of modernization
begin to appear. Herbert Spencer ascribed the same inevitability to social progress
as to technological progress and assimilated both into the model of biological
evolution; Marx and Engels described modernization as a bourgeois achievement and
prophesied its apocalyptic ending. Tonnies described the transition from primitive to
modern as a transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Durkheim and Weber
developed more sophisticated models of that transition: one using the division of
labour as the motive force, the other highlighting the rational-legal mode of
domination. None of these authors paid much attention to the role of technology in
modernization, and, perhaps for that reason, most of their prophecies came to nought.
More recently, Pareto and Sorokin, in their cyclical theories, refused to see anything
unique about modern technology, while the world-system theorists viewed economic
exploitation as the engine of modernization. The most creative students of the
relationship between technology and social change - Jean Fourastie, W.F. Cottrell,
William McNeill, Jean Jacobs - have worked outside the mainstream of social
science.
4
Introduction
An understanding of this relationship is essential if we want to interpret social

change in modern societies. The social trends in our national profiles seem to fall
into three broad categories: those that are functions of technological progress; those
that are influenced but not determined by technological progress; and those that have
little or nothing to do with technological progress.
Most of the trends in the first category reflect the proliferation and
improvement of goods and services and the consequent amelioration of living
conditions and life choices - for example, life expectancy, nutritional status,
educational achievement, agricultural yield per acre, proportion of the population
living in urban areas, worker productivity, income per capita, telephones per capita,
appliances per household, physicians per capita, book production, media audiences,
leisure activities, energy efficiency, water supply, and passenger-miles are all higher,
while infant mortality, contagious disease, illiteracy, hunger, work hours, and
industrial accidents have declined. These indicators - and many others - are so
closely connected that any one of them can be used to measure the level of
modernization attained by a national society. When national societies are arrayed on
these indicators, the rank-order correlations among the arrays average more than .90.
Most of the phenomena in this category are visible and unambiguous, and their trends
can be extrapolated with fair confidence for the short and medium terms.
The trends in the second category are much less predictable and much more
difficult to interpret. The decline of fertility in our four societies was clearly
influenced by the invention, around 1960, of reliable oral contraceptives, but it is
impossible to measure the weight of this technological influence within a compound
of nontechnological influences that are themselves intricately related, including the
movement of married women into the labour force, changes in gender roles and
expectations, a greater acceptance of consensual unions, a tendency toward later
marriage, the legitimation of abortion and sterilization, and the rising costs of child-
raising. One of the most important nontechnological factors is the variation between
successive cohorts of young adults in the propensity to have children, for which
demographers have no explanatory model at all. Another trend that fits neatly into
this category is the institutionalization of ecological movements, attributable in part
to the steadily rising pressure that an advancing technology puts on the natural
environment, but also to a large cluster of nontechnological factors, including the
enhanced legitimacy of democratic polities and the consequent weakening of
extremist parties on both the left and the right, the rising educational level of the
population, the expanding influence of investigative journalism, the rapid growth of
outdoor leisure activities, the development of more effective fund-raising techniques,
and the successful popularization of theories about global warming, ozone depletion,
resource exhaustion, and the like.
5
Most of the trends discussed in this volume fall squarely into the third
category - that is, they are only remotely connected with technological progress, or
not visibly connected at all. This is true of trends in kinship relations, in social
stratification, in class and ethnic conflict, in personal authority, and in religion and
secularization. This last example is notable because the imminent suppression of
religious belief and practice by technological progress has been repeatedly announced
but has yet to occur. Except for such marginal phenomena as the diffusion of
religious messages through the electronic media, it is difficult to find any causal
connection at all between technological progress and the diverse religious trends
exhibited by our four societies.
The major trends in the first category are not trivial - they provide the
material elements in advanced industrial societies - but by themselves they explain
very little about the socially constructed symbols and images that give meaning to
human actions in a society. The large institutional complexes that we call family,
education, work, religion, leisure, politics, and government embody symbols and
images that are constantly changing but never completely disconnected from the past.
In the realm of socially constructed reality, the future, even in the short term, cannot
be more than partly predictable. However, since new collective representations are
constructed out of old ones, the future is never completely open either. The task of
social theory in the study of social change lies within these uncertain but very real
limits. Comparing trends in related social systems, particularly trends in the second
and third categories, helps us to fix the limits of predictability by separating the
changes and continuities intrinsic to a set of social systems from those that are
peculiar to a particular case.
Since the end of the Second World War, our four societies have experienced
the same history, but their initial situations were very different. The two European
societies emerged from that conflict half destroyed. The two American societies, in
contrast, clearly benefited from the war, which accelerated the economic development
of the United States and liberated Quebec from British control.
Economic growth, restarted by the Marshall Plan and reaching 4% or 5% a
year, allowed France and Germany to close the gap with the United States. Industrial
Germany had been more badly damaged than had France, but the latter had also to
overcome a prior industrial lag, which it accomplished in part by an agricultural
revolution that displaced the peasantry in favour of a modern and competitive
organization of agriculture. Everywhere, the magnitude of the baby boom came as
a surprise, although it was least marked in traditionally prolific Quebec and most
spectacular in France, which emerged from a long period of demographic lethargy.
These differences still make themselves felt today in differently shaped population
pyramids.
6
Introduction
In 1965, this demographic and economic momentum was interrupted. For the
first time since 1945, the number of births declined, while stagflation signalled a
major change in the productive system. The first signs of deindustrialization
appeared; service activities and information technology began to expand very rapidly.
The year 1968 was marked by popular demonstrations in all of these societies,
initiated by the young; the first baby-boomers were growing up. In France, a
movement started by students was taken up by industrial workers and even, to some
extent, by peasants and office workers. The truly popular May revolution shook the
establishment. A new spirit emerged, with the slogan "small is beautiful."
The demographic and economic trends of the time assumed somewhat
different shapes in our four societies, but they all moved in the same direction: there
were fewer marriages, more divorces, more births out of wedlock, more female
employment, and more unemployment, while students stayed in school longer,
entailing a rapid growth of the educational system, especially at the higher levels, and
a corresponding rise in the cultural level of the general population. At the beginning
of the 1970s, educational growth slackened in Europe and virtually ceased in the
United States. Similarly, per-capita income stopped rising in the United States around
1972, while it continued to improve in Germany and France.
This history explains why, after some hesitation, the German, American and
Quebec teams in the CCSC project decided to adopt the classification of trends that
had been devised by the French team. It seemed to them that, with some adjustment
and amendment, the trends discovered in France would be found in their own
societies; the details might differ, but there would be no major changes of direction.
This agreement by a score of social scientists, each an expert on his or her own
society, was reached after long discussion and deliberation; it made our co-operative
enterprise possible. That the major trends were parallel in our four societies permitted
comparison and facilitated the identification of differences. Had the trends in each
society been unrelated to the others, cross-national comparison would have been far
less informative. It is because our societies belong to the same set that they can
usefully be compared.
These concurrence might be taken as evidence of convergent social evolution
on both sides of the Atlantic - but not so fast. Trends in the same direction may lead
to very divergent consequences. Since 1965, fertility has been declining throughout
Europe. For the past decade, the population replacement rate has been around 1.8 for
France, around 1.3 in Germany and around 1 in Liguria and northern Spain (a rate
of about 2.2 is equivalent in the long run to zero growth.) It is about the same in the
United States as in France and about the same in Quebec as in Spain. The population
pyramids also differ, because of differences in the amplitude of the baby boom, so
that parallel trends lead to very different consequences. In France and the United
States, the population continues to grow, while in the old German provinces, the
7
native-born population is actually declining, and decline is imminent in Quebec. The

two-child family is still the norm in France, while in northern Spain and in Quebec
the one-child family has become the norm. Thus, trend that is common to the
societies may create more diversity in the future than existed in the past. This
methodological caution needs to be sounded at the outset, lest the reader be deceived
by appearances in the analyses that follow.
CONVERGENCE AND SINGULARITIES
In their following essay, Lemel and Modell make the same point. Most trends are
very similar for the four societies, and when there is a divergence, it usually concerns
only one of the four. A few trends divide the set two by two. The prevailing
parallelism is not confined to any one sector; there are parallel trends in demography,
organization of production, national institutions, social practices, and life styles. The
divergences are concentrated in three sectors: social inequality, social movements,
and local institutions. In analyzing divergences, the authors conclude that Germany
differs the most from the others, and particularly from the United States. Quebec and
France seem to resemble each other in the speed and scope of their transformations.
The United States has evolved more slowly than the three other countries, doubtless
because it was initially ahead with respect to most indicators of modernization.
The national teams agree that in all four societies, the barriers between social
classes have eroded to the point that it is possible to posit that the present
hierarchical structure is of a totally different nature than that in place in 1945.
Paradoxically, the United States, which began its social evolution earlier and had a
very large middle class by the 1920s, now has a class structure closer to that of the
nineteenth century, whereas in France, Germany, and Quebec there has emerged
something that might be called multidimensional stratification - multiple social
groups in a constantly changing configuration.
This transformation of the social structure implies a profound modification of
social conflicts. As Simmel stated long ago, conflicts are a means of reinforcing
social cohesion and the mechanisms of collective decision. It is through conflict that
groups define their interests and identities. The mechanisms of conflict regulation
assure the reduction of tensions by asserting a fundamental consensus about the major
problem of social management. Two trends in our national profiles (trends 7.1 and
6.2) bear directly on this point, and starting from that point, Hondrich and Caplow
sketch out an account of trends in conflict that begins with a striking hypothesis:
"Societies that succeed in modernizing need a large aggregate amount of conflict, but
because violent conflict is too costly for them they are automatically directed to
nonviolent modes of conflict resolution." Put another way, recourse to physical
violence has declined in advanced industrial societies; only undeveloped societies can
8
Introduction
now permit themselves the luxury of civil war. The recent changes of regime in
Eastern Europe support this observation. Note, for example, the contrast between the
"velvet revolution" in Czechoslovakia, which resulted in a peaceful divorce between
two nations, and the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia, involving federations that
were geographically close but far apart in level of modernization.
Labour-management conflicts (trend 7.2) offer other obvious illustrations of
the trend toward peaceful resolution of conflicts. They have considerably diminished
in all of our societies, no matter what indicator is used, and the few prolonged
conflicts that still occur rarely involve any violence. Germany was the first to
develop comprehensive arrangements for resolving industrial conflicts by negotiation;
France has since followed the German example. Strikes have almost disappeared
from the industrial scene in the United States and have declined by far in Quebec.
In recent years, mass demonstrations have been most often organized by the
Greens, who brandish their doctrine of nonviolence with aggressive energy. In
France, the mass student demonstrations of the 1980s involved some attacks on
persons and property, but most of those incidents were attributable to marginal actors.
In general, violence tends to be limited to marginalized groups: race riots in the
United States, xenophobic riots in Germany, youth riots in French suburbs, ethnic
riots in Corsica. France has, so to speak, legitimized the riot as a means of
confronting abuses of power; although riots remain an institution in French society,
they have become essentially nonviolent in recent years. As for the Germans, from
1945 until the revolution of 1989 in East Germany, not a single large-scale
demonstration seems to have occurred. The disquieting resurgence of Nazi-style
incidents in Germany in the past two years may or may not signify a reversal.
The dimunition of violence in social conflicts implies an increasing volume
of negotiation and arbitration (trend 10.1), which we have in fact found in all four
societies. Nevertheless, there is one clear difference between the United States and
the two European countries: arbitration usually occurs at the initiative of government
in Europe, while in America discussion and negotiation among voluntary associations
is a more common mode of conflict resolution. As Tocqueville once remarked, in
France everything derives from the state, in England from a person of high rank, and
in the United States from an association. This contrast, however, is weakening. The
United States federal government has increasingly assumed the role of arbiter, while
in France the state now prefers to create local associations in order to distance itself
from that role.
In all of our societies, the political system remains the primary mode of
conflict resolution, on both the local and the national levels. In their chapter in this
volume, Hondrich and Caplow maintain that "today major political conflicts are no
longer defined by the antagonism of social classes but by concurrent interests." They
identify a series of emergent conflicts, including:
9
. A conflict between the productive system and the welfare state. If a large number
of citizens can no longer be employed in a productive manner, how can their
existence and dignity be maintained? The question arises in the political order and
separates liberals from social democrats, the former emphasizing free enterprise
and individual effort, the latter equality and civil rights.
. A conflict between industrial and cultural values. There is a great unresolved
question regarding whether the primary goal of education is to train productive
workers or cultivated and patriotic citizens. The lengthening of the period of
schooling (trend 15.1) and of the gradual entry into adult life (trend 1.1) have
stimulated the emergence of a youth culture that may eventually settle this
question.
. A conflict between economic and ecological values. This conflict has been treated
quite differently in our four societies, as Frechet and Worndl show in their chapter.
The United States was the first to become aware of this conflict, partly due to the
initiative of traditional conservation groups and partly in response to anti-industrial
preaching. In Germany, the ecological movement took political form very early
and was legitimated by the election of Greens to provincial parliaments. In France,
the ecological leaders are veterans of the 1968 movement. Only very recently have
they been able to organize on a national scale, but they have exercised
considerable influence within political parties and administrative agencies.
These new sources of conflict no longer pit social classes against each other,
but instead mobilize carriers of opinions and values. They can lead to passionate
confrontations, but the developing spirit of tolerance seems to check any inclination
to violence.
The relative decline of violence in social conflicts is indirectly related to the
dimunition of personal authority (trend 7.4) analyzed by Caplow. All forms of
personal authority weakened concurrently in all four societies between 1960 and
1990, beginning with the authority of men over women and family headship.
Children are no longer taught to obey an unassailable parental authority; instead, they
are taught to engage in negotiations in which they are generally weaker but never
completely without resources and are sometimes able to reverse the balance of power
in their own favour. The authority of patriarchs over their descendants has completely
disappeared; grandparents are typically in the position of soliciting affective
gratification from their grandchildren. The authority of teachers and professors over
their students suffered a decisive blow in 1968. Priests and ministers are no longer
able to regulate the behaviour of communicants, who insist on a right to religious and
moral self- determination. Likewise, the authority of politicians, labour leaders, and
notables in general is no longer founded on anything but the consent of their
followers. Even in organizations that emphasize command and discipline, the consent
10
Introduction
of subordinates is now considered essential. The French, American, and German

armies clearly illustrate this transformation.
The weakening of personal authority is plainly related to the erosion of the
social hierarchy, occasioned in the first instance by changes in the composition of the
labour force: the decline of the agricultural sector, the shift from blue-collar to white-
collar employment, the entry of married women into the labour force, and the virtual
disappearance of domestic servants, along with an increase in consensual unions, an
expansion of higher education, the levelling culture of the mass media, the leisure
explosion, the increased volume of consumer goods, and the resulting availability of
diverse life styles. The close connections that once existed between the occupation
of a male who was household head and sole breadwinner, the income of that
household, the class status of its members, and the customs, costumes, and routines
associated with that status have all broken down or been greatly weakened.
The decline of personal authority has interesting and somewhat enigmatic
implications. On the one hand, it augments individual freedom. On the other hand,
it requires a great expansion of bureaucracy. The locus of social control is shifted
upward, so to speak, from the family, the neighbourhood, the parish and the work
group to large-scale agencies, public and private, that are now responsible for the
regulation of social interaction. Whether the quality of life in these societies has been
enhanced or damaged by this momentous change remains a challenging question.
The movement toward secularization that the West has experienced since the
beginning of this century has accelerated in three of our societies over the past
30 years. In West Germany, France, and Quebec, religious practice (trend 11.5) has
been declining rapidly and religious institutions (trend 9.2) have lost much of their
influence. This movement can be interpreted in Durkheimian terms as an advance in
the division of labour. As social activities become more diverse and specialized,
functions that traditionally belonged to religion have separated and acquired
autonomy. The best example may be care for the sick: hospitals have slowly become
laicized as techniques of hospital care have expanded and the number of nursing nuns
has declined.
Theologians of different beliefs and sociologists specializing in religion agree
that there are several dimensions to secularization, as Chadwick, Gauthier, Hourmant,
and Worndl point out in their chapter. First, autonomy with respect to religion has
gradually been acquired by government, education, welfare, and family agencies.
Second, the churches themselves increasingly attend to problems of ordinary life, as
concern with salvation and the Kingdom of Heaven has given way to the struggle for
social justice. Third, individuals look outside religion for satisfaction of their
emotional needs and for the basis of their moral principles. In applying these
perspectives to our societies, however, we must take account of sharp differences in
background and context.
11
In 1905, the French Republic rejected the Concordat and proclaimed the
separation of church and state. Juridically, the situation became the same as that of
the United States, although a French statesman would never swear on the Bible or
invoke the aid of God, as the president of the United States must do. The religious
component of American civic culture goes beyond these customary forms. The last
five American presidents (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton) have all declared
themselves to be active Christians. What could be more exotic for a Frenchman? In
nominally secularized Germany, a supplement on the income tax paid by citizens is
allocated for support of the churches, which makes the churches rich and powerful
and supports a vast network of religious schools, hospitals, and social services.
Ministers of all denominations (except Muslims) are paid by the state.
The number of religious vocations, attendance at church services, and the
incidence of private devotions have declined in three of our societies since 1960, but
at very uneven rates. Of the two Catholic societies, France was the first to record a
sharp decline in religious practice; Sunday church attendance has fallen to less than
10%. In Quebec, where nearly everyone was a practising Catholic in 1960 and nearly
everyone is still a nominal Catholic today, there was a sharp decline in church
attendance during the 1980s. In Germany, the decline of religious practice has been
similar among Catholics and among Lutherans.
In contrast, the United States has seen an authentic revival of religious
practice, which stands at a much higher level now than at the beginning of the
century. Fundamentalists are strong in every denomination. Attendance at Catholic
church declined somewhat after the Vatican II Council, then stabilized at a level that
was still very high. Among Protestants in the United States, church attendance
remained at the same level between 1960 and 1990, and the financial contributions
of the faithful nearly tripled in constant dollars. While religious vocations declined
dramatically in Europe and Quebec and in the American Catholic church, the number
of Protestant ministers in the U.S. grew considerably in relation to the population of
believers from 1950 to 1987. One could gather all sorts of supplementary data about
beliefs and other indicators of religious influence, but the conclusion would be
always the same: there is a sharp contrast between the United States and the three
other societies, and there are important differences between Catholics and Protestants.
The school is without question the public institution most clearly affected by
the church in these four societies, but in very different ways. Religious schools are
numerous in the United States and Germany, and their management poses no political
problem at all, since they are independent of the government in the United States and
financed by a religious tax in Germany. In France, however, religious schools have
been the object of major political conflict for a century. One might even say that the
political life of France had been dominated by this problem, which concretized the
conflict between the church and the secular republic, and which was replicated in
12
Introduction
every village in the relationship between the schoolmaster and the priest. This
conflict is now diminished and perhaps even settled. The enormous - and successful
- demonstrations organized in 1984 to defend "free" religious schools against a
socialist law showed that the church has retained a surprising ability to mobilize
public opinion.
As late as 1960, the French church presented itself as a national institution
whose authority was exerted over all citizens, except for a million or so Protestants
and a smaller number of Jews. Yet at no time after 1793 did more than a quarter of
the French population attend Sunday mass. Since 1960, the church has changed its
pastoral doctrine. It now represents itself as being at the service of believers and not
as being responsible for the entire French people. At best, it is therefore a
denomination of a quarter of the French population. Meanwhile, four other
denominations have acquired equal legitimacy. Protestantism is no longer marginal
with respect to Catholicism. Islam is the second-largest denomination in numbers,
although the Muslims are as weak in religious observance as are the Catholics. The
Jews have doubled in number because of immigration - principally from North
Africa - and their religion has acquired total legitimacy, partly because of the
Holocaust and partly because of the existence of a Jewish state. Finally, unbelievers,
who were too few to be counted in 1960, now amount to about 15% of the
population, according to surveys. France has therefore become, like the United States,
a multidenominational society.
The secularization of beliefs, practices, and institutions does not entail, as one
might expect, the complete detachment of religiously inactive persons from their
religious obedience. Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, and Jews who do not practise
their respective religions do not, however, reject their cultural heritages; rather, they
exalt them. Family religious tradition is still a major component of personal identity.
The free-school demonstrators of June, 1984, in France were not, for the most part,
religiously active, but they wanted their children to be able to attend schools in the
Catholic tradition. The children of German atheists and of assimilated American Jews
are routinely sent to religious schools.
The transformation of family structure that occurred over the past 30 years is
no doubt the most important and consequential change in Western civilization during
this period. The chapters by Caldwell, Stiehr, Modell, and Del Campo and by Bahr,
Dechaux, and Stiehr approach this major transition from two different directions -
the former examining trends in fertility and the latter looking at relations between
parents and adult children. The comparisons among our four societies are fascinating.
In their analysis of the factors responsible for the decline of fertility (trend
3.2) in France, Germany, the United States, Quebec, and Spain, Caldwell and his
colleagues note, as we did above, that these declines have resulted in quite different
situations. In France and the United States, with the replacement rate around 1.8 and
13
an age pyramid comprising numerous young adults, the average family has two
children and the population is still growing slowly. In Germany and Quebec, where
the replacement rate has fallen to 1.4 (even lower in South Germany) the one-child
family has become the norm, and both populations would be shrinking were it not
for immigration. In Spain, this trend began much later, but the decline has been so
rapid that it has now passed the others. The replacement rate is around 1.0 in
northern Spain, unprecedentedly low for any European population.
Four of our seventy-eight trends seem to be directly tied to the decline of
fertility: the falling marriage rate (trend 3.3), the increasing employment of women
(trend 3.1), the increased availability of abortion and sterilization (trend 3.5), and the
lengthening of the educational career (trend 15.1). The indicators that reveal the
recent revolution within the institution of marriage are the marriage rate, the divorce
rate, the illegitimacy ratio, and the average age at first marriage. These four trends
have been moving in the same direction.
Married women have a much higher fertility rate than do single women or
widows, despite the incredibly rapid increase of births out of wedlock (30% in France
and 43% of first births; 40% in Quebec; 70% of African-American births in the
United States). In France, the fertility rate of unmarried women is about one fourth
that of married women.
Female employment has evolved in the opposite direction, whatever the
average level of female employment may be in the particular case. The link between
this trend and the fertility trend is self-evident, but the precise mechanism continues
to be debated. French and American women who work full-time continue to have two
children on average, while women in Germany, Quebec, and Spain who work full-
time (they are relatively less numerous) have only one. The principal difference
between the old habits and the new is that women no longer quit their jobs in order
to give birth, and consequently their return to the labour force after their children are
grown is no longer the major transition it used to be.
The lengthening of the educational career by earlier entry into the schools and
the consequent proliferation of day-care centres and pre-schools seems to be a
necessary condition for mothers to keep their jobs. Here too, however, international
comparisons raise more questions than they answer. In France, mothers work full-
time and their children are in school from the age of three, but in the United States,
where an even higher proportion of mothers work, many children do not start school
until they are five or six. It is true that part-time work for women is more common
in the U.S, but this does not entirely explain the difference.
All of these changes were accompanied by an extraordinarily rapid
modification of norms in the societies studied (trend 17.4). The revolution in family
mores and institutions between 1960 and 1990 was accompanied by a profound shift
of values. In the 1960s, the great majority of people believed that a woman ought not
14
Introduction
to work outside the home unless she was compelled by financial necessity, and only
a small minority would allow married women a free choice between housekeeping
and employment. Today, the survey results on this subject are reversed. Moreover,
'almost everyone now agrees in principle that husband and wife ought to divide
household tasks, although empirical studies show that in most households, men help
only a little more than they used to.
The family policies of our four societies have been quite diverse. Since the
1930s, France has had a complicated and generous policy aimed at increasing the
birth rate policy which should be held at least partly responsible for holding the rate
close to the replacement level. Germany, which refuses to have a pronatalist family
policy because it might be too reminiscent of Nazi eugenics, has a much lower
replacement rate. But the birth rate in the United States, which has no family policy
at all, is nearly as high as that in France. The Quebec government is recently
instituted birth-rate-promotion programme may have interrupted the rapid decline of
fertility there. Once again, we see how international comparisons force us to question
many of the common-sense explanations that have been advanced to explain the baby
boom and the decline in fertility that followed it. Why do couples decide to have
children, not to have children, or to limit themselves to a single child? This remains
a mystery to the social sciences.
The decline in fertility tends to reduce the size of the family network (trend
2.2); on the other hand, the increasing length of life (trend 1.2), by adding another
generation to each lineage, keeps collateral relatives together for a longer time, since
it is well known that lineages tend to separate when their common ancestor
disappears. Although the children of today have fewer brothers and sisters than those
of past generations, they maintain more relationships with uncles, aunts, and cousins.
The decline in fertility and the increase in divorce, consensual unions, and
births out of wedlock, as well as the growing number of single-person households
and single-parent families, are the familiar signs of a transformation of the conjugal
unit (trend 3.3) that has occurred in all of our societies. The phenomenon has been
abundantly described. In contrast, the reinforcement of the family network, which
compensates in a measure for the growing fragility of the conjugal unit, has been
much less studied. Bahr, Dechaux, and Stiehr present a number of interesting
findings.
The first is that despite all the social and economic changes that have
occurred in the past 30 years, the average distance between the residences of parents
and those of their adult children, married or not, has remained virtually unchanged
and differs very little from one country to another. Similarly, the support and services
that these generations provide for each other have not changed much in France or in
the United States, the two countries for which we have information on this point. The
results of local studies in all four societies tend to lead to the same conclusions. For
15
example, to the question "If you had more time and more money, what would you
do with it?," 45% of Germans responded, "I would spend it with my family," in
1953, and 46% did so in 1979; to the question "What would you regret the most if
you had to move far from here?," 38% responded, "Leaving my parents, who live
close by" in 1953, and 45% gave the same response in 1979.
Women play the central role in the interaction of parents and their adult
children. The mother-daughter relationship is the strong axis in this system, while
father-child relationships seem to be waning. The mother helps and advises her
daughter on family matters, and the daughter takes care of her aged mother by
providing moral support, material services, and bodily or medical care. There is no
similar relationship between fathers and their sons or daughters or between sons and
their elderly parents. The phenomenon is explained only in part by the greater
longevity of women. The employment of women encourages them to call upon
grandmothers for child care at all ages. One out of every two French children whose
mothers are employed spends his or her vacation with grandparents. When the mother
is a housewife, the ratio is only one in five. The direct relationship between
grandparents and grandchildren plays an essential role in the transmission of values,
because collective family memory is so important for the construction of personal
identity. We do not have many studies on this subject, but there is no reason to
suppose that the kinship system is weakening in any of these societies.
The entire gamut of social change can be found in the labour market (trend
4.1). It too displays the same tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic, in obedience
to the same factors, although Noll and Langlois distinguish two models of labour-
market growth, one American and the other European. On the other hand, even
societies whose economies are as closely linked as those of Germany and France or
Quebec and the United States exhibit somewhat different patterns. The basic
constituents of a national labour market are the population of working age and the
number of jobs offered to that population by the economic system. From 1966 to
1969, the population of working age grew by 38% in the United States, by around
35% in Quebec, and by 21% in France. In Germany, it grew by only 13%.
Everywhere, the demand for jobs increased because large numbers of women entered
the labour market and this was partly offset by the tendency of men to go to work
at a later age and to retire earlier. The net effect was that in all four societies the
curve of male employment declined while the curve of female employment rose. If
their present trajectories continue, the curves will eventually meet and employment
will be equally divided between men and women. This movement is most
accentuated in France, where the proportion of women who are employed has risen
most rapidly and the corresponding proportion of men has declined most rapidly.
Migratory movements and the shape of the age pyramid have had different
effects in each country. Immigration has been particularly strong in the two American
16
Introduction
societies. In Europe, there is a strong contrast between France, where the cohorts of
young people entering the labour market continue to be large, and Germany, where
they are smaller from one year to the next. The deficiency has been made up in
Germany by a large stream of immigration, which has vastly increased since 1989.
A new contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic is that Americans now work
more hours each year and more years in their lifetimes than do Europeans.
In the two European countries, the increase of available jobs has been weak:
4% in Germany and 9% in France between 1966 and 1989. In America the number
of jobs created has grown more quickly than has the working-age population.
Unemployment has increased everywhere, though with strong oscillations in the
United States. It has grown steadily since 1980 in Quebec, and has been constantly
high in France. In all of these societies, unemployment today is structural rather than
frictional, a serious social problem rather than a temporary maladjustment.
The cross-national differences are particularly marked for young people. In
the U.S., they are characteristically employed while they pursue their studies. In
Germany, they are considered employed during apprenticeship. In France, they
continue their studies somewhat later and are not usually employed at the same time.
There are equally striking cross-national differences with respect to long-term
unemployment, which is practically nonexistent in the United States (about 6% of
total unemployment), weak in Quebec (11%), but strong in Europe: 31% in Germany
and 44% in France. The rates of movement in and out of the labour market are much
higher in North America than in Europe. Demographic and cultural factors are partly
responsible for this, but it is attributable principally to differential rates of
deindustrialization. In none of these countries did the volume of secondary
(industrial) production actually decline between 1960 and 1990, but while that sector
remained stable, the tertiary sector (services and information processing) expanded
explosively (trend 4.4), with the result that manufacturing now employs only about
20% of the labour force in France, the United States, and Quebec. The proportion
seems to be higher in Germany, but the difference is a statistical artifact. Since
subcontracting is less prevalent in Germany than in the other societies, tertiary
activities remain within large enterprises and are counted as industrial. In any case,
the growth of the tertiary sector has been slower in Europe than in America. The
threshold of 50% of all employment in the tertiary sector was reached in the 1950s
in the United States, in the 1960s in Canada, in 1975 in France, and not until 1982
in Germany. Europeans now work less and are more productive than Americans. The
multiplication of substandard jobs in America and the persistence of endemic
unemployment in Europe generate different social problems and elicit different
welfare policies.
Thus we begin to see the vague outline of a global picture of social change
in our four societies. To sharpen the focus, Forse and Langlois undertook a
17
systematic comparison of matrices of social change for France and for Quebec. This
remarkably innovative analysis involves measuring the density of causal relations
among 78 trends recorded for Quebec and 60 trends recorded for France and
grouping them into clusters of closely related trends that can be identified as
"macrotrends." Using this method, they obtained 14 macrotrends for Quebec and 12
for France. Then they studied the causal relations among the macrotrends in each
matrix and constructed a graphical summary of social causality for each country. The
exercise led to findings that were both unexpected and enlightening. On the one hand,
it is clear that the trends are substantially the same in the two societies, with slight
differences in intensity and velocity. Indeed, it is only because of this resemblance
that it is possible to undertake a comparative study such as this one. If there were too
many major differences, comparison would be impossible.
On the other hand, the analysis shows that trends formulated in analogous
terms are interrelated in quite different ways in France and in Quebec. Their
antecedents and consequences are not the same. Trends that have neither the same
causes nor the same effects cannot really be considered identical, because they have
different functions within the social structure. This is the case, for example, with the
trends in union organization and in consensus. In both France and Quebec, unions
have been increasingly institutionalized, but in France this is the result of a change
in administrative regulations, while in Quebec it is a consequence of a decrease in
industrial conflict. In both societies, there has been an abatement of the major
ideological conflicts that formerly divided the entire population and helped to define
the national identity. In Quebec, this macrotrend derives from trends associated with
work, while in France it derives from trends in the domain of politics. At first glance
the two trends are the same, but the matrix analysis shows that the mechanisms and
social sectors affected are different. Convergence is somehow transformed into
divergence.
Each matrix can be represented by a graph of macrotrends that clearly
identifies those that are primarily causal, those that are primarily caused, and those
that fall in between. Even though the trends are the same, the two models are very
different. The major conclusions that seem to emerge from this analysis are that
operating within different structures the same trends can perform quite different
functions; and that every society develops according to its own dynamics.
The hierarchization of trends in these two societies, as derived by this
empirical analysis, does not in either case correspond to any of the major theories
that have been advanced to account for capitalist development. In France, the political
order and changes in relations of production turn out to be in an intermediate
position, while the institutions of the social sector (welfare, health care, education,
and the associated administrative regulations) occupy the causal position. In Quebec,
it is government policy and changes in micro-social relations that are primary causes.
18
Introduction
In both models, social consensus appears as a very strong exogeneous element, but
with different relations to other trends in each case. The authors of this chapter
conclude,
Classic comparative analysts of social change discover, with some embarrassment,
a mixture of convergence and divergence in the processes that they study. We see
here the reason for this embarrassment. Any major divergence among industrial
societies is rare and any absolute convergence among them is still more rare. More
commonly, the differences conceal resemblances or what comes to the same thing
- a similarity of divergence. That is what we call singularity. It is not possible to
understand the phenomenon unless we relocate in a systematic way each of the
elements that make up an infrastructure and identify the differences inherent in their
similarities. One purpose of comparative structural analysis is precisely to permit the
description of this type of singularity.
A COMMON DESTINY?
The concept of singularity helps us to visualize more clearly the subtle balance
between convergence and divergence. It also provides a tentative answer to the large
question that underlies our concern with this balance: Do these societies face a
common destiny? The answer is yes with respect to trends so strong that they act as
exogenous variables, and no with respect to the responses those trends elicit in the
context of a particular society. Consider, for example, two of the strongest trends
discussed in this volume: the decline of fertility and the increasing proportion of
births out of wedlock.
As we saw earlier, fertility declined dramatically in all four of our societies
between 1960 and 1990. The same set of causal factors can be identified in each
setting: improved contraceptive procedures; the entry of married women into the
labour force; the equalization of gender roles; the legitimation of consensual unions;
the shift from blue-collar to white-collar work, which facilitated the employment of
women; the emergence of a feminist movement, which encouraged the employment
of women; the development of an ideology of gender equality that, when enacted into
law, facilitated the equalization of gender roles in the workplace and undermined
traditional gender roles in the family; the postponement of marriage, facilitated by
the legitimation of consensual unions; the increase of divorce and illegitimacy,
facilitated by the increased employment of women; and the increased incidence of
abortion and sterilization, stimulated by all of the foregoing. There is no way that we
can unbundle these factors and assign a relative weight to each one. Nor can we
assess the relative influence of mutually reinforcing factors and prove, for instance,
that the development of feminist ideologies was more responsible for the increased
employment of women than vice versa. We know that each of these factors was
present and, indeed, highly visible in all four of our societies, but there is abundant
19
evidence that their interactions were not identical from one society to another. There
is much more singularity in the pattern of causation than in the list of causal factors.
Singularity becomes even more evident when we examine the direct
consequences of fertility decline. In France and the United States, present fertility
rates are close enough to the replacement level that, together with the bulges in the
population pyramid created by the baby boom and moderate immigration, they
predict a stable or slightly growing population for the immediately foreseeable future
and a fairly stable ratio between the population of working age and their dependents
at both ends of the age scale. Germany and Quebec, with lower fertility rates and less
favourable age distributions, are faced with an imminent shrinkage of their native
populations and the prospect of an uncomfortable surplus of dependents. Making up
the demographic deficit by immigration would not be an easy solution in either case,
given the ethnic basis of their national identities. Population problems loom much
larger for Germany and Quebec than for France or the United States, and the
responses of these societies can be counted on to accentuate singularity.
Another example is the related trend of a rising proportion of births out of
wedlock. Here too, the trends in the four societies are parallel, but numerical
differences, combined with differences in context, lead to non-parallel consequences.
Among Germans and among white Americans, this proportion, although it sharply
increased in the past decade, remains under 10%, and many births out of wedlock are
followed by the marriage of the parents. The traditional pattern of the conjugal
family, with all of its cultural baggage, is still essentially intact. In France and
Quebec, where more than a third of the women who give birth are unmarried, and
among black Americans, where the ratio is twice as high as that, single-parent
families and consensual unions seem to be displacing the traditional family pattern,
thereby transforming the fabric of everyday life.
In sum, the massive convergence of trends that we observe in these four
societies does not imply that they face uniform futures. However, their differences
are inextricably linked to what they have in common, and, as the following pages
demonstrate, the cross-national analysis of recent social trends helps us to assess both
convergence and divergence and to identify emergent singularities.
20
References
Caplow, Theodore, Howard M. Bahr, John Modell, and Bruce A. Chadwick

1991 Recent Social Trends in the United States, 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt:
McGi 11 -Queen's University Press/Campus Verlag.
Forse, Michel, Jean-Pierre Jaslin, Yannick Lemel, Henri Mendras, Denis Stoclet, and
Jean-Hugues Dechaux
1992 Recent Social Trends in France, 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt: McGill-Queen's
University Press/Campus Verlag.
Glatzer, Wolfgang, Karl Otto Hondrich, Heinz Herbert Noll, Karin Stiehr, and Barbara Worndl
1992 Recent Social Trends in West Germany, 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt:
McGill-Queen's University Press/Campus Verlag.
Langlois, Simon, Jean-Paul Baillargeon, Gary Caldwell, Guy Frechet, Madeleine Gauthier, and
Jean-Pierre Simard
1992 Recent Social Trends in Quebec, 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt: McGill-Queen's
21
2
Is There a Single Pattern
of Social Evolution ?
Yannick LEMEL
John MODELL
Even a casual examination of the four national volumes so far prepared by members
of the Group for the Comparative Charting of Social Change suggests that between
1960 and 1990 there has been much in common in the patterns of social change in
France, West Germany, Quebec, and the United States. This is what one would have
expected at the outset. But - in part because the trends are treated in essays rather
than mere assemblages of data, and these do not follow exactly the same form from
society to society, nor draw upon identical data - a first glance does not reveal much
about the extent or structure of differences in social change in the four societies. We
propose in this essay to evaluate more precisely the over-all similarity in evolution
of the four societies, and to discern the degree of difference that this similarity
conceals. We will then attempt to identify any patterns that are visible within these
differences, both in the ways in which the societies' social change has differed, and
in the focus, from society to society, in such difference. Such an analysis inevitably
leads to questions both about the evolution of the four societies and about how this
evolution has been described.
23
SYSTEMATIC AND CONTEXTUAL COMPARISON
In contrast to the other comparative essays in this volume, ours is concerned with the
totality of social change and with societies as entities, rather than with any particular
domain of social change. Our focus is upon the whole; subsystems are considered
here only insofar as they can be understood as components of or deviations from the
general course of social evolution. Our global approach will be evident in the way
we treat national "context." In most of the comparative investigations reported in this
volume, much of the concern is with understanding cultural distinctiveness,
institutional idiosyncrasies, differing histories; the goal of these comparisons is to
explain, by such contextual means, the differences in social change that have been
empirically observed in the trend reports. We believe it neither practical nor
theoretically sound, given our own goal in this essay, to proceed in this fashion; we
seek instead to compare the structure of social change, in attempt to understand
systematic change in its own terms.
We also contrast our approach to that of the ongoing work of Forse and
Langlois, comparing France and Quebec. They are examining the structures of social
evolution within these two societies, using the empirical methodology developed by
Forse. They are thus comparing considerably more intricate intra-society patterns than
we are. In the first instance, we are merely counting trends and their similarities.
Only then, and then only a posteriori and speculatively, do we venture any discussion
of structures beyond those provided by the Louis Dirn trends themselves. It will be
interesting to see whether our speculations on the structural level are consistent with
the findings of Forse and Langlois, and to see if the general sense we have of the
degree of shared social evolution is also reflected in their work.
METHODOLOGY
In the initial stage of our analysis, we created a large table, consisting of as many
columns as there are societies for which trend reports have been compiled (we deal
with the first four here). There are at least two rows per trend: the trend in one
direction, and its opposite; some trends have more than two rows, because upon
inspection they can be divided into more than one elementary trend. In other words,
each society is "coded" separately on two binary possibilities for any given
elementary trend: "yes" or "no" for change in a positive direction, and "yes" or "no"
for a change in a negative direction. If everything had evolved the same way in the
four societies, our table would include a minimum of trends. Of course, things are
much more complicated, despite the very considerable simplification we introduced
by coding all trends as either reflected or not reflected in a given society, as though
a trend were a straightforward, simple entity, and not a complex historical pattern.
24
A Single Pattern?
In Appendix 2, we present the table with which we worked, which we have

condensed by excluding the considerable majority of logically entailed contrary trends
that were in fact absent in all four nations. Let us look at a single example: the third
line of the table, which corresponds to elementary trend 2.2, "Kinship grows in its
significance to social ties." This perhaps surprising trend was observed in France and
in West Germany, as judged by a reading of their respective trend reports. Each
national team was, in effect, asked to consider, in preparing its trend report, size,
spatial distribution, frequency of contact and rituals, and network support, as well as
other matters that might be deemed pertinent to the general issue of trends in kinship.
The French and West German reports indicate that the role of kinship had in fact
grown over the 1960-90 period. Thus, the "elementary trend" that we analyze
represents a fairly high-order generalization: we take up this point later on. On the
other hand, Quebec showed a contrary pattern - a turning away from kinship as an
organizing principle for social life, and the United States report indicated neither
growth nor decline, but stability. Accordingly, the third line in our table indicates "+"
in the France and Germany columns, and "o" in the Quebec and U.S. columns; the
fourth line indicates "+" in the Quebec column and "0" in the France, Germany, and
U.S. columns. These and the other coded elementary trends constitute the body of the
table upon which we report here.
As mentioned above, we are not comparing numbers or discrete statistical
series. In fact, several of the four constituent sub-trends in kinship that the national
teams sought to discern as they did their initial investigation were themselves
composites. Even if a single indicator of the size of kinship networks could be
compared over time from society to society (and it cannot, mainly due to problems
of data availability; although even if data were plentiful, we would surely have
arguments about what constitutes the proper comparable definition of kinship network
across societies), there simply could not be a single indicator of "network support."
Therefore, we are comparing high-level generalizations, derived from the systematic
reading of systematically, but not identically, constructed essays, composed by
different individuals from different societies.
Our systematic reading of the essays followed a uniform, agreed-upon
technique. Each author read about half the trends - one reader per set of four nations
- upon which we base the present report. We accepted our readings as comparable
only after separately reading and coding a smaller identical set and discovering no
great divergence. We read in three stages. The first was to extract from each national
essay the substantial sub-trends reported on (whether the trend was up, down, or
level). The second involved collating what had been observed in the first stage: at
this point, we had to judge where two or more sub-trends within a national report
should be collapsed, and whether a sub-trend in a given society should be considered
25
to be equivalent to that in another, even though component indicators were likely to

be somewhat different. At the conclusion of this stage, we had for each trend a table,
with a modest number (perhaps between four and ten) of sub-trends as rows, and the
four societies as columns. With this table in hand we carried out the third stage,
which involved making one, two, or more "elementary trends" out of the rows within
each trend, and judging whether each of the four societies should be coded "+" or
"o" on the elementary trend and on its converse. We do not maintain that our
procedure entirely prevented "coder effects," which probably would tend toward
finding more similarity rather than less, particularly in the third stage. But we have
sought to control our subjectivity as much as possible, consistent with the decision
to compare broad, nonqualified themes rather than statistical series. The latter
constitutes a more severe discipline, to be sure, but immediately loses the CCSC
structure that underlies our substantive concern with change in a system.
By design, the level of the trend is very broad. One would anticipate that
broad, convergent trends of social change would appear especially often at this level,
but that, looked at even slightly more closely, many more differences would emerge.
That is, the more closely we look, the closer our comparison comes to a series of
single-society expositions, each stressing the distinctive qualities of the respective
society. And that is just what we are doing here. As anticipated, there was much less
agreement at a detailed level than at a more agregated one.1
TWO STYLES OF TREND REPORTS: SOCIOLOGICAL ESSAYS

AND SOCIAL INDICATORS
Our chapter is based on four societies. Specifically, it is based on the work of four
national "teams," and to the extent that these teams differed from one another in their
procedures, we see get a distorted view of the differences between societies. We, do
not mean that any of the participants was less, or even differently, competent from
the others; nor do we mean that nationalism or any other sentiment distorted the
reports we read. But we share a sense that there were distinct "team styles" that must
be kept in mind as we analyze the trend reports that the four teams have put together.
1 We selected a subset of trends, one from each series of trends that we have discussed above, for closer
examination. They were chosen from the list of elementary trends for which there was perfect agreement
among the four societies, so that we could explore the extent of difference-within-similarity of social change.
Here, we coded each of the "second-stage" sub-trends from which we generalized to the trend level itself.
These sub-trends rest upon and amount to generalizations of our brief characterization of each change noted
in each national report within all of the trends that we coded.
26
A Single Pattern?
Two distinct, and in a sense opposed, tendencies can be discerned in the work
of the four national teams.2 On the one hand, there is what we might call the
"sociological essay" style, in which the various indicators that have been assembled
are drawn together in such a way that global patterns can be discerned, providing
summaries characterizing the domain as a whole. In extreme cases, the data serve as
much to illustrate a generalization as to establish it empirically. On the other hand,
there is the "social indicators" style, in which the texts are expositions of the
quantitative series presented, which are generalized only reluctantly. In effect, the
"sociological essay" style is designed to describe each trend, while in the "social
indicators" style, the trend is used to organize a number of discrete indicators that are
understood to exist in their own right and, less obviously, to interrelate to the others.
Each style has its own advantages. The sociological essay is obviously more
engaging to read and, in the context of cross-societal comparison, its tendency to
make high-level generalizations makes high-level comparison (such as we carry out
in this essay) relatively simple, in part by smoothing over internal contradictions and
omissions in the data. But, in a more detailed comparison, the essay style leaves
much to be desired. The social- indicators style makes detailed comparisons, offering
a degree of certainty, but makes generalization correspondingly difficult, since there
is less guidance in the essay itself.
The team styles we have noticed are surely the product of the different
scholarly tendencies brought by the members of the national teams to their task at the
outset, and of the somewhat different interpretations they made of the common
protocol set out by the CCSC at its first plenary meeting. The French team had
already carried out a systematic, synthetic study of social change in France, and the
West German group had been engaged in a variety of investigations, essentially in
the social-indicators mode. It is no accident that the French team's reports most
nearly fit the model of the sociological essay while the German reports more often
resemble the social-indicators model. The Quebec team more nearly approached the
German one in style, as it was composed of quantitatively inclined sociologists, who
were engaged in a broad-gauged study of Quebec culture. The American team
includes sociologists of somewhat differing methodological preferences and even a
quantitatively inclined historian. Their reports vary, but on the whole fit are more in
the sociological-essay style than are those of the Quebec team.
We must also underscore the fact that the statistical systems of the four
societies differ a great deal. France is by far the poorest in available quantitative time
2 Whereas, almost as often as not, all four societies shared trends, more sub-trends were recorded in only one
society than were recorded in two societies, more in two than in three, and more in three than in four.
Ignoring for the moment the above-mentioned difficulty in being sure that all sub-trends were actually
searched for in the data gathered for each society, this raises the interesting question of the ontological
significance of common trends based on sub-trends that are not exactly shared.
27
series, especially because privately produced survey data are very rare there, leaving
sociologists to depend upon administrative data. As well, time series tend to be quite
brief, where they exist at all. Thus, the essay style is perhaps as much a necessity in
France as it is a preferred approach.
In a primitive effort to assess the extent of "style" difference, we have simply
counted the number of "+" entries in our overview table, which match perfectly the
style differences; this is exactly what we would expect. France has 56 "+" entries,
the U.S. 54, Quebec 50, and Germany 48. This may be because part of the reason for
the social-indicators approach (in comparative studies) is to promote conservatism in
claiming knowledge. Since to assert a trend implies a claim of knowledge, the pattern
of team styles implies that the French team will assert trends more readily than will,
at the other extreme, the German team. At the same time, we must note how small
is the difference in number of positive trends cited in the sample of national reports:
some 15% between the relatively expansive French and the detail-minded Germans.
We feel that the strength of the story our analysis allows us to tell outweighs a
difference this small, but we will continue our concern for differences in team style
as we pursue our analysis.
HOW COMMON AN EVOLUTION?
Of the 78 trends that have been charted by the four national teams whose work we
draw upon in this chapter (listed in Appendix 1), we have examined an informal
quota sample of some 45, after deciding to omit from consideration topics that are
essentially contextual to the others (series 0) and those simply and directly reflecting
opinions, attitudes, and values (series 17). From each of the remaining 16 series, we
were careful to select at least one or, more usually, two of the trends that provided
a number and a breadth of representation sufficient to represent the entire panorama.
Of the resulting 45 trends for which we studied the final national trend reports, some
contained ambiguous material in one or more national reports, and others were so
substantially different in concept that no true comparison was possible. In the end,
we compared 43 of the CCSC trends. In some of these, comparison was facilitated
if we subdivided the general trend into two or more sub-trends and compared the
national "score" for each of these. In all, then, we compared 70 dimensions, for most
of which all four societies were scored. These comparisons and the value coded for
each of the four societies are listed in Appendix 2.
Please note that we ordinarily shy away from reporting statistical results
below, electing instead to use language that suggests quantity only in an approximate
fashion. We do so because our variables - the sub-trends or elementary trends - are
conceptual notions, and not themselves aspects of the empirical world. However
28
A Single Pattern?
empirical they may be,3 they are not exactly equivalent to one another. Some are
broad summary aspects of entire behavioural realms (e.g., "Tertiary sector and
especially services grow") while others are far narrower ("Computerization of work").
If all, or almost all, are in some sense important in France, by virtue of the process
that resulted in their entry into our analytic schema, we cannot simply presume the
same importance in the other societies. That is, some are simply much more
substantial from a comparative analytic point of view than are others, and it would
falsify this fact to present exact figures and thus weight each trend equally. Thus it
would make little sense to report the exact proportion of the sample of trends we
have analyzed here that are common to all four societies, and we usually have not
done so. Toward the conclusion of our essay, we abandon this restraint, employing
more precise statistical discussion to move toward substantive speculation, but we
bound this discussion with numerous cautionary statements.4
Over all, there can be no doubt that we are looking at highly parallel social
trends. In the sample of trends examined across the four societies, they showed
identical patterns somewhat more often than there was even one divergent trend
among the four. In cases in which divergence was apparent, more often than not only
one society differed from the pattern demonstrated across the other three, although,
in a fairly sizeable minority, pairs of societies showed divergent trends. As a first
approximation, then, we maintain that there was indeed a dominant pattern of social
change since 1960 across the four societies on two continents. This change contained
elements of the now-classical (and much-criticized) notion of "modernization";
however, there were slightly patterned tendencies across the four societies that
diverged from what we usually understand as modernization.
Table 1 reproduces the set of CCSC trends within which our reading indicated
essential similarity across the four societies. The list is long and varied. Age
structures and aspects of family structure obviously reflect a common evolution
among the four societies, as do a large number of dimensions involving the fitting
of workers to work, which is itself seen as in many ways moving in common patterns
across the four societies. There are clearly common developments in the institutional
3 On this point see Lemel and Modell, "Introduction," in Caplow et al. (1991, 1-4).
4 Similarly, we have chosen not to carry out a formal factor analysis, although in theory this or a like
procedure would allow us to discern any latent structure underlying the divergences from co-evolution in our
data. We do so because we have at present only four data points. While it is appealing to think of
constructing "factor scores" for such latent structures as might emerge from empirical factor analysis (and
our statistical software would readily allow us to perform the exercise), we prefer the more modest
formulation of searching for, and characterizing, the single and paired divergences from the common pattern
for each of the four societies. With these noted, appropriate attention can be paid to the implications for
generalizations about social change in the post-industrial world.
29
Table 1
Trends Examined that Are Entirely Similar in
All Four Societies
1.1 Youth
1.2 Elders
3.2 Childbearing
*3.3 Matrimonial Models
3.5 Reproductive Technologies
4.4 -Sectors of the Labour Force
4.5 Computerization of Work
5.1 Work Organization
5.3 Sizes and Types of Enterprises
6.2 Social Mobility
8.1 Educational System
8.41 The State
9.1 Labour Unions
10.1 Dispute Settlement
11.5 Religious Beliefs
14.1 Amount and Use of Free Time
14.2 Vacation Patterns
14.3 Athletics and Sports
15.3 Continuing Education
16.3 Emotional Disorders and Self-Destructive Behaviours
16.4 Poverty
realm as well, involving the state and some of the most critical ways with which it
addresses the citizenry: education, the legal system, and dispute settlement in general.
Also very prominent in this list are aspects of the self-chosen personal life of adults,
for better or for worse.
We can see the similarity in change across the four societies even better by
comparing the above table with a similar one listing realms in which there was
anything other than complete agreement across the societies.5
5 Except for the absence of a codeable description for one or more society. The clear absence of a trend, or
offsetting sub-trends, are treated as codeable here; if divergent from the other societies, the trend is placed
in table 2, rather than in table 1.
30
A Single Pattern?
Three broad sets of trends show some disagreement that are absent from the
dimensions detailed in table 1. (In addition, although a substantial number of personal
practices are emerging similarly in all the societies, some are not, as indicated in
table 2.)
1. The most obvious is stratification. Patterns of inequality are seemingly not
changing in identical fashion across the four societies. (It will be noted that in
table 1, trends related to work are more closely linked to the technical aspects of
work, and less to the social-structural aspects, than those shown in table 2.)
2. A second realm might be called "mobilization" - the set of institutions and
beliefs that link daily activities of citizens to that of the society at large. In
table 2, we see that there are disparate trends in the way politics is conducted,
the way citizens look at social institutions, and the way authority and normative
behaviours are changing.
3. The clustering of trends in table 2 suggests that, in contrast to the relatively
uniform evolution of social patterns on the society-wide level, there is a greater
degree of divergence in the way that local social patterns - kinship, community
and neighbourhood, daily mobility, local autonomy, and crime and
punishment - have developed in the four societies.
BASIC SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND FORMS OF ENACTMENT

OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
A simple way to understand the areas of similarity and difference in the evolution of
the four societies is to examine the degree to which the elementary trends in which
we see differences are concentrated in certain broad domains rather than in others.
This exercise requires us to hold, somewhat naively, to the letter of the results,
treating all differences as conclusive while ignoring nuance, and accepting the way
the CCSC scheme organizes trends into larger realms as adequate to our purposes.
Particular analytic restraint is appropriate to the realms in parentheses, in view of the
sample of underlying trends on which they are based. Having stated these concerns,
we discover perfect similarity in trends in the following realms.
1 Age groups
3 Women
4 Labour market
(5 Labour and management)
In contrast, divergences were particularly marked in the following realms:
2 Microsocial
13 Life style
(16 Integration and marginalization)
31
Table 2
Trends Examined in which There Are Differences
among the Four Societies
2.2 Kinship Networks

2.3 Community and Neighbourhood Types
2.4 Local Autonomy
4.2 Skills and Occupational Levels
6.1 Occupational Status
6.4 Social Inequality
7.1 Conflict
7.3 Norms of Conduct
7.4 Authority
8.2 Health System
9.3 The Military
9.4 Political Parties
10.2 Institutionalization of Labour Unions
10.4 Interest Groups
11.1 Political Differentiation
11.2 Confidence in Institutions
12.1 Personal and Family Income
13.1 Market Goods and Services
13.3 Personal Health and Beauty Practices
13.5 Daily Mobility
15.1 General Education
16.2 Crime and Punishment
Slightly less marked but nevertheless noteworthy for their divergence are:
6 Social stratification
7 Social relations
8 State and service institutions
10 Institutionalization of social forces
11 Ideologies and beliefs
Comparison of the three domains among which we see an overwhelming
similarity among all four societies is suggestive: "age groups" and "women" call to
mind underlying anthropological structures. The presence in this list of "labour
market" next to "women" is the result of a substantive tie between the two. In France
and the United States, for example, and presumably in West Germany, Quebec, and
32
A Single Pattern?
other societies as well, the evolutions of women's roles and the organization of work
are mutually influential counterparts.
On the other hand, convergence among intra-society trends is the weakest
where the trends deal most directly with the operations of specifically political power;
"state and service institutions" is obviously one of these. "Institutionalization of
social forces" and "microsocial" may be viewed a bit less directly as different ways
of recognizing the social effects of the political realm. The presence in the list of
divergent trends of "ideologies" is likewise suggestive of the meaning of the list as
a whole. Less obviously relevant a priori is "life style" - essentially a matter of
modes of consumption, health, and mobility.
Between these two extremes of convergence and divergence, the systems of
social stratification - education, social hierarchies, family resources - have on the
whole moved toward similarity, but have not entirely converged.
We may say that trends in the basic social structures - social hierarchies,
anthropological structures, and major institutions - have been more similar from one
society to another than have the forms of enactment of social relations. There is a
considerable degree of co-evolution, but there are many exceptions. We now address
this question from the point of view of the societies, rather than from that of the
trends, and examine whether there are particular pairs of societies that are evolving
"more similarly" than other pairs.
OVERALL DEGREE OF SIMILARITY
In the list of elementary trends for which four-fold comparisons are possible, about
six in ten revealed similar trends in all four societies. Are we to consider this
percentage low or high? We lack a fully appropriate criterion that might enable us
to answer this question with certainty. International comparisons rarely seek the
breadth of our study; moreover, they typically compare one society against a set of
others, rather than seeking to describe difference and similarity in a global sense.
Their purpose is to understand how a particular model functions, and each society
represents a case study. Attention is thus directed immediately to the differences
among societies rather than to their similarities. Our concern, being broader, favours
neither similarity nor difference.
We may gain some sense of how similar the overall concurrence actually is
by using a classic probabilistic approach. If any given trend is equally probably
increasing or decreasing in any given nation, and trends in different societies are
independent of one another, the likelihood of total agreement on any given trend is
12.5% - very considerably less than 60%. In a statistical sense, with as many trends
as we have examined, such a difference could hardly occur by chance alone. A less
classically statistical approach would compare the 60% to subjective probabilities
33
before new data were gathered and arrayed. Recall of such prior assumptions is
difficult, but our sense is that our eagerness to undertake international comparison
was based on a sense of national systems being considerably different, and of the
interrelations of given trends within a given national system likewise being rather
loosely coupled: taking these together, we doubt that our prior assumptions would
have held that even half the four-society comparisons would be wholly congruent.
And, given the large number of trends we are comparing, this indicates that
something more or less "real" is at work. But at the same time, 60% certainly
diverges a great deal from the notion of unilinear "modernization," and in a direction
that suggests that the process - if it is a unitary process - is less unilinear than the
imagery might suggest!
Without claiming perfect analogy, we can make comparison to an old study
by Murdock - although his purpose was to compare the United States with a variety
of other societies - that deals with some thirty cultural items. Within this data set,
inter-society agreement was about 30% among non-Western societies and about 60%
among Western societies. The coincidental recording of 60% must not be taken too
seriously, for Murdock was counting traits, whereas we are describing trends.
Nevertheless, Murdock describes a single-society-to-single-society agreement rate,
and (assuming independence) the rate he found would imply about a two-in-ten rate
of total agreement in four societies, far below the six-in-ten rate of total trend
similarity that we observe among our four societies.
HOW ALIKE IS THE CHANGE IN EACH SOCIETY?
Keeping in mind all the cautions we have made about the significance of the
materials we present when treated in strictly quantitative fashion, we offer the
following measure of "proximity" among societies, measured in terms of shared
trends, excluding trends that are shared by all four societies under study:
France-West Germany 22
France-Quebec 25
France-U.S. 21
Quebec-West Germany 19
Quebec-U.S. 24
West Germany-U.S. 13
A simple inspection of the extent of divergence in general trends between
particular pairs of societies gives us our first clue. We find, in essence, that one of
the four societies - West Germany - differs more from each of the other three than
they do from one another. Upon closer examination, we find that the maximal extent
of divergence, by far (remembering, of course, that this is within a basically common
pattern across all of the societies), is between West Germany and the United States:
34
A Single Pattern?
the number of divergences is more than double that between any other pair of
societies. Conversely, France is less divergent from West Germany than are the other
two societies, and shares an especially close parallel in social change with both
Quebec and the U.S., which are quite similar in this domain.
A European pole may perhaps be opposed, in view of these results, to a North
American pole, inasmuch as the pattern of trends in Germany is relatively close to
that in France, and relatively distant from those in Quebec and the United States, in
terms of shared trends; while Quebec and the U.S. share more trends in common than
either does with West Germany.6 The distinction between the two poles, that is,
depends upon the argument that the evolution of West Germany was relatively
different from that of Quebec and the United States, and relatively similar to that of
France. France, in this view, lies at the quite considerable juncture of the two poles,
sharing much with both the distinctively "German" direction of the European pole
and the distinctively "Quebecois" thrust to the North American pole.
We remind readers, once again, that the modest differences that we are making
much of here are swamped (in a statistical sense) by the similarities mentioned above
and here eliminated from the table, and that, with a "sample" of four societies, our
typological designation of "European" and "North American" poles of development
is at best a hypothesis to be examined in the light of further comparative data from
more societies, rather than a conclusion grounded in any theoretically derived sense
of why social evolution should differ (even in degree) along this geographical
dimension.
The correspondence of France with West Germany points to a model that
suggests that the transformation in those societies is in a sense the most perfect. In
6 We have already noted that the German team used methodology that was most tightly bound to strict criteria
for quantitative trend measurement, and so, over all, found fewer trends; and we saw that France found the
most trends, and had the most easy-going attitude toward quantitative evidence. Now, as we look for
substantive convergence among the societies, we find that West Germany is the most divergent nation, and
France the most central. Does this finding perhaps reflect that the German researchers more often refused
to assert a trend where their French colleagues, for example, would have found one? We can find an answer
to this question by establishing whether Germany's disagreements at least sometimes came where distinctive
trends were positively asserted there. Of the eight distinctive trends (which are not merely the simple obverse
of positive trends) in which Germany's results differ from those in the other three societies, only one is an
instance in which the trend is visible in Germany and not elsewhere. In contrast, three of the four trends in
which the French scholars' trend report contrasts with that in the other three societies are instances in which
the change is reported to have occurred in France and not elsewhere. In the American case, where the
researchers, whose team style placed them as close to the French approach as to the German, had eight
divergent trends of which only one was positive, all others being otherwise shared patterns not visible in the
U.S. Given the general predominance of positives among the trends studied, we cannot conclusively reject
the possibility that our "divergence" measure is factitious, but nor can we assert it as a probable finding. The
best procedure, we believe, will be to see whether the patterns of divergence taken over all indicate that
measured social change in the four societies differ in a coherent way, or whether their differences seem
scattered and not suggestive of other than idiosyncratic differences, possibly of measurement or interpretation
35
them, we have the most thorough backing away from certain trends that we identify
as characteristic of classic industrialization. Most striking among these is the muting
of class conflict; as well, there are the growth (perhaps a revival of considerably
older patterns) of kinship as a focal point of socialization and the revival of inner
cities as the residential location of choice of highly prosperous, trendy young people,
whose family patterns and life style are not "bourgeois" in the older sense of the
term. These social arrangements, it should be added, fit with a decline in the
centrality of manufacturing (and the industrial relations that characterize it) in the
economy, and a corresponding rise, especially pronounced in France and West
Germany, of managers and officials in the labour force.
Let us look at the distinctive German patterns directly.7 Several of the divergent
trends occurred in what may on the surface be seen as arguably epiphenomenal
dimensions: differences in health-care trends, leisure-time use, and daily mobility
patterns. On the other hand, a cluster of aspects suggest that Germany may have
undergone political change in the past three decades that is at least somewhat
different from the other three societies, suggesting a difference in the way democracy
has manifested itself there, with two interlocking dimensions. First, unlike the other
three societies, the identification of citizen and government, especially through
partisan-political participation, seems to have changed less in West Germany - to
have remained, in a sense, closer to the model institutionalized in the decade
following the conclusion of the Second World War. A disillusionment (expressed
somewhat variously from society to society) with political rules, political institutions,
and traditional electoral politics has characterized the three turbulent decades in
France, Quebec, and the United States. These trends are not reported for West
Germany. Moreover, the seemingly intractable, although changing, problem of
poverty that has dogged transformations in the other three societies seems less present
in West Germany. Nor has the state much enlarged its role in public administration
as it has elsewhere. In a certain sense, then, we can speculate that although West
Germany has for the most part undergone the same general transformation as have
the other societies, the relatively smooth economic path it has enjoyed over the same
period has removed some of the more glaring irritants that have brought the political
apparatus - of both state and party - into question in the other societies.
The other relatively "different" nation among the four is the United States. As
in West Germany, an area of transition seems not to have occurred there as
elsewhere. In this case, it seems that the class system (which was arguably never as
7 At the sub-trend level, too, the Germans list fewer positive aspects of change than do the other societies. This
is because, although the Germans were as likely as any of the others to be joined with two or three other
societies in reporting a sub-trend, they rarely exhibited sub-trends that were idiosyncratic or shared with only
one society.
36
A Single Pattern?
strongly expressed as it was in our other societies) that changed less rapidly between
1960 and 1990. Institutions of formal education were nearly as widespread, and about
as open to the socially mobile, in 1960 as in 1990; in the other three societies,
advanced education has become more widespread over the period, and more
egalitarian in its distribution. Class conflict - muted, as ever - remains in the U.S.,
and labour unions remain as conflict groups (albeit much weakened), rather than
having their central functions institutionalized in nonconflictual arrangements. In a
nation in which confidence in many major social institutions has declined, business
continues to be held in considerable esteem. To the extent, then, that a major
dimension of the shared transformation of the past 30 years conforms to the French
team's conclusion for France, that class animated politics and culture in the first half
of the twentieth century in a way that it no longer does, the United States is an
exception. (Whether the other three societies have caught up to or surpassed the U.S.
in this regard is another question.)
The few French divergences have to do with lessened income inequality and
with the increase in ethnic-group conflict, with immigration replacing class as a basis
for social tension. Quebec's divergences also seem idiosyncratic rather than reflecting
an overall difference in the evolving system. In Quebec, alone among the four
societies, kinship has declined (from an unusually high level) in its significance as
a basis for social life, conforming to classic social theory, but contrasting with
patterns in the other three societies. An obvious explanation here is that Quebec in
1960 was the only society of the four under study that was really "traditional," in the
classic sense of that term as applied to kinship patterns. It has become less so. In
analogous fashion, but once again idiosyncratic as regards social change, Quebec has
undergone government centralization over the past 30 years, in contrast to the other
societies. But, of course, Quebec is one government among many in a national
federation, and has developed a stronger "central" government at the provincial level,
as other of our societies have also at the sub-national level.
All in all, the divergences, as rare and limited in their scope as they are, suggest
limited, but in some ways patterned, national variants, very much within the general
pattern of transformation outlined above. Historical circumstances emerging from the
first half of the century and the Second World War - Germany's unique economic
"miracle," the characteristically muted expression of class differences in the U.S.,
Quebec's virtual colonial status even into the period under study - have produced
elements that are distinctive to each of the societies. But the number of patterns they
share, the social change they have undergone together, is much more substantial.
In sum, at least in the four societies under study here, while there are reasonably
coherent aspects in which pairs of societies change in concert and in contrast to the
other two, these aspects are scattered. Each society has some unique correspondences
with each of the others: the closest the data come to suggesting a strong divergent
37
model is in the area of social stratification, where France and West Germany,
societies in which social class was historically more prominent in structuring
inequality than in the two North American societies (in which ethnic differences were
more prominent), have shown more distinctive shared trends related to the lessening
of this traditional element of social structure. But the Franco-German "model" may
not really represent a distinctive pattern of change so much as the common effacing
(or, at least, weakening) of formerly distinctive patterns, so that the two societies now
have more nearly converged with the North American pair than had been the case
before 1960.
To conclude, we believe that a fair account of variation within commonality has
emerged from the CCSC scheme and the empirical essays of the national teams.
More detailed work can be undertaken, and latent patterns of variation from pattern
may be discovered by Forse and Langlois. A more causal trans-national analysis can
be attempted, examining more closely the timing of change, that would enable us to
begin to discern patterns of mutual influence from nation to nation.8 As well, more
fully contextualized and closer focus on single trends or groups of trends could
provide the basis for inter-society comparison: indeed, this approach lies at the heart
of most essays in the present volume, and it is in counterpoint to them that we offer
this global overview.
References

1991 Recent Social Trends in the United States, 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt:
Jean-Hugues Dechaux
1992 Recent Social Trends in France, J960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt: McGill-Queen's
Glatzer, Wolfgang, Karl Otto Hondrich, Heinz-Herbert Noll, Karin Stiehr, and Barbara Worndl
Jean-Pierre Simard
8 Our colleague Matthias Bos has proposed that CCSC work along these lines.
38
A Single Pattern?
Appendix 1
List of CCSC Trends, with Those Employed
in the Data Set Underlying this Essay in Boldface
0. Context
0.1 Demographic Trends
0.2 Macro-Economic Trends
0.3 Macro-Technological Trends
1. Age Groups
1.1 Youth
1.2 Elders
2. Microsocial
2.1 Self-identification
2.2 Kinship Networks
2.3 Community and Neighbourhood Types
2.4 Local Autonomy
2.5 Voluntary Associations
2.6 Sociability Networks
3. Women
3.1 Female Roles
3.2 Childbearing
3.3 Matrimonial Models
3.4 Women's Employment
3.5 Reproductive Technologies
4. Labour Market
4.1 Unemployment
4.2 Skills and Occupational Levels
4.3 Types of Employment
4.4 Sectors of the Labour Force
4.5 Computerization of Work
5. Labour and Management
5.1 Work Organization
5.2 Personnel Administration
5.3 Size and Types of Enterprises
6. Social Stratification
6.1 Occupational Status
6.2 Social Mobility
6.3 Economic Inequality
6.4 Social Inequality
7. Social Relations
7.1 Conflict
7.2 Negotiation
7.3 Norms of Conduct
7.4 Authority
7.5 Public Opinion
8. State and Service Institutions
8.1 Educational System
39
8.2 Health System

8.3 Welfare System
8.4 The State
9. Mobilizing Institutions
9.1 Labour Unions
9.2 Religious Institutions
9.3 The Military
9.4 Political Parties
9.5 Mass Media
10. Institutionalization of Social Forces
10.1 Dispute Settlement
10.2 Institutionalization of Labour Unions
10.3 Social Movements
10.4 Interest Groups
11. Ideologies and Beliefs
11.1 Political Differentiation
11.2 Confidence in Institutions
11.3 Economic Orientations
11.4 Radicalism
11.5 Religious Beliefs
12. Household Resources
12.1 Personal and Family Income
12.2 Informal Economy
12.3 Personal and Family Wealth
13. Life Style
13.1 Market Goods and Services
13.2 Mass Information
13.3 Personal Health and Beauty Practices
13.4 Time Use
13.5 Daily Mobility
13.6 Household Production
13.7 Forms of Erotic Expression
13.8 Mood-Altering Substances
14. Leisure
14.1 Amount and Use of Free Time
14.2 Vacation Patterns
14.3 Athletics and Sports
14.4 Cultural Activities and Practices
15. Educational Attainment
15.1 General Education
15.2 Vocational Education
15.3 Continuing Education
16. Integration and Marginalization
16.1 Immigrants and Ethnic Groups
16.2 Crime and Punishment
16.3 Emotional Disorders and Self-Destructive Behaviours
16.4 Poverty
40
A Single Pattern?
17. Attitudes and Values

17.1 Satisfaction
17.2 Perceptions of Social Problems
17.3 Orientations to the Future
17.4 Values
17.5 National Identity
Appendix II
Trends Compared in This Chapter,
with Coding for France, West Germany, Quebec, and the U.S.
F G Q u
1.1 A new transitional phase between school and work + + + +

1.2 Elders becomes more important in society + + + +
2.2 Kinship grows in its significance to social ties + + o o
2.2 Kinship declines in its significance to social ties o o + 0
2.3 Centralization declines in largest cities + + + +
2.3 "Gentrification" of inner cities + + o o
2.4 Centralization of political authority at national level o o + 0
2.4 Decentralized national political authority + o o +
3.2 Fertility is reduced + + + +
3.2 Marriage and childbearing are disassociated + + + +
3.3 Weakening of "bourgeois" marriage model + + + +
3.5 Reproduction becomes voluntary + + + +
4.2 Formal manpower training grows + o o +
4.4 Tertiary sector and especially services grow + + + +
4.5 Computerization of work + + + +
5.1 New industrial-management schemes replace Taylorism + + + +
5.3 New, smaller or less centralized firms + + + +
6.1 Reduced self-employment; more white-, fewer blue-collar + + + +
6.1 More officials and managers + + o 0
6.2 Intergenerational mobility increases,
because occupation redistributed + + + +
6.4 Inequality among women increases + o + +
6.4 Income inequality diminishes + o o 0
6.4 More equal access to educational opportunity + 0 o +
6.4 Age-based inequalities grow, benefiting older citizens + 0 + 0
6.4 Class is a less salient category, especially "worker" + + o 0
7.1 Reduced conflict, increasingly institutionalized + 0 + +
7.1 Growth of legal and paralegal conflict settlement + 0 0 +
7.3 More tolerance of divergent opinions and behaviours + + + +
7.3 Tolerance of sexual matters increases + + + +
7.3 Ethnic-group tolerance increases 0 + + +
7.4 Devolution of centralized authority structures o + + o
7.4 State of authority relations is unsettled + o 0 +
41
F G Q U
8.1 Extended education, often together with occasional work + + + +

8.2 Increased production of health-care services + + + +
8.2 More hospitals + 0 0 0
8.4 State more present in public administration + + + +
9.1 Labour unions less important to the working class + + + +
9.3 Stability of military numbers + + + .
9.3 Loss of symbolic role of army + o + .
9.4 Traditional left/right bipolarity weakens + + + o
10.1 More new, specialized dispute-settlement mechanisms + + + +
10.2 'Labour-union apparatus treats more social needs + + + o
10.2 Management includes labour in decision making o o + o
10.4 Increasingly demanding interest groups + + + o
11.1 New techniques of voter mobilization; party system weakens + o + +
11.2 Less confidence in political institutions, politicians o o + +
11.2 Less confidence in formal rules o + o o
11.2 Less confidence in educational institutions 0 + 0 +
11.21 Less confidence in business o o + o
11.2 More confidence in business 0 0 0 +
11.2 More confidence in the military o o + .
11.2 Great national institutions lose symbolic significance + + o o
11.5 Religious forms proliferate + + + +
11.5 Religious forms decline o o + +
12.1 With more income, household equipment increases + o + +
12.1 Decline in differences in household income + 0 0 0
13.1 Increase in income brings change in consumption + + + +
13.1 New ways of distinguishing life style by consumption + 0 0 +
13.3 More consumption of health care + + + +
13.3 Development of alternative medical philosophies + + + o
13.5 More daily mobility thanks to automobile + + + o
13.5 Reduced gender differential in daily mobility + 0 0 +
14.1 Leisure time increases in amount and importance + + + +
14.2 Growing amount of vacation time + + + +
14.3 Sports are on upswing; many are democratized + + + +
15.1 Growth in overall spread and extent of schooling + + + +
15.1 Part-time university study increases o o + +
15.3 Adult education incraeses + + + +
16.2 Crime, even when not increasing, becomes focal issue + + + +
16.3 Specific psychological discomforts, not anomie + + + +
16.4 New forms of poverty arise, in spite of state efforts + o + +
42
3
Differing Levels of Low Fertility
Gary CALDWELL
Karin STIEHR
John MODELL
Salustiano DEL CAMPO
Our purpose in this chapter is not to explain fertility change, but to arrive at a better
understanding of the societal context in which such change took place. Specifically,
we want to situate fertility change within a number of transformations in the structure
of women's lives in contemporary Euro-American society. Our goal is to use this
contextual approach to move toward a typology of fertility behaviour in industrialized
societies that can be plausibly related to other dimensions of social change in the
same societies. The level of analysis is, then, macroscopic, and the nature of the
discussion is inductive rather causal, the empirical perspective being provided by the
comparative data (from five societies) and the time span involved (30 years).
Although such an undertaking leads us to look relatively closely at changes
in fertility and certain related contextual factors, we take note at the outset that even
a cursory glance reveals that fertility behaviour is one realm in which a long-term
trend, common to all five societies compared, obtains. However, although the
prevailing direction of fertility change was an accelerated decline followed by a
deceleration leading to a levelling off, there were noticeable differences in overall
fertility levels, short-term variations (five-to-ten-year-period patterns), and differences
in the times at which the phases of this over-all trend were realized. We want to
determine whether similar observations regarding level, extent, and timing of changes
43
can be made with respect to the evolution of the contextual factors we have chosen
to examine.
Fertility, then, provides the Research Group on Comparative Charting of
Social Change with a case of parallel social evolution, perhaps even with a baseline
against which the degree of parallel evolution in other aspects of social change can
be compared.1 Since no "historical necessity" can attach to a given trend - it is
extremely unlikely that women in one society achieve the level of fertility of women
in other societies by emulation alone - we will attempt to determine to what extent
a common fertility trend is or is not associated with parallel trends in "contextual"
factors in the five societies under study: France, West Germany, Quebec, Spain, and
the United States. Consequently, the task we have set ourselves here will often lead
us to emphasize modest differences rather than to re-emphasize a striking similarity
in both the overall fertility trend and the contextual factors. We begin with an
overview of the fertility-change pattern before invoking what we consider to be the
relevant aspects of the immediate context in which fertility evolves: the contextual
factors.
OVERVIEW OF POSTWAR FERTILITY
The five societies differed greatly in the levels of fertility that prevailed in the early
years of the postwar period.2 In the 1950s, "baby booms" that were by no means
identical in degree (Lesthaeghe, 1988: 32) characterized all of the societies except
Spain. But in the 1960s, each society, again with the exception of Spain - where the
decline began much later in the late 1970s - underwent a precipitous fall in total
fertility rate (TFR),3 near four to just above two at the end of the decade (table 1
and figure 1). After this decline of 50% in less than 15 years, a plateau developed
at the approximate TFR level of 1.8 - 0.3 below the replacement level of 2.1 - in
three of the societies (France, Quebec and the U.S.).
1 See the individual society trend reports available in the Comparative Charting of Social Change project. Data
referred to here come from these reports and from a number of additional data series and survey data supplied
by the authors and by J.-H. Dechaux of the French team.
2 Cf. the years 1950 to 1960 in table 1. Obviously, there are important regional differences whithin societies
(northern and southern Spain, for instance) as well as racial differences (blacks and whites in the U.S.);
however, in the CCSC project we have forsworn sub-societal analysis.
3 The TFR is a synthetic measure that represents the average number of children who would be born alive to
a woman during her lifetime if during all her child-bearing years she were to conform to the age-specific
fertility rates of the year in question.
44
Fertility
Table 1
Total Fertility Rate
France, Germany, Quebec, U.S., and Spain, 1960-1990
Year France Germany Quebec U.S. Spain
1960 2,73 2,36 3,86 3,65 2,90

1961 2,81 2,45 3,77 3,62 2,80
1962 2,78 2,43 3,66 3,46 2,80
1963 2,88 2,51 3,55 3,32 2,90
1964 2,90 2,54 3,41 3,19 3,00
1965 2,83 2,52 3,06 2,91 2,97
1966 2,78 2,53 2,72 2,72 2,90
1967 2,63 2,48 2,44 2,56 2,90
1968 2,57 2,38 2,27 2,46 2,90
1969 2,53 2,21 2,19 2,46 2,90
1970 2,48 2,01 2,08 2,48 2,85
1971 2,50 1,92 ,99 2,27 2,88
1972 2,43 ,71 ,82 2,01 2,84
1973 2,32 ,54 ,80 1,88 2,81
1974 2,11 ,51 ,79 1,84 2,83
1975 1,93 ,45 ,82 1,77 2,80
1976 1,83 ,45 ,81 1,74 2,80
1977 1,86 ,40 ,75 1,79 2,66
1978 1,82 1,38 1,71 ,76 2,53
1979 1,85 1,38 1,75 ,81 2,35
1980 1,95 1,44 1,68 ,82 2,19
1981 1,94 1,43 1,62 ,82 2,02
1982 1,91 1,44 1,53 ,83 ,90
1983 1,79 1,33 1,45 ,80 ,74
1984 1,81 1,29 1,45 ,81 ,68
1985 1,82 1,28 1,42 ,84 ,64
1986 1,83 ,34 1,36 1,84 ,54
1987 1,80 ,37 1,35 1,87 ,47
1988 1,80 ,41 1,41 1,93 ,44
1989 1,79 ,44 1,52 2,00 ,39
1990 1,78 ,45 1,64 2,01 ,38
Note: This table is the basis for figure 1. Similar tables - most of which are available in
the respective trend reports - exist, but are not reproduced, for the other graphs
presented here.
45
Figure 1
Total Fertility Rate
Figure 2
Age-Specific Fertility Rate: 20-24
46
Fertility
West Germany and Spain, on the other hand, experienced a free fall, their
TFR passing directly through the 1.8 plateau. At the time the 1.8 plateau pattern was
emerging, in the early 1970s, a sustained low level of 1.4 was thought highly
improbable. However, the West Germany's rate continued to fall to the 1.4 level;
Quebec's level, after approximately five years at the 1.8 plateau, also fell to 1.4, at
least until 1989.4 Now that Spain's TFR is in the same low range, we have, for the
30-year period, a two-plateau pattern in terms of end-of-period levels. In figure 1, the
two patterns appear quite distinctively: on the one hand, France and the U.S. at the
1.8 plateau; on the other, West Germany and Quebec at the 1.4 plateau, where Spain
joins them. Hence, in terms of fertility we have what we shall call near-replacement-
level - societies (France and the U.S.) and non-replacement-level societies (West
Germany, Spain, and Quebec). Within the 30-year period 1960 to 1989, the three-
year period 1977 to 1980 appears to have been an important inflection point: in
France, West Germany, and the U.S., the downward trend in fertility was arrested,
whereas Spain (in 1977) and Quebec (in 1980) embarked on a new phase of fertility
decline.
In order to explore in more detail the fertility patterns just described, we
have used three further fertility indicators: age-specific fertility of women near the
beginning of the childbearing age range, the 20-to-24-year age-group (figure 2);
age-specific fertility near the end of the range, the 30-to-34-year age-group (figure 3);
and average age at first childbirth (figure 4). An overview of the comparative
evolution of these three indicators reveals that both early and late age-specific
fertility contributed to the initial 50% drop; enhanced fertility at age 30 to 34 was
responsible for the post-1975 flattening of fertility in France and the U.S.; fertility
in the 20-to-24 age group continued to decline in the 1980s, except in the U.S.,
where it levelled off; and in four out of the five societies, age at first childbirth has
been on the rise since the early 1970s, and in Spain's case since the early 1980s. In
respect to this last indicator, the similarity of the French, German, Quebec, and
Spanish trends is striking, as is, inversely, the continued commitment of American
women to parenthood at a markedly younger age - on average, two years earlier than
in the other societies.
We conclude our characterization of patterns in fertility trends with the
following observation: it is principally the decline in fertility at the younger end of
the childbearing range in West Germany, and at both the younger and older ends of
the range in Quebec, that resulted in the emergence after 1975 of the two distinct
end-of-period patterns mentioned. Spain is now repeating the Quebec pattern -
4 At this point, Quebec began to experience a rise in its TFR. The extent to which this rise is a consequence
of the business cycle or a redirection in the mid-term trend like that found in Sweden and Denmark is
discussed in Caldwell, Frechet, and Thibault (1992).
47
Figure 3
Age-Specific Fertility Rate: 30-34,
Figure 4
Average Age at First Childbirth,
48
Fertility
continued simultaneous decline in both the 20-to-24 and the 30-to-34 age
groups - which France, West Germany, and the U.S. have managed to avoid. In West
Germany, the rise in the 30-to-34 age-group rate has prevented an even more
disastrous fall, given the very low 20-to-24 rate. In other words, in the post-1975
period West Germany has been distinguished by extraordinarily low fertility in the
20-to-24 age-group, and Quebec by the failure of the 30-to-34 age group to increase
its fertility, as has been the case in France, West Germany, and the U.S. In Spain, the
initial post-1960 50% collapse is too recent to predict how these two age groups will
perform in terms of "post-collapse" fertility. Incidentally, this collapse is no doubt
associated with the advent and availability of the birth-control pill, use of which was
not widespread before the mid-1970s.
CONTEXT
Fertility evolves, obviously, in a social context. Various dimensions of the context

that social analysts hold to be directly related to fertility can be observed
operationally - that is, in terms of reliable indicators on which data are collected in
industrial societies. Before embarking on an interpretive effort that will draw on more
qualitative data and considerations, we shall examine the comparative evolution of
four of what we shall henceforth refer to as contextual factors. These factors are the
prevalence and stability of marriage; female participation in the labour force; the
prevalence of abortion and sterilization, which, because they require the intervention
of institutional agents, are social practices; and the extent of universalization of
compulsory schooling. Although we do not claim that these factors determine, for
instance, value change - the reverse may in fact be the case - it has been established
that they are associated with fertility levels, and because they are measurable, they
are observable and comparable; hence the interest in documenting them before
attempting any interpretation of the observed societal differences in fertility levels
and phasing. Before proceeding to this descriptive exercise, a brief justification of the
pertinence of the four contextual factors selected is in order.
The prevalence and stability of marriage has been included because in
contemporary industrial society the fertility of married women is still well above that
of unmarried women. Even in the case of the society in our universe of five that has,
by far, the highest percentage of out-of-wedlock births (40% in Quebec in 1990), the
fertility of married women was still, in the mid-1980s, twice that of unmarried
women (Rochon, 1989). In France, the fertility of unmarried women is still four
times lower than that of married women of the same age (Calot and Leroy, 1989: 8).
As for the prevalence and stability of marriage as such, we presently have at our
49
FigureS
Birthsout of Wedlock,
France, Germany,Quebec, U.S., and Spain, 1960-90
Figure6
MarriageRate,
France, Germany,Quebec,U.S., and Spain, 1960-90
50
Fertility
disposal four indicators: births out of wedlock (figure 5), marriage rate (figure 6),
average age at first marriage (figure 7) and divorce rates5 (figures 8 and 9).
The pertinence of women's participation in the labour force arises from the
observation of an inverse correlation between fertility and female labour force
participation that has, until very recently at least, been a constant of postwar
industrial society. Although there is a wide consensus in the literature on the
correlation between the two, there is not the same agreement as to the dynamics and
direction of a possible relationship. Whether fewer children permit women to work
more outside the home, or whether the decision to enter or stay in the labour market
deters women from having more children is not an essential question here. Taken
together, these decisions by women (often with husbands' or lovers' advice and
concurrence) constitute an assertion of the kind of family they wish to have, both
with regard to a level of material comfort vis-a-vis family size and with regard to
gender roles. For our present purpose, which is to measure labour-force involvement,
we have compiled the female participation rate (FPR), which is the percentage of
women 16 to 64 years old who are working or looking for work (figure 10), as well
as the rates for the age groups at both extremities of the age range in which most
childbearing takes place, the 20-to-24 and 25-to-34 age groups (figures 11 and 12).
In addition, we have the overall participation rate for women with children under
three years of age (figure 13).
Abortion and sterilization are two particularly effective and, in the case of
sterilization, permanent brakes on fertility. The prevalence of both is widespread in
contemporary industrial society, and they reflect recourse to techniques that involve
the participation of agents - medical or paramedical - other than the women
themselves. Their considerable role as a socially influenced brake on fertility makes
them a contextual factor of the first order. Each of the two techniques has raised, and
continues to raise, publicly debated moral issues related to individualism, gender, and
the proper role of the medical system. As it happens, the female and male
sterilization data available to us are too incomplete for consideration here. However,
we do have adequate data on recorded abortions for four of the five societies in our
universe (figure 14)6.
Finally, we have included the universalization of schooling as a contextual
factor that bears on fertility. In this respect, we draw upon the work of the social
demographers John C. Caldwell, as recapitulated in his General Theory of Fertility
5 We have the gross divorce rate for all five societies (figure 8), whereas our data on the total divorce rate
(TDR) (figure 9) are incomplete.
6 Fertility termination through abortion is, for historical reasons, especially closely tied to public policy, and
thus validity and reliability of data are variable in time and between societies.
51
Figure 7
Average Age at First Marriage,
Figure 8
Divorce Rate per 1,000 Population,
52
Fertility
Figure 9
Total Divorce Rate per 100 Marriages,
France, Germany, Quebec, and Spain, 1960-90
Figure 10
Female Labour-Force Participation rate,
53
Decline (1982), and Ron Lesthaeghe, as put forward in his article "Cultural Dynamics
and Economic Theories of Fertility Change", written with Johan Surkyn in 1988. For
Caldwell, the mediating cause of the behaviour change that takes a society from a
regime of high fertility to one of low fertility is the onset of "downward wealth flow"
from parents to children. Once the direction of wealth flow is reversed, sex and age
differentials associated with the upward flow begin to crumble. In Caldwell's theory,
the watershed in the reversal of the wealth flow is the advent of compulsory
schooling, which, in addition to physically removing children from the home
production unit, undercuts the familial morality compatible with family economic
production (under which system high fertility makes economic sense) and
disseminates the norms and values of an individualistic morality associated with a
market economy. For Lesthaeghe and Surkyn (1988: 22), education takes on crucial
importance because it is the locus of cohort-specific socialization: "There is tangible
evidence ... that the individuation process has indeed been moving along the lives of
a cohort-and-education-driven model." Although compulsory primary-level schooling
was initiated in many industrial societies at the end of the nineteenth century, it is
only in the last quarter-century that application has been sufficiently comprehensive
that the proportion of the general population with fewer than nine years of schooling
has been brought down to less than a quarter (table 2).
THE COMPARATIVE EVOLUTION OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
We turn now to a detailed and comparative examination of the indicators of our first
contextual factor, the prevalence and stability of marriage. In the mid-1960s, all five
societies had crude marriage rates in the range of seven to ten marriages per thousand
population (figure 6). Since then, all but the U.S. have experienced a steady decline,
to the range of four to five per thousand. The U.S. has consistently maintained a
marriage rate above ten per thousand population, or one marriage annually per one
hundred population members. Hence, we have four low-nuptial-rate societies and one
"marrying" society. It is also noteworthy that a reversal in the trend to ever-lower
marriage rates appears to be under way in both West Germany (since 1979) and
France (since 1986).
The age at which young people begin marrying (figure 7) is both a factor
determining the marriage pattern and a further indicator of the changing role of
marriage in the life of contemporary men and women. The most impressive feature
of the comparative evolution in age at first marriage is the almost lock-step similarity
in the five societies: a gradual decline for 15 to 25 years beginning in 1950, and a
steady and impressive rise since 1975 that has yet to subside. The only distinguishing
societal performance is to be found in Spain, where the decline continued until 1980
54
Fertility
Table 2
Proportion of the Population
with Fewer than Nine Years' Education
Year France Germany3 Quebecb U.S.C Spain"

(%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
1960 21,0 _ 39,7 _

1961 — - 55,2 — -
1965 - 18,1 - — -
1967 - 16,5 — — —
1968 — 15,6 — — -
1969 - 15,5 - — -
1970 - 17,5 - 27,7 -
1971 - 17,5 47,1 — —
1972 - 17,0 - - —
1973 25,4 16,0 - - -
1974 18,6 13,9 - — -
1975 11,0 11,8 34,1 21,9 -
1976 - 12,1 32,2 21,2 16,2
1977 18,6 12,1 31,1 19,9 16,1
1978 - 11,4 31,3 19,3 16,2
1979 - 10,4 30,8 19,2 15,9
1980 15,8 10,1 29,6 17,5 15,4
1981 15,3 9,2 29,2 16,7 14,9
1982 14,9 8,3 28,4 15,8 15,1 '
1983 14,0 7,7 27,2 15,1 15,1
1984 13,1 7,2 26,9 14,3 15,3
1985 15,4 6,6 26,2 13,9 15,2
1986 14,9 6,3 25,6 13,3 14,7
1987 13,5 6,0 24,4 12,7 15,3
1988 13,5 6,1 24,3 12,1 16,6'
1989 12,6 7,6 23,7 11,6 16,7
1990 12,0 8,0 22,6 11,2 -
a Germany: % of school leavers without gr. 9 certification.

b Quebec and Spain: proportion of the population over 15 years of age.
c U.S.: proportion of the population over 25 years of age.
55
before reversing. We postulate that, in all five societies, preference for earlier
marriage within the "conjugal" (J. Caldwell, 1982), "breadwinner" (Davis, 1984)
pattern had been building even before the decline in marriage age set in, at which
time material and other external circumstances made realization of such preferences
gradually possible. In regard to the duration of these preferences and the lifting of
constraints to their realization, Spain may simply have been a bit out of phase with
the other societies, thus undergoing a particularly sharp discontinuity between the
realization of former preferences and the brand new aspirations (with regard to
marriage) that have obtained since the mid-1970s.
For the most part, trends in average age at first marriage (figure 7) have
paralleled those in average age at first childbirth (figure 4), but with an intriguing
departure beginning in the early 1980s. The departure, apparent in all societies but
Spain, is that the average age at first marriage has risen faster in recent years than
average age at first childbirth: women are postponing marriage longer (or giving up
on it entirely) than they are postponing childbirth. In other words, marriage timing
less adequately predicts first-birth timing than it did just a decade ago: childbearing
is less tied to marriage than formerly. This is so to the point that in the U.S., average
age at first marriage has been higher than average age at first childbirth since 1982;
in France, West Germany, and Quebec, the gap between the two is narrowing. The
dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births is a further indication of the weakening
connection between childbearing and marriage.
Indeed, there has been a rapid increase since the early 1960s in the
proportion of births outside of marriage (figure 5). We interpret this as an additional
indication both of the reduced prevalence of the "conjugal" marriage norm and of the
growing incidence of women deciding to raise children independently of marriage.
Such a seeming paradox is possible if, as we believe, many societies in the Western
world are moving away from what we call the bourgeois model to the volitional
model of reproduction (Modell, 1989). The terms bourgeois and volitional are used
here to underline the normative dimensions of the two models; in a strictly
operational perspective, the terms nuclear and post-nuclear - as used, for instance,
by David Popenoe (1988) - would no doubt be more adequate.
The supposition of a move from the bourgeois family model - the relevant
elements of which are normative marriage timing, lifetime marriage, non-
prostitution/non-libertine female sexuality within marriage, and terminal control of
fertility - to the volitional model - the elements of which are delayed marriage until
a time and circumstances of the partners' choosing, variable delay of conception
within marriage, selective family building, and the elective raising of children outside
of marriage - is the first of five propositions to be advanced in the course of our
analysis. We suspect, incidentally, that before long the shaping of volition will
become conditioned and determined by new norms, as the advantages and
56
Fertility
disadvantages of various choices become more apparent. Meanwhile, the increase in

out-of-wedlock births has been considerable in all societies of our universe except
West Germany; since the mid-1970s there has been a rapid acceleration in France,
Quebec, and Spain. Presently, in all but West Germany and Spain, at least one-fifth
of all births take place outside of marriage. The low German rate, half of this, is
something we will return to later.
With regard to the stability of marriage - as opposed to its prevalence - we
have chosen divorce as an indicator. Since no rate is available to us for all five
societies, we have used two different divorce rate measures, the crude divorce rate,
CDR (figure 8), and the total divorce rate, TDR7 (figure 9), the first having as its
denominator total population; the second, marriages. Overall, the frequency of
divorce has clearly risen in all five societies (except, perhaps, Spain, for which there
are insufficient data), and the rates are converging.
Specifically, the French, West German, and Quebec rates are rising and
converging (figures 8 and 9). Presently, the TDR is between 30 and 45 divorces per
100 marriages in France, West Germany, and Quebec. In the U.S., where the level
of divorce is much higher, the CDR is in the range of five per 1,000 population, as
opposed to two to three in France, West Germany, and Quebec. However, in the U.S.
the marriage rate - partly due to frequent remarriages - is, as we have seen, much
higher. Quebec, which has a higher TDR than either West Germany or France, has
caught up with regard to divorce very recently. We suspect that Spain will also
catch-up soon.
It is apparent that, in France, West Germany, Quebec, and the U.S., marriage
as an institution is changing. We are not, however, claiming that the demographic
impact of marriage on fertility explains either the rapid fertility decline common to
all four societies or the differences among them. It is nonetheless plausible that in the
U.S. the stabilization of fertility at a relatively high level is associated in part with
younger and more frequent marriage.
Our second contextual factor is female labour-force participation (figures 12
and 13).8 Here, the convergence taking place in contemporary industrial societies is
once again quite striking, although the differences in pattern are also instructive.
Since 1950, West Germany, Quebec, and the U.S. have moved inexorably - from
substantially different levels - to a state in which just over half of the female
population participates in the labour force (figure 12). Spain's low rate, half that of
7 TDR is a synthetic rate representing the likelihood of a marriage ending in divorce if a couple were to
experience in the course of their marriage the age-specific divorce rates of a given year; it is presented here
as the number of divorces «expected» per 100 marriages.
8 Because the participation series are longer and are available by age groups, we chose to use the "national,"
as opposed to the OECD "harmonized," data.
57
Figure 11
Age-Specific Female Labour-Force Participation Rate: 20-24,
Figure 12
Age-Specific Female Labour-Force Participation Rate: 25-34,
58
Fertility
the other four societies but rapidly converging with them, is an indication of its late
industrialization, and perhaps of its somewhat later experience of changes in attitudes
regarding gender role, which, along with economic change, are behind the changed
participation-rate pattern. West Germany stands out as a society with a long history
of high female participation in the labour force.
When one consults the rates for 20-to-24-year-old women (figure 13), the
same convergence is apparent for younger women, except in France, where the
participation rate of women in this age group has been declining since 1976. It may
be that more young Frenchwomen are pursuing their studies rather than working. In
West Germany, on the other hand, the 30-to-34 age-group has a significantly lower
rate than France, Quebec, and the U.S. Although we can offer only a plausible
explanation for the comparatively lower participation rate of young Frenchwomen,
the lower participation rate of German women 30 to 34 years old is almost certainly
accounted for by more of them staying at home to raise young children than is the
case in France, Quebec, and the U.S. This is largely confirmed by the comparative
participation rates of women with young children (figure 13): in Quebec and the
U.S., the rate is in the neighbourhood of 50%, whereas in West Germany only one
third of women with young children work.
We turn now to the comparative examination of our third contextual factor,
the prevalence of abortion and sterilization. Although we have at our disposal
rudimentary data on abortion (figure 14), our coverage of the five societies is grossly
inadequate with respect to sterilization. With respect to the overall (male and female)
sterilization rate, the variation among the societies in our universe is rather
astounding, from a total accumulated sterilized population of approximately 6% in
West Germany to an annual sterilization rate of the same order, 6%, in Quebec. In
Quebec, the combined annual rate of sterilization by tubal ligation and hysterectomies
for women in the childbearing age range is, and has been since the early 1970s, 20
per 1,000 population, or 2% of the childbearing population a year, with a high of 3%
in 1976. Were this rate to prevail for another decade (for a total of 30 years) one
could assume that two thirds of a hypothetical cohort of women would be surgically
sterilized at age 45. In fact, this situation is not all that different from that in the
U.S.: by 1982, almost 40% of American married women were sterilized! Although
we do not have the detailed data to confirm it, we know that the overall sterilization
rate is much lower in France and West Germany, and lower yet in Spain. In France,
sterilization for other than medical reasons is still socially unacceptable; in West
Germany, it has just begun to be accepted as an effective contraceptive method,
having shed its image as a coercive social-engineering technique.
There are two noteworthy aspects of the recent evolution in rates of abortion
per 100 live births (figure 14). First, during the 1970s the rise in recorded abortions
was stupendous in France, Quebec, and the U.S. (Our data for Germany are quite
59
Figure 13
Labour Force-Participation rate, Women with Young Children,
France, Germany, Quebec, and U.S., 1960-90
Figure 14
Abortions per 100 Live Births,
60
Fertility
recent, and for Spain almost non-existent.) Second, after this rather vertiginous rise,
rates began to stabilize at two distinct plateaus: 40 per 100 live births in the U.S. and
approximately 20 per cent live births in France, West Germany, and Quebec.
We now come to our last contextual factor, the universalization of schooling.
Despite the fact that compulsory primary-school education was introduced in West
Germany, France, and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century, progress
was uneven and attendance often difficult to enforce. Since the Second World War,
it has become common in industrial societies to make school attendance compulsory
to at least the age of 16. However, the existence of a considerable backlog of people
who slipped through the compulsory-primary-school net of the pre-Second World
War period, along with a still not insignificant proportion of contemporary youths
who do not manage to finish eight years of schooling, result in there being a
substantial proportion of the adult population with fewer than nine years of schooling.
In the last quarter century, this proportion has evolved very substantially. In
1960, 60% of the adult population in Quebec and almost 50% of that in the U.S. had
not completed nine years of schooling (table 2). In both cases, the change has been
dramatic: down to 26% in Quebec and 14% in the U.S. by 1985. In the same period,
the proportion of primary-school leavers in West Germany without grade-nine
certification has fallen from 21% to 6%. It can be stated with certainty that the
decline in fertility has been associated with a parallel decline in the proportion of the
population with fewer than nine years of schooling.
Given the universalization of compulsory secondary-school attendance, it
would be of interest to monitor movements in the proportion of the population with,
say, fewer than twelve (as opposed to nine) years of schooling. In Quebec, a
significant rise in the secondary-school drop-out rate since the mid-1980s - almost
half of teenagers now do not graduate from high school and 12% of sixteen-year-olds
are not in school (Langlois et al., 1992: 504, 512) - may be associated with an
apparent rise in fertility since 1988.9 In fact, since 1972 the proportion of those in
the relevant age group attending college in the U.S. has been constantly declining,
and more recently dropping out of high school has become more widespread (Caplow
et al., 1991: 472). This could mean that "modernity," in the sense that John Caldwell
uses the term - the displacement of familial morality and family-based production
by Western individualism and the market economy - has inherent limits, and that a
reaction to non-familial morality and market penetration of the household economy
is in progress; that "individuation" of existence, in accordance with Blow's dialectics
of idealization and disenchantment (Lesthaeghe and Surkyn, 1988: 17), has produced
a cohort effect on those born in the early 1970s. Or perhaps, as Popenoe (1988: ch.
14) suggests, the post-nuclear family (our "volitional" model) is simply inadequate
9 With regard to this apparent rise, cf. note 4.
61
to the task of preparing young people for industrial society, and what we are seeing
in the withdrawal from schooling is a breakdown in the socialization formerly
assumed by the "bourgeois" nuclear family.
We have some tentative conclusions to advance regarding fertility behaviour
in contemporary industrial society. First of all, there is convergence, with regard to
both fertility behaviour and the contextual factors we have chosen to examine:
France, West Germany, Quebec, the U.S., and even Spain are more alike now than
they were in 1960. The one notable exception is marriage, with respect to which the
U.S. is now in a category apart from the other four societies. The fact of this
convergence, and particularly the alignment of fertility in Quebec and subsequently
in Spain - two societies that experienced late but accelerated industrialization - at a
common level (the 1.4 to 1.8 TFR range), would suggest that, at least in the medium
term, industrial society, at least in societies of European origin, is associated with a
sub-replacement fertility rate.
Within this medium-term convergence, there are also common
"turning-points" (inflections of trends) at the beginning of the 1960s and in the late
1970s. However, notwithstanding these similarities, there are revealing differences
with regards to fertility itself. Two distinctive end-of-period patterns have emerged:
a near-replacement level in the U.S. and France, and a below-replacement level in
West Germany, Quebec, and Spain.
In terms of our contextual factors, the U.S. and Spain must be distinguished
in several respects from the other societies. Conception at a younger age is more
prevalent in the U.S., leading to earlier first childbirth and more abortions. Marriage
is more prevalent, in terms of both age at first marriage and frequency of marriage.
Divorce, and presumably remarriage, are more frequent in the U.S. than elsewhere.
Manifestly, marriage, or at least what we have designated the volitional model of
marriage, is more robust as an institution in the U.S. than in the other four societies:
one marries sooner and more often. In the other four societies, the marriage rate is
about half what it is in the U.S. Divorce, much more frequent in the U.S., is
presumably better incorporated into the volitional-marriage model (seen as less of a
trauma) than into the model that still predominates elsewhere.
Differences in the proportion of out-of-wedlock births allow us to make
distinctions among the four "non-marrying" societies. In France and Quebec, the
proportion is higher than in the U.S., whereas in West Germany and Spain it is much
lower. This might be indicative of the persistence of the bourgeois marriage model
in West Germany and Spain, and its decomposition in France and Quebec in a
context in which the volitional model has not yet taken hold (or been
institutionalized) as it has in the U.S. Should the future bring a further spread of the
volitional, or post-nuclear, model - as reflected in more frequent divorce and the
raising of children outside of marriage - to non-American societies, we will have
62
Fertility
further evidence of the existence of a cultural modernization process that affects

demography in which, in this case, fertility-related behaviours are disseminated from
the most influential society in the Western world (the U.S.) to other already
industrialized Western societies, and subsequently to the world at large.
France and West Germany also differ in that they have been at different
end-of-period fertility plateaus for the last 15 years (TFRS of 1.8 and 1.4,
respectively). Our supposition is that, in the struggle to reconcile the participation of
women in the labour force with the maintenance of a domestic establishment
(bourgeois model) and having and raising children, the French and the Germans have
evolved different strategies. In West Germany, in the squeeze created by the three
demands, it is fertility or the number of children one will raise that has suffered; in
France, it is the centrality of the domestic establishment (in terms of the time spent
on its maintenance and living in it) that has suffered, as opposed to fertility. As we
shall suggest below, these national differences of emphasis are also reflected in
public policy.
Finally, Quebec and Spain are exceptional relative to the three other
societies. Our interpretation is that both - first Quebec and then Spain - have
experienced late but accelerated "modernization," with the result that in the social
ambiguity of a rapid transition (in a single generation), both fertility and the creation
and establishment of a traditional domestic establishment (marriage) have suffered
in Quebec, and will suffer in Spain. Our second proposition is then that late and
accelerated modernization results in a non-replacement-level fertility rate.
We conclude our review of contextual factors with a characterization of the
bourgeois/volitional family-model distinction. In the U.S., a post-bourgeois family-
model society, marriage remains a pre-eminent normative force precisely because of
the dynamic inherent in the volitional model. In France, the family component of the
decomposing bourgeois model is still very much a normative force
(Castelain-Meunier and Fagnani, 1988), whereas in West Germany the traditional
domesticity of the bourgeois model retains its resilience. In Quebec - an industrial
society inspired by imported models10 - where modernity reigns, the decomposition
of the bourgeois model has been rapid and complete, creating an ambiguous situation
in which the vestiges of the bourgeois model and the emergent volitional model
co-exist. (The bourgeoisie has been quick to embrace the volitional model, while the
"proletariat" clings to the bourgeois model.) It is to be expected that Spain, having
10 This is the sense given to the term in John Caldwell's work (Caldwell, 1982). Quebec and Spain are
instances of «tier B» populations in his theory.
63
experienced the same late and accelerated modernization process as Quebec, will
replicate the Quebec experience.11
All of this raises a vast range of auxiliary questions that cannot be dealt with
adequately here. For instance, did Quebec and Spain experience late and accelerated
modernization for the same reasons? Is the volitional model a viable one in the long
term (a half-century or more)? To what extent is the emergence of the volitional
model - as opposed to the bourgeois or conjugal family model - associated with the
postwar change in the status of women? As a first attempt to respond to these
questions, we shall review changes in values related to women's roles and
aspirations, as these values are reflected both in publicly expressed attitudes and in
institutions and government policy.
VALUE CHANGE AND SOCIETAL SPECIFICITY
Convincing explanations for fertility change on a macrosocial level can be found in

long-term change in the social structure, triggered by the processes of
industrialization, urbanization, the penetration of market forces, and the crystallization
of the welfare state. But if we are to look more closely at one particular time period,
that since the end of the Second World War, and seek to illuminate the
distinctiveness of the social patterns within a more generalized convergence, a
finer-grained medium-term analysis is required. Fertility is a relationally volatile
phenomenon, tied to attitudes and values as well as to material conditions.
Consequently, our discussion here deals with changes in attitudes, values,
and material conditions surrounding marriage and family, as well as the
transformation of the female gender role; and changes with regard to women's
participation in the public sphere, not just in terms of out-of-the home employment,
but also in terms of the division of labour in the household. We will also consider
the influence of government incentives, notably purposeful population-policy
measures, and the form and extent of the out-of-home child care offered.
The story of each society's recent transformation is complex and contested;
to attempt a fully comparative account here would be foolish. Even the summary
accounts within a single society are highly speculative as to general causes. In the
U.S., one account, for example, considers secularization, in the broad sense of the
word, to be central to the more general movement away from traditional authority:
"As religious adherence waned, the sway of absolute religious authority over the
spheres of morality and individual conduct diminished. Alternative codes based on
11 Other industrialized but late modernizers, such as Greece, northern Italy, the Irish Republic, and, in due
time, the new market-oriented Polish society will, in all probability, suffer the same fate (unless anti-
modernization reaction manifests itself) of demographic destabilization.
64
Fertility
humanistic values, mental-health criteria, or extreme individualism (doing one's

thing) surfaced and were urged by adherents as the meaningful and sensible bases for
organizing life and action" (Veroff et al., 1981: 195). But other accounts, not
inconsistent in their understanding of discrete aspects of the value change, offer
different explanatory mechanisms - for example, the empowerment of once
subordinate ascriptive groups (including those defined by gender and age) in the face
of a prosperity widespread enough that subordinated groups could "afford" to ignore
the prescriptions and proscriptions that formerly maintained them, securely but safely,
in inferior status (Modell, 1989). In West Germany, the parallel transformation is
explained by still another, more psychological mechanism: the loosening of a related
set of repressions, codified as loyalty, subordination, hard work, modesty,
self-control, punctuality, conformity, adaptation, and temperance (Klages, 1985: 18).
The 1960s, the decade that marked the end of the postwar baby boom in
France, Quebec, and the U.S. and the beginning of fertility decline in Spain, is a
meaningful period in many ways. It witnessed a trans-national Wertwandlungsschub
(a discontinuity in value transformation: see Klages, 1985), the cause of which has
been widely discussed (Lesthaeghe and Surkyn, 1988). In all four societies, values
concerning personal self-development12 registered major gains. Characteristically,
the young and those with more formal education espoused the new orientation,
displaying a distinctive flexibility in personal goals and means of attaining them. This
was not egoism, pure and simple; rather, numerous long-standing hierarchies, most
visibly those between men and women, lost some of their attractiveness as, and
because, standards supporting discussion of the interests of all involved gained in
importance. Normative sanctions for customs in personal relationships were less and
less likely to be blindly accepted. While the traditional marriage-and-family model
was comprehended as an institutional arrangement with obligations and
complementary role assignment, depending on division of functions and reciprocity,
mutual love and sympathy — with their dependence on voluntary, and somewhat
unpredictable, emotional relations - is at the heart of the new model. A recapitulation
of this secularization, and the individuation it implies, as well as a demonstration of
the role of early socialization and education in determining the pace at which it takes
place, is to be found in Lesthaeghe and Surkyn (1988).
In West Germany, it took scarcely more than a decade for this change to
express itself exemplarily in attitudes toward marriage and family. Between 1963 and
1978, the proportion of those polled who viewed the institution of marriage as a
12 In the field of idealistic social criticism, for example, emancipation from authority, equality and equal
opportunity, democracy, civil involvement, individual autonomy; in the field of hedonism, for example,
enjoyment, variety in life, letting out emotional needs; in the field individualism, for example, creativity,
spontaneity, self-fulfillment, independence (Klages, 1984: 18).
65
necessity dropped from 89% to 61%, although the same values had remained
astonishingly stable before and would stabilize again after this brief period of change
(Piel, 1987: 121). In the U.S., in 1957, 53% of all those polled rejected a person
opposed to the marital imperative, who was deemed to be either sick or immoral, as
too egotistical or too neurotic for marriage. In 1976, only one third of the respondents
stated similarly restrictive views.13 In contemporary Spain, citizens are still visibly
torn by the confrontation of old and new ideas: on the one hand, according to a 1990
survey, 77% believe that marriage is not out of fashion and 66% are ready to swear
to their commitment again in front of their children. On the other hand, a growing
minority of men and women approve of marrying later, with the benefit of prior
experience acquired by cohabitation. Pragmatically, 80% of Spaniards believe that
cohabitation will increase in the future, but 33% consider it utterly immoral.
When marriage roles are obvious and fundamentally complementary, there
is limited negotiation on who is to fulfil them. However, if certain tasks can be
performed by either partner, each task needs to be assigned and negotiated. In the
course of gradual establishment of an egalitarian role model, the perception of what
is fundamental for marriage and partnership is adjusted. Plural models emerge,
typically with hazy, permissive boundaries, where clearcut prescriptions were once
the order of the day.
In open-ended polls in the mid-1960s, 52% of West Germans expressed
appreciation of dutifulness, tolerance, and consideration as the basic foundation of
marriage; however, these values dwindled to near-meaninglessness by 1977, adhered
to by only 8%. Having children, an important reason for marriage stability for 21%
of those polled in the 1960s, was named by only 9% in 1977. No normative
substitute with comparable validity presented itself. Only "affection" and "sharing"
registered gains, and "equality," not mentioned in the years 1964/65, achieved the
leading position, with 15%, in 1977.14
A parallel tendency of diminishing rigidity regarding gender-specific role
assignment seems to exist, as well. In 1974, 36% of Americans still felt that women
should take care of running their homes and leave running the country to men, but
only 24% held this opinion in 1986. Similarly, the proportion of those who
disapproved of a married women earning money in business or industry if she has
a husband who can support her decreased. The same tendency is observed in
13 The overwhelming normative power of the institution of marriage in the 1950s can be judged by the fact
that the majority of respondents exhibited this sanctioning attitude independent of their own marital status
(Veroff et al., 1981: 147).
14 Results of a 1981 Common Market survey point in the same direction: "One notes that for the old, the
religious, the people of the right, and even married people, marital fidelity is the most important guarantee
of happy marriage, but that it is placed third or fourth among the opposed groups" (Stoetzel, 1983: 127).
66
Fertility
contemporary Spain, a late starter like Quebec, in value change: 44% of the
population accept that married women work outside home to the same extent as men
(Tohariz 1989: 181). Only 27% are in favour of a family model in which men work
to support the family and women stay at home - although the proportion is about
twice as high among people 35 years and over.
Conflicts within relationships are more often recognized and discussed
nowadays - and seemingly more often acted upon, through marriage dissolution, for
example. At first glance, it may seem surprising, in view of rising divorce rates, that
satisfaction with family life is considerably higher now than that with other spheres
of life, and has not, or at least not notably, dropped. Jean Stoetzel's (1983: 123)
summary of results within the Common Market in 1981 concurs with this: "Only one
in ten claim to never be happy. Time and time again in other surveys, the family has
appeared as a refuge, as the supreme value." The growing instability of partnership
relations by no means signifies a crisis in the institution of the family, but is, rather,
the result of increasing individual demands with regard to the quality of family life.
Marriage is judged in terms of its contribution to personal fulfillment, and much is
expected of it (Nave-Herz, 1988: 85; Veroff et al., 1981: 162). Stoetzel (1983) sums
this up: "The individual is no longer an element of the family; the family is a part
of the individual."
As in all other sectors with which the ideology underlying family is
converging, the family sphere is increasingly viewed as formed on the basis of
voluntary agreement: a contract between two parties, subject to continuous
negotiation, in which neither the state nor the church has any special interest.
Mutual affection has become the leading justification for the maintenance
of social contact in all spheres. Occasionally, these negotiated, almost improvised
arrangements have given fresh life to family patterns not unlike those of the
preceding era, structures once expressing an ideology of mutual dependence now
subtly modified to partake in the new belief system organized around the individual's
needs. Thus, we do not find growing estrangement between members of extended
families, but, rather, a kind of emotional closeness based on free will, mutual
understanding, and respect. A tendency for families to be open to extra-familial
sociability networks has been documented in West Germany and France; circles of
friends and acquaintances have become larger, neighbourhood relations friendlier. The
respective U.S. statistics were already at a relatively high level in the 1970s, and they
have remained stable. Observations in Quebec indicate the likelihood of a decline in
the size of parental networks, but from extraordinarily high levels.
For large numbers of people in recent years, children represent in this
context - to phrase the point provocatively - an anachronistic value. They require
commitment to decade-long obligations, restriction of individual decision, mobility,
and flexibility - that is, fewer chances of self-determined life plans, the realization
67
of which is now also granted to women. One may more readily withdraw from
friends or kin or leave a spouse than turn away from one's child. The decision to
have children is made less lightly than in the past.
Indeed, the choice to have fewer children manifests itself in the desired
number of children reported in surveys. In 1950, a family of at least four children
was the ideal of a substantial proportion of the adult population (in the U.S., for 42%
of women and 35% of men; in France, for 23% of both sexes; in West Germany, for
11%), while only 5% desired this number of children 30 years later, with the
exception of the U.S., where 19% of women and 15% of men still desired four
children. In Quebec, a similar downscaling of family-size expectations can be seen
in the difference between the number of children planned by the 1926-30 and
1946-50 cohorts of parents: 3.7 and 2.4 respectively, a drop of 35% between two
generations 20 years apart (Henripin et al., 1981). In 1980, a majority of Americans
(51%) and Germans (59%) wanted a family with two children. Among the French,
approximately equal proportions, 44% and 45%, desired families of two and three
children, respectively. Conversely, in the same year 1% of Americans, 3% of the
French, and 9% of West Germans preferred childlessness (Hopfinger, 1987; Simon
and Landis, 1989).
THE CHANGED ROLE OF WOMEN
Women in particular must (consciously or unconsciously) decide to which ties they

want to submit themselves. Asymmetries in the scope of family commitments
pertaining to the two genders remain: women's freedom of manoeuvre depends far
more than men's on the choices they make in this regard. Two commitments with
unforeseeable effects on self-determined life planning, marriage and motherhood take
top priority in women's collective consciousness.
In an attempt to manage these two situations, at least three unconventional
strategies15 for handling these difficult choices are conceivable. First, women may
decide to remain unmarried and childless, either by abandoning sexuality or by
practising extramarital cohabitation; in the latter arrangement, the principle of "till
death do us part" is subject to question. The probability of prolonged singleness is,
as data from all societies examined indicate, on the rise for younger women, except
for a recent reversal in France. Second, women may decide for marriage and against
children. Intensively experienced partnership and improved career opportunities are
15 When "strategies" by women are mentioned here, it should not be forgotten that the women's-liberation
movement has heightened sensitivity to problems: the "marriage and motherhood trap" has been since,
Simone de Beauvoir, a constant ingredient of societal criticism in extended feminist circles. On the other
hand, the paradigmatic effect of alternative, increasingly socially acceptable life planning, even without
explicit feminist thinking as a basis, cannot be underestimated.
68
Fertility
the promised compensations for relinquishing motherhood. In all societies compared,

the number of childless-marriage couples has risen. Finally, women may decide for
children and against marriage, a decision that is a factor in the dramatic rise in the
number of single-parent families and of divorces, both of which may constitute
opting for family outside of marriage. The markedly higher age of unmarried mothers
at the time of the birth of their children signals an increasingly conscious fulfilment
of the desire for children outside of marriage. This choice is rare in the United States.
To what point these strategies, which deviate from the long-standing bourgeois family
model, actually reduce real pressures, facilitating the realization of modern ideals,
cannot be assessed here. We know more about the contradictions in the living
conditions of women who have chosen the traditional model of wife and mother.
Though there are definite differences among the societies compared, the
majority of children are still born within marriage, and, as stated above, societal
esteem for the family is still strong in all of the societies we have studied. The
problems lie below the surface. Even in the U.S., where the early and universal
pattern of marriage has long been recognized as contrasting to that in most of
Europe, the orientation regarding parenthood is changing. The proportion of mothers
who said that all married couples should have children declined from 85%, in 1962,
to 43%, in 1980, levelling off between then and 1985 (Thornton, 1989: 882). A fairly
positive attitude toward having children was registered among 58% of those polled
in 1957, but among only 44% in 1976. The proportion who commented negatively
on the restrictiveness of parenthood in all replies rose from 30% to 45% (Veroff et
al., 1981: 220). In 1976, children represented elements of "happiness," "marital
completion," or "goal in life" less often than in 1957, while they were more often
associated with "general responsibility" and "general restriction of freedom." While
it was mainly men who felt burdened by an undefined "general responsibility,"16 it
was women who put their finger on a central feature of parenthood: restriction of
freedom was associated with life as a mother for 28% of them. Men, being
objectively less restricted under the current marital-role structure, registered a 12.3%
proportion of similar responses to this question.
A very recent study on the situation in West Germany opposed the
traditional division-of-labour family type (working man and housewife) to the
functionally differentiated type (both partners work and share the housework), seen
as modern and meaningful for the future. As expected, the proportion of those
advocating general arguments on behalf of having children - they give life a purpose,
they simply belong to a real family, and so on - was higher in "traditional" families
than in "modern" ones. On the other hand, "traditional" housewives also expressed
16 In 1957, 23.3% and in 1916, 38.6%, as opposed to women in 1957, 18.9% and 1976, 32.4% (Modell,
1989: 284).
69
arguments against children, based on the fact that one was tied to the house because
of them and had to restrict oneself financially. While the career plans of men were
barely hampered in "traditional" families, they were also obviously less willing to
restrict themselves to the home (Schumacher, 1988). The hampering of career plans
is a central argument not only for working women, but also for nonemployed women.
The education level of younger women has approached that of men over the past few
years, and the traditional pattern of the more highly educated, bread-winning husband
has accordingly lost in importance.17 Early on, women find that employment - not
retreat into private life - is the outcome of educational qualification.
Increasingly, employment for women has been less a short-term opportunity
to earn some additional money before marriage, or a basis for temporary
independence pending marriage, and more the key element in a long-term career,
requiring that occupational obligations and satisfactions associated with marital duties
and rewards be negotiated with their partners. We can see this new conception of
employment in changes in the proportion of women gainfully employed during the
so-called family-building phase, ages 25 to 34 (figure 12).
In West Germany in 1950, 78% of young women between 15 and 20 years
of age were working, but only 36% of the 33- to 40-year-olds were. In 1980, women
entered working life relatively late due to longer training periods, but were to a
notable degree (still) employed in the age cohorts up to 60 years. In the United
States, 51.3% of women aged 18-19 were in the labour force in 1950, while a far
smaller proportion, 34.0%, of women were working at ages 25-34, at which point in
life most women were devoted strictly to the marital role. (The critical ages for this
comparison differ from those in West Germany, because American women marry
younger than do West Germans.) By 1988, the proportions were 62.9% and 72.7%
for these age groups. Hence the new pattern of the woman's life course had been
largely established: young American women were not dropping out of the labour
force in order to marry, but were continuing to enter it even as they married. As well,
more and more American women were extending their schooling to college, with
some depressive effect on labour-force participation, and more and more were
delaying marriage, although this did nothing to depress labour-force participation
(U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1989). The Quebec results refer only to the period
after 1975, in which the most pronounced growth in the female labour-force
participation rate could also be observed in the 25—44 year age group, increasing
from 45.8% to 71.1%. Similarly, the age-specific proportions in France in the 1960s
17 In the U.S., a tendency toward homogamous marriage can be observed for whites since the marriage
cohorts of 1941—45, and for blacks since the cohorts of 1951-55. A tendency toward increasing homogamy
is also ascertainable for France. West Germany, however, shows no increase of homogamous marriage, but
clear decreases of better-educated husbands and increases of better-educated women (Rockwell, 1976: 88;
Ziegler, 1985: 90).
70
Fertility
represented the typical three-phase-model, with women interrupting employment in

the second (family) phase. Currently however, three quarters of all French women
between 25 and 35 years work - 10% more than among 20-to 25-year-olds. In Spain,
labour-force participation at all ages is far below that in the other four societies,
although the participation of younger women is increasing rapidly. In 1990, the
overall female rate was 33%, although, according to the latest Eurobarometer (Del
Campo, 1991), 95% of Spanish women want to work outside the home.
The three-phase model of women's life course is also losing validity in West
Germany, though German mothers of small children are very securely in last place
with regard to labour-force participation. In Quebec, 68% of women with children
under three years were employed in 1988, 57% of women in this position were
working in the U.S., and, in 1989, 74% in France.18 But only 32% of West German
mothers with children of this age had a job in 1987 (figure 13).
Marriage partners in the societies compared are far from sharing household
tasks equally. There is a growing tendency toward believing that marital tasks should
be shared equally, and a trend toward "helping out" by younger husbands, especially
when the wives are gainfully employed; but this is usually limited to particular tasks,
often those of the highest prestige, such as taking care of children. In 1985, 92% of
West German men living with a woman claimed not to be strained by housework
- because they were doing almost nothing (Lebert, 1985). Exemplary of the
differences between attitude and behaviour are the results of a recent study carried
out by the Spanish Institute of Women. Although the majority of Spanish men think
that men and women share domestic tasks when both work outside the home, Spanish
men in fact assume a smaller share of the work than even the Germans, who do from
five to nine times less domestic work than their spouses. In France, according to a
1985 survey, about 60% of both men and women were of the opinion that "household
tasks devolve upon both spouses," but even in the groups advocating this egalitarian
view, the amount of time devoted to household work per week amounted to
16.5 hours for women and only 6.5 hours for men. Men believing in egalitarian role
structuring worked in the household only one half-hour longer than did the men who
claim that housework is the woman's job. In the United States, while husbands added
nearly one hour a day in house work between 1965 and 1985 (all aspects except child
care gaining in the time they devoted), American wives shed fully two hours, mainly
of domestic chores (Gershuny and Robinson, 1988: 542; Grignon, 1985-86: 10).
"Modern" women married to "modern" men reconcile the contradiction between their
husbands' normative claims and their actual behaviours by doing less housework
themsleves - an arrangement in which their husbands probably concur. If the
18 The statistics for France refer to women with only one child. However, 63.2 % of mothers with two
children, of whom one is under three, are employed.
71
bourgeois household was based on beliefs and behaviours that implied asymmetrical
gender roles and reflected a visible family investment in tidiness, emergent family
patterns may increasingly reconcile belief and practice by omitting the symbolic
assertion of jointness that a tidy domestic establishment represents; indeed, we have
suggested that this is particularly the case in France.
There are national differences, to be sure. In 1986, the majority of West
German women and men polled still held the view that women have the choice of
either raising children or pursuing a career; realization of one goal would mean
renunciation of the other (Institut fur Demoskopie Allensbach, 1986). Contrary
tendencies can be seen in France. In a 1979 poll, only 40% held the opinion that
mothers of small children should not work; three years later, only 29% felt this way.
Characteristically, women and young people had more liberal views than men and
older respondents, and the over-all pattern moved away from the model of "femmes
au foyer" (the little woman in the kitchen). The proportion of American high-school
students in their final year of study who endorsed the traditional notion that "it is
usually better for everyone" when husbands work gainfully and wives "take care of
the home and the family" declined from 58% of girls and 83% of boys, in 1976-77,
to 36% of girls and 68% of boys, in 1985-86. But the translation of this trend into
endorsements of the gender-symmetrical idea that "if a wife works, her husband
should take a greater part in housework and child care" showed hardly any increase
(it was already endorsed by about 70% of both boys and girls) over the same period
(Thornton, 1989: 876). In Quebec, husbands say that they are reallocating time to
family duties, as they feel they should, but there is no evidence of behavioural
change.
The value change we have been documenting and discussing constitutes a
redefined feminine role in Western society: continued participation in the labour force
during child-bearing years; a preoccupation with job security and career;
redeployment of household chores among family members; a redefinition of the
significance of the domestic establishment; and the necessity of extra-family child
care. There are also more general concerns that result from the fact that women are
now autonomous individuals and less dependent on men. With the "lifetime
marriage" of the bourgeois model no longer holding, and more temporary "volitional"
arrangements having emerged, increasingly self-reliant women must plan their
fertility.
The value change associated with this redefinition was sufficiently of
consequence to promote a redirection of trends in four fertility-related behaviours in
France, West Germany, Quebec, and the U.S. between 1971 and 1976. Indeed, it was
during this relatively short five-year period that women in these societies began
postponing having children, putting off or forgoing marriage, and envisaging the
possibility of having children outside of marriage, all of which are behaviours that
72
Fertility
Table 3
First Year of Sustained Rise (or Drop)
in Average Age at First Maternity, First Marriage,
Crude Marriage Rate (Drop) and Births Out of Wedlock"
Av. Age Av. Age Crude % Births to Average Temporal

1st birth 1st marr. Marr. Rate non-married Columns Sequence
(fig- 4) (fig- 7) (fig- 6) (fig- 5) 1-4
(1) (2) (3) (4)
France 1976 1977 1973t 1977 1976 4

Germany 1972 1976 1971 1976 1974 3
b
Quebec 1972 1975 1974 1972 1973 2
U.S. 1973 1975 1973 1968 1972 1
Spain 1982 1980 1976 1980 1980 5
a As determined by visual inspection of the appropriate figure.

b No data prior to 1971.
c Source: INSEE, Donnees societies, 1990, p. 277.
directly influence fertility. Our third proposition is thus that the redefinition of
women's role led to a turning-point with respect to the contextual factors that
influence fertility patterns, and consequently fertility itself. In the already modernized
industrial societies of our comparison, this happened around 1975, and in Spain
around 1980. We shall call this, the second of our two turning-points, the "post-
feminist revolution" turning point. We undoubtedly have here what Lesthaeghe and
Surkyn (1988) would call a "pure cohort" effect.
Our evidence for this is to be found in figures 4 through 7, which document
four of our contextual-factors indicators. In table 3, we have listed the first year of
a sustained rise in average age at first maternity (figure 4) and average age at first
marriage (figure 7), an increase in births out of wedlock (figure 5), and a decrease
in the marriage rate (figure 6). Column 5 indicates the average year of all four trend
redirections in each society. In France, West Germany, Quebec, and the U.S., the
average year of inflection of all four indicators lies between 1971 and 1976; Spain is
considerably later on all indicators, producing a four-indicator average closer to 1980.
Incidentally, the time sequence in table 3 is coherent with the thesis that the changes
73
were the product of cultural diffusion originating in North America (Calot and Leroy,
89).
ACHIEVING OR MAINTAINING NEAR-REPLACEMENT-LEVEL FERTILITY
Our fourth proposition has to do with what allows a society to maintain replacement-
level fertility in a post-feminist-revolution industrial society. In fact, of the four
thoroughly modernized societies in our comparison, two have achieved this (France
and the U.S.) - as has Sweden (Hoem, 1990) - and two have failed to do so (West
Germany and Quebec). We propose that to maintain near-replacement-level fertility
given contemporary women's roles, either a strong pro-marriage norm or extensive
public support to alleviate the inconveniences to modern parents of child raising is
required. What is interesting is that in the universe of five societies considered here,
one, the U.S., combines near-replacement-level fertility with a strong marriage norm
and the absence of public promotion of natality; France, the other society in which
near-replacement-level fertility is maintained, has a low marriage rate but has been
investing public resources in promoting a higher birth rate for well over a quarter
century. We shall now consider the extent of such public high-birthrate promotion
in the form of support to families, after which we reflect on the state of the marriage
norm.
In France, an emphatically pro-high-birthrate family policy makes use of a
well-developed and complicated system of direct and indirect financial assistance for
families with children. This assistance varies according to income level. Characteristic
of the entire system is progressively increased support provided for larger families.
The income-tax system also favours the traditional family model: since the incomes
of the husband and the wife are always taxed as one unit, using progressive rates, the
additional income of the employed wife is automatically more highly taxed.
Therefore, "spouse splitting" takes an extended form in France: taxable income is
divided up according to the number of family members, calculating one part per
husband and wife (quotient conjugal) and 1/2 part per child (quotient familial), a
formula in which children contribute considerably to tax deductions.
In addition to these fiscal incentives, the French school system offers a
remarkable spectrum of possibilities for child care. School lasts all day, and for over
half a century there has been a voluntary and cost-free national pre-school system for
children from two years of age up. The "Ecole maternelle" is open to all three- to
six-year-olds, and two-year-olds are accepted when places are available (Calame and
Fiedler, 1982: 45). In 1987, 35% of two-year-olds and 94% of three- to six-year-olds
attended pre-school.
These conditions, which certainly support a fit between childbearing and
current women's roles and to which can be imputed birthrate-promotion effects, are
74
Fertility
relatively scarce in West Germany. The family is the basic taxation unit, resulting in
a tax bracket with higher rates for the spouse who enters professional life later and/or
who has the lower income - usually the wife. Children are subject to exempt fees
that need not be taxed, but they are not included in a more emphatic "splitting
system" as in France.
The present form of child care in West Germany has more serious negative
consequences. Its faults are universally recognized; the situation has improved
somewhat (in part due to the falling number of children) in the past few years. In
1987, only 33% of three-year-olds, 70% of four-year-olds, and 85% of five-year-olds
attended kindergarten. Most child-care facilities are not adapted to the working hours
of the parents, who, for the most part, register children for only half-day attendance.
Because there is no all-day school system in West Germany, the transfer from
kindergarten to school does not improve conditions for combining parenthood and
working. Although kindergartens open at standardized hours, irregular school days
make it nearly impossible to manage even a part-time job without the assistance of
privately organized help. In 1986, state-provided afternoon child care was available
for only 3.9% of six- to fifteen-year-olds.19
The situation in the U.S. is quite another case again. With the Economic
Recovery Tax Act of 1981, the "marriage penalty" - the modestly increased total
amount of income taxes two workers must pay when they marry - was eliminated.
This was a concession to the demand that the principle of the economic partnership
of equals be placed above the conception of marriage as an economic partnership in
which both partners share equal ownership of the couple's wealth. For decades,
income-tax deductions of up to several hundred dollars per year were offered for each
dependent in the family, most of whom are children born to the partners, the exact
amount being a function of the progressive taxation rate: higher-income families thus
receive higher child subsidies. However, little positive impact on the birthrate can be
imputed to this measure.
Complete nonconformity with European patterns is also exhibited in the field
of child-care facilities. When the U.S. is compared with other industrialized countries
"it is striking that there is nothing resembling a 'national policy' - there is no attempt
at the federal level to meet, or even define, the needs of the some eight million
children under the age of six whose mothers work" (Joffe, 1983: 168).20 The U.S.
19 All data according to information from Statistisches Bundesamt.
20 This corresponds to the fact that the U.S. government has no direct policy on fertility. Most fertility-related
policies are not produced by a wish to alter the population or population parameters, but for other reasons —
chiefly moral ones. There are some attempts to aid prenatal care of mothers, and to provide "sex
education," which typically includes information about contraception and, since the advent of AIDS, a
stronger tendency to urge abstinence.
75
has a tradition of governmental attention to compensatory schooling programmes for

children of disadvantaged population groups. The current leading programme in this
field is Head Start (approximately 375,000 children were enrolled in 1983). On the
other hand, any system of massive government involvement in programmes aimed
at young children inevitably raises images, alarming to Americans, of
"state-controlled child-rearing." As a result, the problem of child care is solved
largely by way of private initiatives. Non-government programmes include private
day-care centres and nonprofit ones, family day-care homes, employer-provided child
care, nursery schools and other educationally defined half-day or full-day
programmes, and a vast informal network of care offered by relatives and babysitters.
The proportion of three-year-olds attending pre-school, for example, increased from
a minute 4.9%, in 1965, to 28.6%, in 1987, reflecting something of a re-evaluation
of child-rearing preferences, as well as a market at least somewhat responsive to
effective demand (U.S. National Center for Educational Statistics, 1989: 57).
Multivariate analysis has revealed that a major determinant of the choice of
some form of paid child care by working mothers, whether in-home, day care centres,
or nursery school, was the mother's weekly wage (but not the father's), no doubt a
characteristic outcome of essentially market-driven child-care provision and an
indication of how social class differentially affects women's family decisions
(Leibowitz, Waite, and Witsberger, 1988: 214). According to survey results from
1965, 1974, and 1984 on the child-care situation for six- to thirteen-year-old children
of full-time employed mothers, the category "external child care by nonrelatives"
garnered an average of 13%, with only minor variation. It is astounding for
Europeans that the entrusting of child care to the private sector can be compatible
with high female-employment rates - doubtlessly because it is supplemented and
supported by facilities such as all-day schools.
In Quebec, the state has made some efforts to encourage a rebound of
fertility. Although federal tax benefits for parents have declined in real-dollar terms
over the last several years, the combined effect of federal and provincial fiscal
policies has been progressive and now amounts to benefits that constitute, for an
average income, approximately one-quarter of the cost of caring for children. In the
matter of extra-familial child care, Quebec is characterized by a similarly complex
picture. There are both non-subsidized and subsidized nonprofit day-care centres,
profit-making day-care centres, school day care, "stop-over centres," and nursery
schools. Day-care centres have existed since the early seventies, and at present
services accommodate approximately 90,000 children from birth to the end of
elementary school. However, demand far exceeds the services offered: the rate at
which needs are met amounts to 56% for the zero- to five-years age group, and to
only 19% for children aged six to eleven years (Policy Statement on Day Care
Services: 1988). These facilities - as in France and the U.S., but in contrast to West
76
Fertility
Germany - are mainly directed toward all-day care. However, the under-supply of
facilities does not prevent a large proportion of mothers from pursuing employment.
In 1990, in accordance with a progressive implementation of a more pro-high-
birthrate policy, Quebec offered a bonus of $6,000 (Cnd.) for third children in a
family.
The situation in Spain is different yet again. Until 1985, the family as a
whole was regarded as a single taxation unit, although this regulation has since been
rejected by the courts, and today spouses may file separate returns. However,
deductions for child nurseries and kindergarten, domestic help, housing, and so on
are still nonexistent. In 1967, economic allowances received per family amounted to
6.13% of the minimum wage, and this deteriorated to only 0.62% in 1985. In 1967,
the budget for family allowances was around 25% of the total social-security budget,
whereas in 1986 it amounted to less than 1%. A comparison of allowances in Spain
and the rest of the European Community showed that in 1986, to receive what a
British mother got for one child, a Spanish mother would have to have 17 children.
(To receive what a Belgian mother got for 10 children, a Spanish mother would have
to have 675!) On the whole, the former pro-high-birthrate family policy has been
replaced by a policy of war on poverty. Its goal is to decrease vertical inequalities
of income, rather than horizontal inequalities derived from the fact of having
children.
In fact, the Spanish public - an important difference with respect to the
other societies under study - sees having children as being as much a financial
burden as a threat to individual life styles: 87% of those interviewed declared that
economic crisis caused families to have fewer children or to delay births, while 67%
thought that it resulted in not having any. In the same sample, 93% were of the
opinion that government should provide kindergartens and 66% felt that the law
should permit one parent to stay at home with the children although 34% still thought
it should control the use of contraceptives (Revista Espanola de Investigaciones
Sociologicas, 1988).
In our fourth proposition, we advanced that either extensive public support
to parents or a strong marriage norm were essential to maintaining near-replacement-
level fertility. Having considered the extent of public support, we now comment on
the state of the marriage norm in our five societies. In Spain, Quebec, and West
Germany - non-replacement level societies - marriage and motherhood are still
associated in the collective memory of women with a high degree of societally
imposed rigidity. Nazi propaganda assigned women a firm place as bearers of
sons - future soldiers. In the 1950s, a rehabilitation of the nuclear family led to it
being considered a guarantee of happiness and peace. Both models, prewar and
postwar, were fairly uncompromising on the question of female life planning outside
of matrimony and children. In Spain and Quebec, in addition, there is a heritage of
77
a socially imposed destiny for women. Until 1968 in Quebec and until 1975 in Spain,
a divorce - in accordance with the Catholic dogma of indissoluble matrimony - was
next to impossible to obtain. As mentioned above, facilities for external child care
were not available to any notable extent until the past few years. Both the creation
and the maintenance of a traditional domestic establishment - marriage and raising
children - are, for Quebec, Spanish and West German women, institutions founded
upon a tradition of social pressure and constraint incompatible with their present
aspirations.
In the U.S., throughout the current century, there has been a very different
attitude toward marriage and family, with the result that people marry sooner and
more often. As we have pointed out, the marriage rate in the U.S. is almost double
that in West Germany, France, and Quebec. In addition, divorce is better incorporated
into the marriage institution, and is more readily resolved by prompt remarriage.
Though children - thanks, in part, to a lack of government involvement in the co-
ordination of child-care facilities - may still constitute a certain hindrance to flexible
life planning for women, marriage is seen as far less of a constraint.
The opposite seems to be the case in France. It would appear that the lower
intensity of the French feminist movement - undoubtedly a consequence of the
government institutionalizing its demands early on - has allowed gender-specific
roles to persevere in a variety of everyday spheres, more than in the other societies
examined. In addition, an infrastructural framework (as described above) provides a
solution to the problem of external child care, freeing motherhood of many of its
restrictive aspects.
SEPARATING THE SHORT TERM FROM THE MEDIUM AND LONG TERMS
We come now to our last, most methodological proposition, inspired by our empirical
comparative analysis: if our understanding of fertility change is to progress, we must
distinguish among long-term, medium-term, and short-term trends. If we fail to
separate out the simultaneous impacts of trends operating over the short term (a
decade or less), the medium term (from a decade to a quarter century), and the long
term (over a quarter century), we are less able to detect trends that would otherwise
be interpreted as unexplained change. Of course, such reasoning assumes that the
three different types of trends do in fact exist. Let us now consider our five-society
fertility data with this postulate in mind.
Most demographers would agree that the long-term trend in the
industrialized world has been the transition from high fertility (four to six children
per family) to low fertility (no more than two to three), and that this trend began in
78
Fertility
the Europeanized world (with some exceptions21) in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century (Chesnais, 1986). Of our five societies, three (France, West
Germany, and the U.S.) had made the transition before the Second World War;
Quebec did so somewhat later, and Spain even later. The reasons for this trend,
called the demographic transition, have been associated with industrialization,
urbanization, and economic development. Our observation period, 1960 to 1990, is
both too short and too recent to observe this long-term trend, or whether there has
been a change in direction that would signal the emergence of a new long-term trend.
Indeed, our observation period, although perhaps part of another long-term
trend that will be recognizable and characterized in hindsight,22 lends itself best to
the search for medium-term trends in industrial, urbanized Western societies; what
we have called, for the purposes of this discussion, modernized societies. We suggest
that there are, subsequent to the baby-boom trend period of the late 1940s to the
early 1960s, two discernible medium-term trends.
The first is the "fertility collapse" or "baby bust" period which began in the
middle and late 1960s, observable in all societies but Spain, where it began 10 years
later; the second is the post-feminist-revolution period, in which fertility behaviour
was transformed in ways hitherto unknown. This trend began in the mid-1970s,
except in Spain, where it manifested itself in the early 1980s. The first trend operated
over a period of approximately 15 years, and the second has been with us for the
same duration.
With regard to the existence, generality, and causes of these two trends, we
have a few remarks to make in the context of our comparative analysis. First, it is
remarkable that both trends, and more particularly the second, should have made
themselves felt - as did the unforseen baby boom - in four societies (France, West
Germany, Quebec, and the U.S.) at approximately the same time. They are, indeed,
the consequence of the two common turning-points we distilled from our preliminary
descriptive review of the evolution of fertility in the five societies. The inescapable
conclusion is that there are material circumstances and value changes that operate on
these societies as a single system. The fifth society, Spain, which was not at the time
a thoroughly modernized society, is now, it appears, experiencing the same trends,
as its social fabric comes into "phase" with the modernized world.
21 France is the notable exception, in that the transition began there in the eighteenth century.
22 Perhaps this will be a transition from "low fertility" to "non-replacement fertility," as many early twentieth-
century commentators like Oswald Spenglar (Decline of the West, 1918) argued would be the fate of highly
urbanized societies. Or, perhaps the advent of an expansionary phase in a new Kondratief cycle will
produce an Easterlin effect: increased fertility from a generation that will have benefitted from its own
relatively low numbers.
79
Nonetheless, after it has been said that these societies belong to a wider
societal system, the question remains as to how such significant changes in something
as fundamental as fertility behaviour could take place in such quick succession in
four different societies. Although we do not pretend to be able to answer this
question, let us consider separately the probable causes of our two medium-term
trends, beginning with the events closest to fertility behaviour in what is obviously
a complex causal chain.23 In the case of the fertility collapse of the 1960s, much of
what explains the rapidity of the transition was no doubt technological - the
availability of effective contraception, particularly the Pill. The rapid and widespread
dissemination of the Pill in France, West Germany, Quebec, and the U.S. is eloquent
testimony to the pervasiveness of communications and product distribution in modern
market economies. Obviously, there also existed a shared value system that made
these populations receptive to the technology once it was available.24
With regard to the post-feminist-revolution trend, the quick
country-by-country succession of immediate causes of lower fertility - delaying first
inception, delaying marriage, forgoing marriage and bearing children out of
wedlock - is discernible in our comparative data (see table 3). The lock-step
succession of the inflection in these four very operational indicators of fertility
behaviour is quite dramatic and presupposes that the revolution in gender roles swept
the modernized world almost simultaneously. In the modernized world, an entire
cohort - not even a generation - of women experienced the same revolution at
approximately the same time, the cohort that was in its early twenties in the mid-
1970s - those born in the mid-1950s. In terms of Lesthaeghe and Surkyn's (1988)
analysis of the cultural dynamics of post-war fertility change, we suggest that this is
the next pure-cohort discontinuity after the baby-bust post-materialist discontinuity
(those born 1946 to 1955). That such profound cultural change should be so rapid
and so widespread both within and among societies is surprising. Surely, this is both
only possible in, and characteristic of, the modernized world.
One sobering element of the scientific fall-out of the existence of these
medium-term trends in modernized societies is that we are probably able to foresee
the course of fertility behaviour in newly modernized societies. For instance, we can
be reasonably sure that the post-feminist-revolution fertility-behaviour changes that
occurred in the early 1980s in Spain will further depress the fertility level in that
country, as they did in Quebec; and that Greece, where the same changes took place
23 Lesthaeghe and Surkyn's (1988) analysis attempts to encompass the entire chain, incorporating, for instance
the Becker and Easterlin models.
24 We recall here that cultural diffusion via schooling and the media are important elements in both
Lesthaeghe and Surkyn's (1988) and John Caldwell's (1982) theories of fertility decline.
80
Fertility
Figure 15
Best Trend-Fit fertility Rate,France, 1960-90
Figure 16
Short-Term Variation TFR.France, 1960-90
Source: Data for France in table 1 and the Hodrick-Prescott smoothing technique,
lambda =400
81
in the late 1980s, will see its already low TFR (1.52 in 1989) continue to decline for
at least half a decade.
And what about short-term trends? These would be trends visible in the
pattern of annual variations remaining after extraction of the effect of medium- and
long-term trends. As it happens, there is an extensive literature25 - ignored by
demographers and sociologists but well known to economists - that documents the
existence of a short-term fertility cycle correlated to the business cycle in the
industrial world over the last century (Lodh, 1987). In Quebec, medium- and
long-term trends have been extracted to demonstrate the existence of short-term
trends related to the business cycle (Caldwell and Czarnocki, 1977; Caldwell,
Frechet, and Thibeault, 1992).26 When one "detrends" the French data, what remains
is a cyclical pattern that is, no doubt, a mirror image of the business cycle27
(figures 15 and 16). In figure 16, it is notable that the moments of short-term
depression in fertility coincide with the 1961-62, 1973-75, and 1981-82 recessions,
not to mention the less severe 1965 and 1967 "contractions."28
Those interested in the correlation between the business cycle and
short-term fertility variation report that, in the post-Second World War period, as
much as three quarters of the variation is accounted for by the business cycle (Kirk,
1960). Interestingly, since the relationship was first adequately demonstrated - in the
United Kingdom at the end of the last century (Yule, 1906) - it has become
progressively more important. The interpretation advanced is that this is a
manifestation of the progressive penetration of individual decision making into a
realm once more influenced by norms associated with family formation - notably,
for instance, the connection between getting or being married and having children
(Galbraith and Thomas, 1941).
In conclusion, what can we infer from the above comparative analysis in
a universe of five modernized (or modernizing) societies, over and above the five
specific propositions advanced in this text? One can, we suggest, hypothesize that,
despite a convergence of fertility levels in Western societies, there are two distinct
fertility-level plateaus: a near-replacement level at a TFR of 1.8, and a
non-replacement level in the 1.4 TFR range. Furthermore, although all modern
societies are subject to the same long-term, medium-term, and even short-term trends,
25 See, for instance, Kirk (1960).
26 Using quadratic de-trending of logged data.
27 In the case of French data, we have used as a smoothing technique to simulate a long term trend: the
Hodrick -- Prescott method.
28 These are the dates of the post-1960 recessions and contractions as experienced in Canada.
82
Fertility
cultural and social-policy differences do make a difference - and a crucial one, in

that it is these indigenous influences that determine whether a society experiences one
or another of the contemporary fertility plateaus. For instance, the strong marriage
norm in the U.S. and a long-standing state pro-natalism in France appear to be related
to the fact that both of these societies have near-replacement-level fertility. Sweden,
where efforts to raise fertility have been successful, is now undoubtedly a case of the
latter (Hoem, 1990).
Notwithstanding this prevalence of trends, the phasing of the medium-term
trends is a function of the phasing of modernization itself, with the consequence that
the turning-points involved are not necessarily simultaneous. This phasing is a
question not only of sequence, but of when and how rapidly modernization takes
place. Late modernization is, inevitably, accelerated modernization, and accelerated
modernization has perturbing effects in terms of behaviours related to fertility. Of our
three non-replacement-level societies, two, Quebec and Spain, have experienced late
and accelerated modernization. As for West Germany, the fact that it has fallen to the
lower, non-replacement fertility plateau is, we suspect, a consequence of the
distortions in the modernizing process arising from Germany's defeat in the Second
World War, a mere generation and a half ago.
Finally, nothing in the evolution of the four fertility contextual-behaviour
indicators (average age at first maternity, average age at first marriage, marriage rate,
and the proportion of births outside of marriage), the inflection in direction of which
signaled the post-feminist-revolution turning point (1971 to 1975), would indicate a
reversal of the current trend of sub-replacement fertility. Indeed, fertility theorists
who subscribe to the influence of the modernization or secularization process on
fertility invoked in this analysis - John Caldwell (1982), Kingsley Davis (1984), Ron
Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn (1988), and Larry Bumpass (1990) - can see no reason
that the present long-term trend decline should not continue! We shall content
ourselves with noting that we are due for a medium-term redirection, and that this
redirection will be up, not down;29 however, the medium-term is not the long
term.30
29 When this article was first drafted, in 1990, the current rise in fertility in the Western world was not at all
evident.
30 Indeed, we stand by our position that the current up-turn in fertility is a medium-term, and not necessarily
a long-term, development.
83
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87
4
Employment and Labour-Market Change.
Toward Two Models of Growth
Heinz-Herbert NOLL
Simon LANGLOIS
Many changes have occurred in the composition of the labour force in the developed
industrial societies over the last 30 years. These changes are primarily the result of
structural transformation in the labour market and developments in the demand and
supply of labour. The modernization and computerization of businesses have resulted
in job losses and forced some older workers to retire. The tertiarization of the
economy, particularly job growth in the service sector, has created more opportunities
for paid work outside the home for women and young people. Increasingly, these
changes have also been brought on by social changes outside the labour market. The
supply of labour underwent major transformations as a result of demographic
developments, such as population ageing and increased immigration, and social or
cultural changes, the most important of which is probably the new roles taken on by
women, whose presence in the labour market has increased everywhere. Decreasing
fertility, higher individual levels of education, increases in life expectancy, and rising
numbers of divorces, to name just a few examples, have had major effects on the
structure and composition of the labour force. Because they are numerous and
diversified, these factors may be combined in a number of ways.
Even highly modernized societies on a similar level of social and economic
development, like the ones under consideration here, show remarkable structural
differences. Why is the average retirement age in France lower than elsewhere? Why
89
Figure 1
Changes in Total Population Aged 15 to 64, in Index (1966=100),
Sources: OECD, 1992; StatisticsCanada, cat. nos 91-512,91-210,and 71-001.
Figure 2
Labour-Force Participation Rates, Population Aged 15 to 64,
Sources: OECD, 1992; StatisticsCanada, cat. nos 91-512,91-210,71-001, and 71-529.
90
Labour-Market
is the rate of women's participation in the labour market higher in the United States?
Why has this rate grown more rapidly in Quebec than everywhere else? Why is the
proportion of service-sector employment lower in Germany? The answers to these
questions must be sought through a systematic examination of social and economic
transformations, and especially of their interrelationships, which take on different
forms from one society to another. This is the approach we are following here. We
will begin by looking at changes in total population, trends that characterize
participation in the labour market, and changes in total employment - that is, the
supply and demand of jobs. We will then identify trends in labour-market
participation by age and by sex, since there are significant variations at both ends of
the working-life cycle and in the female population, and these differ from society to
society. An analysis of structural changes in the labour market will follow. The
presumed decline in employment in smokestack industries will be examined, as will
the increase in services, although these are less and less distinguishable from goods.
Do men and women work in the same sectors? Is the quality of their respective jobs
different? Types of employment and precariousness will be considered as indications
of different outcomes of labour-market operations. Finally, we shall look at the scope
and structure of unemployment in the four societies as a major labour-market
problem during the last two decades. It is obvious that some trends differ in various
ways in the four societies, and that others have at least different rates of change. Is
there, then, a convergence or a divergence between the four industrialized societies?
The answer to this question will conclude the analysis.
TRENDS IN EMPLOYMENT AND OCCUPATIONAL ACTIVITY
Two factors affect the evolution of the demand for jobs in any society: changes in
the population of working age1 and in participation in the labour market.
Between 1966 and 1990, growth in the population of working age was
stronger in North America than in Europe: 39% in the United States and 34% in
Quebec, compared to 21% in France and 15% in West Germany (figure 1). Demand
for jobs also grew more strongly in North America, particularly among women and
young people. Over all, the rate of labour-force participation was very similar across
the four societies in the late 1960s, at about 65%. This rate decreased slightly in
France and Germany and increased in the U.S. and Quebec in the late 1980s. Over
a 20-year period, a gap of about 10% developed between the two pairs of societies
(figure 2). These data show a major difference: a much higher proportion of
1 Corresponding to the categories used by the OECD, the population of working age is defined here as the 15-
to-64-year-old population.
91
Figure 3
Evolution of Total Employment,
France, Germany, Quebec and U.S., 1966-90
Sources: OECD, 1992; Statistics Canada, cat. nos 91-512, 91-210, 71-001, and 71-529.
92
Labour-Market
individuals of working age are in the labour marked in North America than in
Europe. In other words, North Americans work more than Europeans.
This divergent development is revealed even more clearly when the supply of
jobs is examined. Between 1966 and 1990, the number of jobs held increased very
slightly in West Germany, growing by a total of 6%, and even underwent negative
growth from 1974 to 1976 and from 1980 to 1983 (figure 3). The number of jobs
began to increase again gradually in 1984, and growth accelerated considerably
during the second half of the 1980s. By 1990, Germany had an unprecedented level
of employment.
Growth in the total number of jobs held was also quite low in France: 10%
during the period considered. However, this growth took place only until the mid-
1970s, and the number of jobs has actually been nearly stable since then. In both
European countries, growth in employment has thus been considerably lower than
growth in the population of working age. The situation is different in North America,
where the number of jobs held grew more rapidly than the population of working
age, and job growth was considerably higher. By 1990, the index, calculated on the
basis of 1966=100, reached a much higher level in the U.S. (160) and Quebec (151)
than in France (110) and Germany (106), where it barely exceeded the level at the
beginning of the period.
In summary, there was strong growth of employment in North America but not
in Europe, first because the population of working age increased more rapidly, but
also because of higher participation rates and a larger supply of jobs.
PARTICIPATION IN THE LABOUR MARKET
Men and women have had opposite behaviour patterns in the labour market over the
past two decades: there has been a decrease in the labour-force participation rate
among men and an increase among women (figure 4). The gap between the rates has
shrunk considerably; the difference is smallest in Quebec and remains most
pronounced in Germany.
In Europe, the low increases in the female participation rate in fact partially
offset the withdrawal of older men and young people from the labour market, so that
the over-all labour-force participation rate has decreased only slightly; the two
developments in a sense have cancelled each other out. The situation is different in
North America. In the United States, the decrease in the male labour-force
participation rate was quite slight and less pronounced than elsewhere; on the other
hand, the female labour-market participation rate rose to a level higher than that in
the other societies. These two movements explain the strong increase of labour-force
participation in the United States. In Quebec, changes in labour-force participation
rates occurred more rapidly and more markedly than elsewhere. The rate for men,
93
Figure 4
Labour-Force Participation Rates by Sex,Population Aged 15 to 64,
Sources: OECD, 1992; StatisticsCanada, cat. nos 91-512,91-210, and 71-001.
particularly those 55 years and older, dropped faster and to a lower level, whereas
the rate for women increased more rapidly. As a result, the differences between male
and female involvement in the labour market were progressively reduced. Significant
changes also occurred in the four societies in participation rates of specific age
groups, particularly those at the beginning and the end of the working-life cycle. For
practical reasons, we shall limit our analysis to three groups: men and women aged
15-24, 25-54, and 55-64 years (figure 5).
It is more difficult to measure the labour-force participation rate of young
people than of any other age group, because institutional differences among the
societies - particularly in the educational system - make international comparisons
more complicated (Freeman and Medoff, 1982; OECD, 1988). In spite of these
limitations, it can be stated that the over-all rate of labour-force participation by
young people is distinctly higher in North America than in Europe. This difference
can be explained to a large extent by a much higher propensity to hold jobs among
students aged 15 to 19 in North America than in France and Germany: more than
40% of 15-to-19-year-old students in the U.S. and Quebec held jobs in the late
1980s, while only about 1% in France and 5% in Germany did so. Among 20-to-24-
year-old students, the labour-force participation rate is about 60% in the U.S. and
50% in Quebec, compared to only 15% in France and 12% in Germany.
94
Labour-Market
The labour-force participation rate of young people rose very rapidly in Quebec
during the 1970s and 1980s, and has almost reached the level in the U.S.. However,
most of them work at part-time jobs, since they attend an educational institution and
therefore cannot work on a full-time basis. According to an OECD study, "the
availability of part-time jobs is a factor that contributes substantially to propagating
the work-and-study formula among young people" (OECD, 1988: 64). The more
restricted availability of part-time jobs in France and Germany and institutional
characteristics of the educational system, particularly greater pressure on students in
North America to earn their own living, explain the differences observed. France is
distinct from the other societies, since the labour-force participation rate among both
men and women aged 15 to 24 there has been decreasing substantially since 1970.
This 15% drop can be attributed, at least in part, to the increase in unemployment,
which has closed the doors of the labour market particularly to young people. Other
factors accounting for the decline are the expansion of the educational system,
including implementation of post-school training schemes set up to counteract the
high rate of youth unemployment.
The data for Germany indicate a trend parallel to that of France at the beginning
of the period examined: a decrease in the rate of participation until 1982, followed
by an increase. The much higher labour-force participation rate of young Germans
compared to the French may at least in part be due to the German system of
vocational training, which is different from that in France and in North America. The
most important type of vocational training in Germany is apprenticeship, which is a
three-year course combining practical training in a business and part-time theoretical
training in school. As opposed to forms of vocational training inside the school
system, this type of training is considered employment in labour-market statistics.
Therefore, the labour-force participation of young people is comparatively high in
Germany, particularly for those who are not studying at the same time. The increase
observed since 1980 can be explained in part by an increase in the number of
apprenticeships due to the baby-boom generation, but also by a general improvement
in the labour-market situation. The decrease in participation before 1980 can be
explained in all societies by the increasing amount of time spent in school or in other
types of general education and vocational training.
Almost all men aged 25-55 years are in the labour force in the four societies
analyzed. The pronounced increase of female labour-force participation is certainly
one of the most important changes to have occurred in our contemporary societies,
and this can be traced to a shorter childbearing period and increasingly high levels
of education among women. Another major change is the increasingly continuous
labour-market-participation profile of married women with dependent children. Fewer
and fewer women abandon their occupational activities after the arrival of children.
Withdrawal from the market after marriage or after having a child is declining,
95
Figure 5
Labour-Force Participation Rate, by Sex and Age,
Men Women
Sources: OECD, 1992; StatisticsCanada, cat. nos 91-512,91-210, and 71-001.
96
Labour-Market
except the case of women having three or more children. Another significant change
is that career interruption is shorter than before, when it does occur at all. As a
consequence, the patterns of male and female labour-market participation are
becoming increasingly similar.
Since 1970, the female participation rate in the middle-age group has increased
continuously in France and the United States, climbing from 50% to about 74% in
the late eighties. It reached almost a similar level in Quebec, but at the end of a more
rapid increase over a 15-year period. Female employment is significantly lower in
Germany than in the other three societies; at the end of the eighties the participation
rate of 25-54-year-old women was only somewhat above 60%. Starting from a
similar level in the early seventies, female labour-force participation increased as
constantly as in other countries, but at a slower rate. There is good reason to assume
that this is related to the lesser degree of tertiarization of the German economy and
to the fact that the participation of German women in the labour market is lower
during the maximum childbearing period and among women with dependent children.
These differences correspond to differences in attitudes toward women's roles. There
is empirical evidence that the proportion of men and women approving of women
working while taking care of young children at home is much smaller in Germany
than in the United States (Alvin, Braun, and Scott, 1992), France, and Quebec.
Besides the massive influx of women into the labour market, the premature
withdrawal of an increasing proportion of men aged 55 to 64 no doubt constitutes
one of the major transformations in the labour market (Jacobs, Kohli, and Rein,
199la). The decrease in labour-force participation of the male population in this age
group was quite sharp in France, dropping from 75% in 1970 to 46% in 1990. The
decline was accelerated by the adoption of governmental measures to encourage early
retirement in order to create jobs for young unemployed persons (Guillemard, 1991).
It was also pronounced in Germany until 1982, after which time it slowed down
(Jacobs, Kohli, and Rein, 1991b). The participation rate of men in this age group was
higher in Quebec than in the U.S. in 1975, but it dropped more rapidly in Quebec,
at nearly the same rate as in France. Programmes aiming to promote early retirement
encouraged this decline in all of the societies, as did accelerated retirement for health
reasons, not to mention the difficult economic situation, which compelled many
workers, employed mainly in traditional industrial sectors, to take forced retirement.
In summary, the labour force has undergone significant transformations, the
amplitude of which has differed from society to society. In North America, more
women and young people have taken on jobs, thereby increasing the proportion of
the population employed as a whole, whereas fewer older men have withdrawn from
the labour market, in contrast to what has occurred in Europe.
97
In summarizing the evolution of labour-force participation in the societies

considered, it can be concluded that the two most outstanding common trends are an
increase in concentration of employment within the intermediate age group and a
gradual decrease in the gap between male and female labour-force participation rates
and patterns. In this respect, it is not so much the direction of the trends that
accounts for the differences between these societies, but rather the continuity and the
rates of change.
SECTORAL STRUCTURE OF THE LABOUR MARKET
The labour market underwent profound changes between 1960 and 1990, ranging
from the relative decline of the secondary sector and a rise in precariousness to the
spreading of unemployment, not to mention a redefinition of the boundaries between
the production sector and the service sector, which are now no longer as clearcut as
they used to be.
There is a regular and ongoing shrinkage in the manufacturing sector as a whole
in all four societies. Employment in this sector was at a higher level in West
Germany, and the gap between this society and the other three remained constant
throughout the period. In Germany, 32% of the labour force was employed in
manufacturing in 1990, versus 21% in France, 19% in Quebec, and 18% in the
United States (figure 6).
A relative decline in employment in the manufacturing sector does not mean that
the industrial sector was decreasing in absolute numbers. In both the U.S. and
Quebec, the absolute number of jobs in the secondary sector remained at about the
same level between 1969 and 1990, with slight upward or downward variations
according to economic cycles. In order to neutralize these variations in the short term
and to better identify the long-term trend, we have calculated five-year moving
averages to describe the evolution of the real number of manufacturing jobs (figure
7). An examination of the trend indicates a drop in the real number of jobs in this
sector in West Germany and in France, and the gap between these two countries had
narrowed by 1990.
The decline in the relative employment share of the secondary sector cannot in
general be interpreted as a sign of deindustrialization (Caplow, 1990; Lawrence,
1984; Loveman and Tilly, 1988). In North America, employment in this sector
remained at about the same level during this period. It is only the large increase in
service-sector employment that caused the decrease in the relative over-all importance
of the secondary sector, creating a statistical illusion. The situation in France and
Germany is different from that in North America, where industrial employment is
decreasing in both relative and absolute terms, while its level is still higher in the
European countries, particularly Germany.
98
Labour-Market
Figure 6
Civilian Employment Rate in Manufacturing and Service Industries,
Sources: OECD, 1992; StatisticsCanada, cat. nos 71-529 and 71-001. Bureau de la
statistiquedu Quebec, Annuaire du Quebec.
Figure 7
Civilian Employment in Manufacturing Industries,
in Index (1971=100), Five Years Moving Average,
Sources: OECD, 1992; StatisticsCanada, cat. nos 71-529 and 71-001. Bureau de la
statistiquedu Quebec, Annuaire du Quebec.
99
Service-sector employment has undergone rapid growth since 1966. This

trend reveals a major structural change, already anticipated early on by Clark (1940)
and Fourastier (1954). The level of employment in this sector exceeded 70% in the
U.S. and Quebec in 1990 (figure 6). In these economies, the ceiling of 80%, which
Fourastier had identified as attainable in this sector, is about to be reached.
In regard to level of tertiarization, Germany is thus among the latecomers in
Europe, whereas France holds an intermediary position. If we compare the points in
time at which the share of employment in the service sector began to exceed 50%,
it becomes obvious that the changes in the sectoral structure of the labour force have
not taken place simultaneously. In France and Germany, this level was not reached
until the mid-1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, respectively, as compared to
Quebec, where more than 50% of the labour force were employed in the service
sector as early as 1960, or the United States, where this phenomenon could be
observed in the 1950s.
In the societies that registered an increase in employment in the 1980s, this
increase is almost entirely concentrated in the service sector. The dynamics of the
tertiarization process are still strong even in those economies in which tertiarization
is most advanced. It particularly favours women and young and well-trained
employees. The American experience, however, proves that the expansion of the
service sector is not automatically linked to an increase in high-skill jobs, but that it
does affect the number of jobs for which higher levels of qualification are not
required.
Germany has not yet managed to make up for its above-average time lag in
tertiarization. In respect to service-sector employment, the United States was ahead
of Germany by 18% in 1970 and by 14% in 1990. France, on the other hand, has
gained ground on its way toward a service economy and has reduced its gap in
comparison with the United States by half (14% in 1970, 7% in 1990).
There may be various reasons for the considerable differences in the size of
the service economy, even between societies that by other standards have reached
similar levels of development. There is certainly no simple and universal explanation
for this phenomenon. The variations observed in the sectoral distribution of the
labour-force are at least in part due to the fact that the statistical procedure of
assigning employees to economic sectors is handled by different classification
principles from society to society. Individual businesses, or even entire industries,
classified in the service sector in one society may be assigned to the manufacturing
sector in another, and vice versa. There is ample evidence, for example, that the
degree of tertiarization in terms of sectoral distribution of the labour force is
underestimated for Germany.
As to Germany and its tertiarization time lag, discussion has focused on three
factors. One might argue that the potential for expansion of employment in social
100
Labour-Market
services is more limited in societies in which these services are not primarily
supplied by the market, as they are in the U.S., but are provided by welfare-state
institutions and financed by the public, and are thus subjected to specific restrictions.
The rather strong external orientation of the German economy seems to be a second
explanation for the observed differences, given the correlation between a larger
service sector and the strength of the internal orientation of an economy. In addition,
the international competitiveness of the manufacturing industries may contribute to
the fact that secondary-sector employment in Germany is larger than in comparable
economies.
While these factors - with some qualifications - may also account for the
smaller gap between France and North America, there is also evidence that the
process of "contracting out," in which service functions within secondary-sector
businesses are taken over by specialized tertiary-sector businesses, is less advanced
in Germany than in France, the U.S., or Quebec. Obviously, this process has
contributed substantially to the expansion of the service sector in recent years.
Internalization of the market is much more marked in Germany, where, for example,
large industrial enterprises carry out many activities which would be otherwise
classified as services.
While employment shares in the service sector differ, developmental trends
within the tertiary sector are strikingly similar across the societies. Business-oriented
services have expanded the most in all four societies, and there is an above-average
increase in social services, particularly in the fields of health and education. These
service functions are the ones in which Germany may still have a lot of catching up
to do, compared to other countries with a higher degree of tertiarization. Thus some
authors claim that there is a good chance of a further increase in employment in the
service sector (Krupp, 1986).
Finally, it should be pointed out that growth in services was more rapid in
societies that had reached the highest levels of labour-market participation among
married women. Indeed, the arrival of married women in the labour market implied
a shift in a number of activities relating to production in day-to-day life - such as
child care and housework - toward the open market; these activities are then taken
into consideration in the national accounts and recognized in the official statistics,
which is not the case for housework done by women not active in the labour market.
As a general trend in the change of the sectoral structure of work, it must be
stated that the classic distinction between goods and services, as described by Hill
(1977), is less and less valid, and the dividing line between the two is increasingly
vague. The manufacture of products requires more and more services, and certain
goods are highly personalized. Moreover, the production of certain services is
increasingly linked to the production of goods (Gershuny, 1978). But it is particularly
the arrival of new technologies that has contributed to making the boundary between
101
goods and services more vague, as was clearly demonstrated in a study by the
Economic Council of Canada (1991). A service produced by a business can be stored,
as in the case of a computer programme or an audiovisual presentation, or it can be
produced on an assembly line (fast food or frozen food). There are delays in the
delivery of certain services, and the personalized relationship can be entirely absent.
Certain classic characteristics of goods may also apply to a broad range of services,
and characteristics of services may apply to an increasing number of goods, such as
personalization or just-in-time delivery. For example, cars or bicycles that are
personalized to a certain extent can be mass-produced. As well, there are increasing
numbers of machines and new technologies involved in the distribution of services
such as health care, personal financial management, scientific research, and education.
This effacement of the boundaries between the industrial and service sectors thus
creates the need for certain clarifications in any analysis of the evolution of
employment by sector in the future.
TYPES OF EMPLOYMENT AND WORKING CONDITIONS:

GOOD JOBS AND BAD JOBS?
Without doubt, a rise in precariousness and a deterioration in quality of some jobs

are significant characteristics of labour-market changes during the 1980s. Obviously,
precariousness is more pronounced in North America than in the two European
countries. In the two North American societies, the number of jobs held increased
considerably, but a large number of the new jobs were of low quality compared to
those that had been created during the years of strong economic growth. The
increase in precarious jobs has been considered to be one of the forces behind the
claimed trend of a declining middle class (Bradbury 1986; Harrison and Bluestone
1988; Lawrence, 1984; Phillips 1990; Picot, Myles, and Wannell 1990). This decline
can also be attributed to changes in demography in household composition, as various
authors have demonstrated.
One factor that must be considered in an explanation of growing
precariousness is the change in distribution of age groups. There are more young
people in the North American labour market, hence the downward pressure on
incomes. This phenomenon is important, even if it does not totally explain the
decrease in wages and salaries or the deterioration in quality of jobs. The study by
Picot, Myles, and Wannell (1990) on Canada and Quebec and that by Lawrence
(1984) on the United States showed that when the effect of changes in the
distribution of age groups is neutralized, the decline in the quality of jobs still exists.
These studies also showed that the decline in average total quality of jobs could not
be attributed to a more rapid increase in sectors offering jobs of lower quality (in
personal services, the retail trade, and, more generally, McJobs), an explanation
102
Labour-Market
rooted in popular wisdom often mentioned in the mass media or in the most
superficial analyses. On the contrary, the phenomenon seems to be present in all
sectors of activity, including ones that have traditionally offered the best working
conditions.
The goods-production sector was more severely affected by the increase in
precariousness and the decrease in quality of jobs. There are fewer jobs in the
traditional big industries, many of which offer fewer benefits than previously, and
more in smaller businesses, which offer less advantageous working conditions.
According to Lawrence (1984), men aged 50 and over bore the bount of this
transformation. In North America, a larger proportion of older employees remained
in the labour-force, but were forced to accept a reduction in their working conditions,
whereas Europeans more often left the labour market through early retirement.
Several studies have shown that the quality of jobs available to young people
has also deteriorated in North America. Young employees are more exposed to
precariousness than are the other age groups, particularly in comparison to the young
people of preceding generations. In fact, for the first time in North America, young
people face the prospect of downward intergenerational social mobility; there seems
to be the real possibility of being unable to surpass, or even maintain, the standard
of living their parents have reached.
Precariousness of employment is still a marginal phenomenon in France.
Malinvaud (1987) assessed the proportion of precarious jobs (fixed-term contracts)
at 3% of the total and at 10% among young people. He also observed that employees
who had been unemployed were more dependent on the vicious circle of precarious
jobs than were other members of the labour-force, and that this dependence had
increased since the 1970s.
Germany also faced some increase in precarious types of employment during
the last decade: besides fixed-term employment (Rudolph, 1987) and marginal
part-time work, there were rising numbers of agency workers and people temporarily
employed in the context of public job-creation schemes (Biichtemann and Quack,
1989). To some extent, the increase in precarious work seems to be a consequence
of the high level of unemployment at the beginning of the 1980s, which forced some
people to accept jobs of inferior quality. On the other hand, the policy of deregulation
of the labour market, which took place in Germany and in many other countries
during the 1980s, also gave rise to nonstandard types of work, particularly the growth
of fixed-term jobs. Over all, however, the increase in precarious types of work in
Germany was rather marginal and their total share is still of minor importance (Noll,
1991).
103
UNEMPLOYMENT
Although unemployment, by its nature, is a cyclical phenomenon and is not likely to

follow a long-term trend, it nevertheless has multifarious effects on behavioural and
structural changes in various societal domains. The so-called oil-price shocks of 1973
and 1979, which induced recessionary trends in the world economy, have been
important markers for the development of unemployment in the last two decades. As
in many other countries, there was a significant increase in unemployment following
the two oil-price shocks in all societies under study here. It would be too simple,
however, to consider the rise in oil prices to be the only or the essential cause of the
increase in unemployment within this period of time. Rather, it seems that the oil-
price shocks, besides their recessive consequences, triggered and accelerated an
economic and technical structural change that resulted in a quantitative and
qualitative change in the demand for labour. Apart from this structural change on the
demand side, an unusually large increase in the supply of labour contributed to
labour-market imbalances, partly due to a change in female labour-force participation
and to demographic changes, as mentioned above. (Franz and Konig, 1987).
Cross-national comparative analysis of the evolution and structure of
unemployment is handicapped by the fact that the comparability of the data bases is
not fully ensured. In the United States, France, and Quebec, information about
employment status and about the characteristics of unemployment and the
unemployed is collected by labour-force surveys, while information for Germany is
based on the statistics of the federal labour administration. In this context, a person
is classified unemployed if he or she is registered as unemployed with the
employment office. This methodological difference in data collecting, as well as other
differences in statistical classification, have to be taken into account when
interpreting the national differences we find in the data.
Due to differences in initial economic situation, institutional settings, and
political approaches to coping with the labour-market crisis, the four societies were
not hit equally by unemployment, although the structural problems they encountered
were quite similar. During the 1960s and early 1970s, unemployment was low in
Germany and France (figure 8). It was not until the late 1970s that the scope of the
problem reached a level comparable to that which had obtained in North America for
some time. Quebec faced the highest rates of unemployment almost throughout the
period, with a maximum of 14% in 1983. The United States, on the other hand, fared
remarkably well during the 1980s, coming off better than Germany or France. The
relatively moderate level of unemployment, and especially the enormous growth in
jobs, gave rise to the reputation of the United States as an "employment miracle,"
except for the fact that some of these new jobs were considered "bad" jobs.
104
Labour-Market
Figure 8
Evolution of Unemployment Rates,
France, Germany, Quebec and U.S., 1966-90
Sources: OECD, 1992; Langlois et al., 1991.
105
In the 1980s, unemployment passed its peak in all four societies. Whereas
unemployment had begun to decrease in the United States and Quebec in the early
1980s, this occurred somewhat later in the two European societies: in Germany by
the mid-1980s and in France not before the end of the decade. As yet, however,
unemployment has not come down to the level of the early 1970s, and there are signs
that it is rising again in all four societies.
In addition to differences in the overall level of unemployment, there are
significant distinctions between the four societies with respect to the structure and
duration of unemployment. Women have a higher risk of becoming unemployed than
men in all four societies and at almost all points in time. Strikingly, this difference
is much larger in the European societies under consideration than in the North
American ones. This finding can be interpreted as an indication of a gender-specific
segmentation of the labour market.
When we compare the unemployment rates of three age groups (15 to 24
years, 25 to 54 years, 55 to 64 years), we find that in Quebec and the United States
the risk of becoming unemployed decreases with age, while in Germany and France
- at least for men - the intermediary age group carries the smallest risk of
becoming unemployed. One possible explanation for the differences is that the
"last-in, first-out" principle that favours older employees is applied more rigidly in
North America than in Germany or France. Germany differs from the other three
societies by its comparatively low level of youth unemployment, and by the fact that
the oldest age group - men and women alike - is most affected by unemployment.
In France, on the other hand, due to some characteristics of its educational system,
young people, especially young women, carry an extraordinarily high risk of
unemployment compared to the other societies (Malinvaud, 1987).
Most significant perhaps are the inter-society differences in the duration of
unemployment. While there was an increase in all four societies, at least at the
beginning of the 1980s, the incidence of long-term unemployment remained much
lower in North America than in Europe (figure 9). In 1989, the proportion of long-
term unemployment - that is, unemployment for 12 months and over - was 11% in
Quebec and 6% in the United States, compared to 44% in France and 49% in
Germany (OECD, 1991). In the North American societies, unemployment seems to
be absorbed relatively quickly in comparison to the two European societies. Although
there is in general a positive correlation between the aggregate level of
unemployment and the proportion of the long-term unemployed, the various levels
of unemployment obviously cannot explain the differences in unemployment duration.
Although these differences may in part be due to data-collection methods,
there is good reason to look at them as indications of different modes of labour-
market operations. The OECD states that "in North America the rate of flows into
and out of unemployment is relatively high and ... job search and hiring are relatively
106
Labour-Market
Figure 9
Incidence of Long-term Unemployment
% Unemployed 12 Months and Over
France, Germany, Canada, and U.S., 1983-89
Source: OECD, 1992.
familiar activities for workers and employers respectively" (OECD, 1991: 41). On the
other hand, labour markets in France and Germany, as well as in some other
European societies, are characterized by comparatively low labour turnover, and the
experience of unemployment is more restricted to specific groups within the labour-
force than is the case in North America.
The differences in duration of unemployment can be seen over all as
indications that labour market operations in the two European societies favour those
with a job by giving them a considerable amount of protection against job loss,
whereas labour-market operations in the two North American societies favour the
unemployed by giving them better opportunities to reintegrate into the ranks of the
working population.
TWO MODELS OF GROWTH: CONVERGENCE OR DIVERGENCE?
In summary, the economic growth observed in the past 30 years in the four societies
examined was apparently sustained by two mechanisms: the creation of a larger
number of jobs in North America and higher labour productivity in Europe (figure
10). Freeman, for example, claims "that the United States paid for job creation with
slow growth in real wages and productivity ... Americans work harder for the same
gain in living standards as Europeans" (Freeman, 1988: 298-299).
107
Since the mid-1970s, the standard of living has increased in the United States
and Quebec almost exclusively because more people were involved in the labour-
force. Although people worked more - in terms of labour-force participation as well
as in terms of hours worked - in North America, there were also greater numbers of
precarious or poorly paid jobs. The European societies created fewer jobs and
tolerated increasing levels of unemployment, but at the same time they were less
affected by precariousness and more successful in terms of growth in incomes and
a reduction in working hours.
Over all, we can therefore advance the hypothesis that there were two models
of growth during the period from 1960s to 1990s: one based mainly on increasing
productivity, and the other on the broadening of the labour-force. A French economist
came to the conclusion that in France and Germany, "employment is partly sacrificed
for competitiveness and to maintain the standard of living of those workers who do
have jobs" (Marchand, 1990: 19).
Are the two divergent models following a continuous trend, or are we witnessing
a convergence? A study by the OECD indicates that the beginning of the 1990s
marks the "first sign of an attenuation of the disequilibrium of the past decade during
which Europe as a whole saw strong growth in production but a levelling off in
employment, whereas North America registered rapid employment growth, but a
levelling off in productivity" (OECD, 1989: 19). At present, there are more
indications of convergence than of divergence: precariousness is not a phenomenon
only of North American labour markets, but is also expanding in France and, to a
lesser extent, in Germany; the number of jobs increased again considerably in France
and Germany during the late 1980s, while unemployment rose again in the U.S. and
Quebec and the gap in productivity growth declined. Taking into account the
diminishing differences in the sectoral structure of the work force and in the patterns
of labour-market participation, the societies under examination obviously are
becoming more similar, even if they are still different in many aspects of
employment structure and labour-market operation.
108
Labour-Market
Figure 10
Growth in Total Employment, Productivity, and Gross Domestic Product,
France, Germany, Canada, and U.S., 1973-79 and 1979-89
Growth of Total Employment
Growth in Productivity
Growth in Real GDP
Sources: OECD, 1992; Statistics Canada, cat. nos 71-529 and 71-001. Bureau de la statistique du Quebec,
Annuaire du Quebec.
109
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113
5
The Changing Bonds of Kinship.
Parents and Adult Children
Howard M. BAHR
Jean-Hugues DECHAUX
Karin STIEHR
Our objective is to portray intergenerational relations in the four societies under study
in the context of other contemporary trends that may influence the way kinship
behaviour is enacted and the forms it takes.1 We have also reviewed the vast
research literature on generational ties in industrial societies, in order to frame our
study of change within well-established generalizations from that literature.
Theoretically, the number of one's kindred is a function of the fecundity and
mortality histories of one's family, but in practice these biological constraints are
mediated by cultural definitions of what constitutes a "close" or "distant" tie and by
variables such as traditional holiday practices, family social status, and the residential
proximity of marginal or "distant" kin. Kinship as a network of relations among
relatives is more sociological than genealogical. Genealogy defines potential
networks, but interaction determines their reality. In common usage, terms such as
"kinship" and "relatives" have ambiguous limits. Much of the research literature
1 Much of this chapter was written while the senior author held a faculty research fellowship at the David M.
Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University. In addition, the Kennedy Center
provided partial support for the January, 1992, semi-annual meeting of the International Research Group in
Provo, Utah, where drafts of this and several other chapters in the present volume were presented and
critiqued.
115
applies concepts such as "kinship network" or "intergenerational relations" to studies

that have mainly to do with the "immediate" families of orientation and procreation.
For international comparisons, a very narrow definition, a core that virtually
all researchers identify, is preferable to a wider one with varying network boundaries.
Accordingly, most of the present analysis is limited to one category of
intergenerational ties: parent-child relationships. This limitation is not very
constraining, because the parent-child connection is the single most important kinship
tie in Western industrial societies, and the so-called kinship literature is mainly
concerned with the study of relations between older parents and their grown
children.2 Studies of intergenerational relations or kinship, whatever else they do,
usually highlight the priority of this bond. No other kinship tie approaches the parent-
child connection in terms of affect, contact and communication, mutual obligation,
and helping behaviour.3
An emphasis on the parent-adult child connection is also appropriate because
that dyad has become the typical one. In each of the four late-stage industrial
societies considered here, there are now more parent-adult child pairs than there are
parent-minor child pairs. In other words, the parent-child bond is now predominantly
a relationship between adults. This new modal relation is more complicated than the
typical parent-child dyad of former times. It often involves simultaneous occupancy
of the role of child and parent, for most adults nowadays have responsibilities to at
least two generations (Smyer, 1984: 325-326).
Good trend data on kin relations are relatively scarce, and therefore some of
our national trend reports on kinship networks were largely qualitative and
impressionistic. Each drew upon local or regional studies to some degree. As a result,
the present chapter does not rely quite as heavily on the trend reports in the four
national volumes as do some other chapters in this book. This is not to say that it is
any less an outgrowth of the co-ordinated efforts of our Research Group, but rather
2 Although there are relatively few quantitative studies of sibling relationships, the literature on kinship relations
in industrial society is so extensive that "relatively few" now amounts to a substantial bibliography. The
underrepresentation of studies of sibling relations in the research literature was recently underscored by several
contributors to a special issue (1989, no. 1) of American Behavioral Scientist. The research indicates that in
old age siblings are relatively unimportant as sources of instrumental support but more important for emotional
support; that there is little sibling contact in comparison to parent-child contact; and that sibling pairs involving
sisters are closer than those involving brothers only (Gold, 1989: 30). Most studies of connections beyond the
immediate family are of ties to grandparents.
3 Stated differently, the research literature on kinship is largely a literature of "familial" relations (i.e.,
"relationships [that] arise out of reproductive activities involving interaction by persons living in proximity")
in the limited usage of that term recommended by Harris (1990: 74). Closely related is Hohn and Liischer's
(1988: 317) conceptualization of family as "life-forms (Lebensformen) based primarily upon the organization
of parent-child relations, which enjoy a special status of societal recognition."
116
Intergenerational Relations
that the collection and analysis of much of the data followed the preparation of the
individual trend reports rather than building directly on them.
We acknowledge the risks inherent in generalizing about even one society (see
Gommers, Hankenne, and Rogowski, 1979: 117), let alone across societies and
language groups. In the present instance, there is a great temptation to conclude that
because rates of residential proximity, kin contact, or household structure are
approximately the same from one society to the next, the same things are happening
in each place. Yet we know from the literature of several other national trends that
apparent parallelism often presents a situation in which a myriad of differing cultural
and historical factors have yielded nearly identical rates.
A related problem is the too-ready acceptance of notions of "convergence" or
"isomorphism".4 The assumption that changes in one society have their counterparts
in another, perhaps offset in time but similar in direction, may facilitate the
premature and erroneous identification of "master trends." An example bearing
directly on kinship relations is an attempt to interpret the "massive trend" toward
early labour-force withdrawal among persons aged 55-64 in several industrial
countries. Seeking similarities in the institutional arrangements that produced this
trend, Guillemard (1989: 169) was careful to examine the data for each nation
separately rather than assuming parallelism. "The institutional arrangements to be
taken into account cannot be defined a priori," she wrote "they must be discovered
and examined country by country." Similarly, van de Kaa (1987: 8-12, 33) argues
that despite a "second demographic transition" that manifests remarkably similar
characteristics in most European nations, many factors are at play within each nation,
and similar outcomes may reflect different combinations of antecedents.
We will begin our examination of intergenerational relations in France,
Germany, Quebec, and the U.S. by restating certain well-documented characteristics
of kinship in modern industrial societies. These include descriptive attributes of
kinship relations as well as generalizations about processes of change and the mutual
interplay between family and other social institutions. We then review some of the
"master trends" supposedly driving changes in kinship relations. Next, we consider
demographic changes relevant to parent-child relations, especially trends in life
expectancy, the sex ratio, fertility, births outside of marriage, and abortion. Finally,
4 Weatherford (1981) notes the frequent tacit assumption of similarity among industrial nations and cautions
that there is no more reason to think that they are all alike than there is to think that all pastoral or
horticultural peoples are alike. His analysis of labour and domestic life cycles in an industrial, non-urban
German community demonstrates that small differences in the labour or working-life cycle may be
accompanied by substantial differences in domestic life cycles and cultural patterns of ageing. The sizeable
differences in family life and ageing patterns, he says, are consequences of interactions involving "particular
values which are pronounced in German society," along with a distinctive history of supporting legal and
governmental policies and the influence of the local environment (Weatherford, 1981: 145-146).
117
we turn from issues of cultural and demographic context to characteristics of

households and families: household size and composition, residential proximity to
parents and children, frequency of visits, and mutual aid.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF FAMILIES

AND KINSHIP RELATIONS IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES
In late-stage industrial societies, the dominant family form is the "modified extended
family," generally with the following characteristics: frequent interaction, close
affective bonds, exchange of goods and services, mutual aid, voluntary interaction,
and at least some family members residing within visiting distance (Bengtson and
Cutler, 1976; Cowgill, 1986; Sussman, 1976; Troll, 1971; Troll, Miller, and Atchley,
1979; Young and Willmott, 1957). Kin structure is typically bilateral, with an
emphasis on close blood relationships, a matrilateral focus, and a female-centred basis
for kinship activities (Johnson and Barer, 1987; Kivett, 1985: 228; Yanigasako,
1977). Relationships are normative but often governed by a "voluntaristic or optional
principle," and relatives tend to be divided into two major classes, the nuclear family
and an amorphous category of "kindred" with culturally variable boundaries.
Most elderly people live near and have frequent contact with at least some of
their children (Cowgill, 1986; Shanas et al., 1968: 195; Townsend, 1957; Young and
Willmott, 1957: 30). Relations between grandparents and grandchildren are usually
rather formal or distant, with the lack of affect due partly to physical distance and
partly to their differing activities (Cowgill, 1986: 92).5 Among the factors that
influence kin relations are the proximity of kindred in space and time, closeness of
genealogical linkage, fertility and mortality rates, common residence, household
composition, and cultural differentials reflecting region, ethnicity, class, and gender.
The influence of spatial/temporal proximity is mediated by the strength
(affective and biological closeness) of the relation and a society's communications
and transportation technology. Other things being equal, distance attenuates contact,
communication, and mutual aid. In other words, the greater the dispersion of kin, the
weaker their reciprocal influence, and "the stronger the nuclear unit becomes at the
expense of kin ties" (Blood, 1970: 193). Even with modern transportation and
communication, distance is an important determinant of kin contact, with frequency
of contact inversely related to the distance between residences (Cowgill, 1986: 85).
Both number of visits and amount of help received by older people from their close
kin is directly related to residential proximity (Kivett, 1985: 231).
5 Cowgill's generalization refers to Western families, but the research it reflects is more American and British
than continental. In contemporary Germany, grandmothers and often grandfathers are highly involved in child-
raising activities because external child-care facilities are insufficient.
118
The parent-adult child tie is the most important kinship relation in terms of
mutual support (see, for example, Adams, 1968; Shanas, 1979a; Taylor, 1986), and
the most important parent-child bond is that between mother and child. Initially
biological, it is augmented by socialization and nurturant interaction. For many
reasons, throughout life women continue to be more involved than men in
maintaining interpersonal family connections. The net consequence is that the mother-
child connection endures longer and matters more than other kinship ties in terms
of communication, caring, visiting, mutual responsibility, and mutual aid.
The effects of genealogical distance are roughly congruent to those of
space/time. Kinship obligations fade with genealogical distance, "not because they
subsist between members of different categories, but because the parties have never
shared common household membership experiences" (Harris, 1990: 74).
Much of the literature on the primacy of parent-child dyads supports the
conclusion that their cohabitation - the sharing of experiences and the reciprocation
that accompanies family life - creates obligations and generates privileges that are
crucial determinants of subsequent relationships between parents and grown children.
Family activity creates sentiments, rituals, and enduring social patterns. Role
obligations weaken with distance from the parent-child dyad, and in most industrial
societies "consanguineous relatives outside of the family of orientation [are] ... of
little functional importance to the support systems of older adults" (Kivett, 1985:
229).
Changes in longevity and fertility alter kinship structure - or, at least, its
potential structure. The greater the life expectancy, the greater the number of
generations available for intergenerational activity. The higher the fertility, the more
potential kindred within a single generation.
Fertility does not determine the nature of kinship networks, but it sets limits.
High fertility means that there are potentially many family members, both in the
family of orientation and in the extended kinship network. Low fertility means that
even though older people live long lives, many will be without grandchildren
(Cowgill, 1986: 91). Note that from the perspective of grandchildren, high life
expectancy means that virtually all grandchildren will have two or three generations
of living antecedents.
Perhaps most essentially, culture provides the social definitions of whatever
biological links are known to exist. All societies specify rights and obligations that
accompany putative biological ties, especially close connections. The significance of
"kindred" is socially defined, and the meaning and limits of "family" and "kindred"
vary from culture to culture.
Kinship definitions and behaviour vary within as well as between nations.
Each national society has ethnic populations whose kinship patterns differ from the
majority's. In addition to purely ethnic effects, populations may be characterized by
119
regional or locational differences that also influence kinship relations. Furthermore,

ethnic subcultures typically differ from the majority socio-economically, and class
status is known to influence kinship patterns.
The multiculturality of European countries has been augmented by the "guest
worker" movement, whereby labour shortages have been resolved by importing
workers from less developed lands. In addition, many refugees have entered Europe.
These "foreigners" in France and Germany appear rapidly to adjust their fertility and
much of their other behaviour to host norms, but they still reflect distinctive, or even
"traditional," kinship and family values.6
There are also historic regional patterns, such as the several French
"anthropological traditions." In southwestern France, the proportion of households
with parents and adult children living together is higher than elsewhere because of
the traditional maison family type, which resembles the notion of "stem family"
developed by Frederic Le Play (see Augustins, 1989; Dechaux, 1991). In the U.S.,
there are two distinct orientations of rural families to "closest" kin: an "extended-kin"
familism in the rural South that includes considerable residential concentration of
kindred and counts first cousins as "close" kin, and a "western type" familism that
defines "close" as coterminous with the nuclear family (Heller and Quesada, 1977).
Also, blacks and Hispanics differ from whites in levels of interaction between the
elderly and their children, and in financial help and other aid exchanged. There are
also Hispanic-black differences (Cantor, 1979; Jackson, 1980; Shanas, 1979a). Studies
of networks of support for elderly blacks in the U.S. reveal considerable regional and
socio-economic variation (Taylor, 1985).
Variations in socio-economic status produce differences in kinship behaviour
and in the scale of kin networks. For instance, Blood (1970: 191) found that among
high-status people, a lower proportion of all social transactions were kin transactions
than among low-status people. However, this did not mean that kinship ties were less
important to high-status people, because "the same discretionary margin which
enables such families to devote more resources to their kin also enables them to
devote more resources to non-kin." As a result, paradoxically, "kin are at the same
6 In 1982, about 10% of French births and almost 15% of German births were due to the fertility of immigrants.
In Germany, immigrants amounted to just over 4% of the population in 1970, rising to 8% by 1989. In France
in 1982, immigrants comprised 11% of the population, with Algerians, Portuguese, Italians, and Moroccans
accounting for over half of the foreign-born. In Germany, "guest workers" are not regarded as immigrants and
are supposed to return to their native countries after a limited stay, but this legal definition does not reflect
reality. In fact, foreigners' stays are becoming longer.
120
time more important absolutely and less important relatively for high status people."7
Rossi and Rossi (1990: 226-228) also found socio-economic status to make a
difference. Among their Bostonian respondents, the strength of perceived kinship
obligation varied directly with educational attainment.
Another way that culture matters is in the value orientation of populations, for
such orientations ascribe meanings and establish priorities of family behaviour. That
is, they determine what is appropriate or proper behaviour in dealing with one's
family and relatives, and what one's rights and duties are. Cultural values that
accentuate commitment (or altruism or "traditionalism") are likely to maintain and
strengthen kinship systems. On the other hand, those that give priority to
individualism (or hedonism or "progressivism") are thought to limit and attenuate
kinship systems. Culture also shapes kinship relations through gender roles. In
Western societies - and apparently in most other present-day societies - women are
more responsible for "kin-keeping" activities than are men. Women traditionally have
been assigned the bulk of nurturance activity, and "filial services" are usually
provided by daughters or sisters (Harris, 1990: 90; Smyer, 1984: 330-331).8
Contemporary trends that add to women's kinship responsibilities are recent
increases in the number of female-headed families and, at the upper ages, greater
numbers of women. Note that if most kinship services are provided by adult women,
and these women are also increasingly occupied in the labour force, either they must
become more burdened or the level of services and activities they provide must
decline.9
7 This paradoxical relation is confirmed in German research conducted in 1984-85 in which lower-class people
reported a "contact net" of about 13 people, while upper-middle-class people reported about 35. However,
the larger number reported among the higher-class people was due almost entirely to their having more friends
and acquaintances; they did not have many more kin. Their larger networks were not inherited but gained in
the course of life, and thus tended to be more voluntary and reciprocal than the kinship ties that both they
and the lower-class respondents had (Marbach and Mayr-Kleffel, 1988).
8 For example, in England, the proportion of elderly parents having daily contact with sons is half that of those
having contact with daughters, and the elderly parents live closer to their daughters than to their sons
(Cowgill, 1986: 86; Young and Geertz, 1961: 131-133). The bias to female linkages also extends to cousins.
In one study, the cousin of most contact was a maternal blood relative (55%) or maternally related through
marriage (6%) (Kivett, 1985: 230). Even researchers are oriented by the prevailing bias: there are fewer
studies of grandfathers than of grandmothers, and much that falls under the title "grandparenting" is either
derived from or mostly applies to grandmothers. Similarly, there are many more studies of mother-child than
of father-child relations, and more studies of relations between sisters than between brothers.
9 Efforts to involve "the family" in various activities of mutual support generally occupy women more than
men. In what Baker (1986: 439) calls the "social conscience" approach, appeals to the "morality" of family
responsibility "reinforce ... increasing the obligations of normally female family members to the old, sick and
handicapped." Blood (1970: 200) notes that while today's kin networks are more equalitarian and less
hierarchical than formerly, even this "softening" of kinship obligations continues to foster greater participation
121
KINSHIP AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Among the historical processes often cited as disrupting or changing kinship

behaviour are modernization, industrialization, and urbanization.10 Accompanying
these master processes have been changes in demographic rates, such as increased
migration and reduced fertility and mortality, that have had significant impacts on the
structure of kinship groups. Changes in political and educational institutions have also
influenced kin relations and, conversely, kinship groups and families have influenced
political, educational, and other social institutions.
We now know that there is no necessary relationship between modernization
and the size or viability of kinship systems. Sometimes modernization strengthens
kinship systems, although that seems not to have been the usual experience in
Western industrial nations. For example, living in a city, with its diversity of
occupational specialties, may actually reduce people's need to migrate in search of
employment, and thereby increase their opportunity to live near kindred (Sussman,
1970: 95). Under some circumstances, kin networks facilitate rather than obstruct
modernization, and among the possible effects of migration are a concentration and
intensification of kin ties (Blood, 1970: 191,196; Talmon, 1970).11
In many modern settings, the kin group continues to be an important
economic unit, facilitating integration into the economy. If kinship groups enact such
of women than men.
10 Brief definitions of these processes are in order here. (Defining them further, specifying the relations
among them, and comparing the intellectual and political orientations (or perspectives or paradigms or
theories) associated with them is a multi-volume task beyond present need or capability.)
"Industrialization" refers to the progressive utilization of inanimate sources of energy in economic
production. "Modernization" denotes an increasing rationality in the planning, management, and conduct
of social life, including necessary changes in social institutions and in people's attitudes and values, in
the interest of industrial development and technological innovation. "Urbanization" refers to the processes
whereby increasing proportions of a society's population live in cities or areas of relatively high
population concentration.
11 Two decades ago, Sussman (1970: 497-498) called for more study of family systems as forces
independently acting to shape their institutional environment in place of the usual conceptualization of
family as a dependent variable. He insisted that the relationship was reciprocal: families acted and also
were acted upon. He maintained that cross-cultural studies were especially useful in learning "how the
particular form and stage of industrialization and urbanization affected change in the family structure and
functions and how the family system itself may have shaped and molded the pattern of economic and
industrial development." Reviewing Murdock's study of the interplay of social and family change in
250 societies, Sussman (1970: 490) concluded, "Kinship structures do not break down, dissolve, or even
change radically as the result of culture contact with either equal or technologically advanced societies.
Rather, such structures evolve and adjust over time, taking on activities and functions which for the most
part are supportive of and adaptive to the changed conditions and emerging social systems."
122
functions, then kinship ties are a vital part of the contemporary social structure.
Kinship ties may establish or sustain economic ties, and by the same token economic
relationships may strengthen or weaken kinship ties (Harris, 1990: 92).
To summarize, family and kinship relations exist along with other social
relations, and cannot be understood a priori as either in opposition to or congruent
with them. Sometimes the family institution competes with other "greedy institutions"
for loyalty and personal resources (Coser, 1974), and sometimes kinship systems
facilitate access and achievement in other institutions. The relation between kinship
and modernization must be interpreted in particular historical, cultural, and
institutional contexts.
"MASTER TRENDS": MODERNIZATION, INDUSTRIALIZATION,

URBANIZATION
In highlighting aspects of the "master trends" apparent in these four national contexts,
we do not intend a redundant retesting of the already discredited urbanization -
family defunctionalization hypothesis. Rather, we merely wish to emphasize that there
are important, continuing societal differences in many key indicators of
modernization/industrialization. Indeed, there turns out to be enough diversity in level
and sometimes even direction of trend so as to call into question the oft-assumed
direct linkage between modernization and the micro-realities of kinship behaviour.
That is, when we actually compare specific modernization indicators, rather than
assuming their similarity, it appears that the four societies under study differ more
in modernization level or phase than in kinship behaviour.
A further problem in trying to interpret changes in intergenerational behaviour
in the context of the modernization (or postmodern) perspective is that master trends
such as modernization or industrialization are so broadly defined as to be virtually
useless as discrete independent variables. Consider this definition from a sociology
text:
Modernization refers to a set of social changes that have taken place in
societies throughout the world in the past three centuries. It encompasses all
the changes that societies and individuals experience as a result of
industrialization, urbanization, and the development of nation-states ... [It]
summarizes most of the major changes, for better or worse, that societies
throughout the world are experiencing, albeit at differing rates and with
different amounts of social disruption. (Kornblum, 1988: 568-569)
Note that there is virtually no change since 1700 that may not be described as
modernization. The metaphor is all-encompassing: modernization causes everything,
or is everything. It is presumed to permeate all aspects of family life:
123
"Industrialization ... moved production to factories. By removing production from the

household, modern capitalism created far-reaching effects on all facets of the family.
Nothing was left untouched" (Henslin, 1990: 410, 414).
To say that modernization or industrialization changed everything does not
explain just how the changes took place. More importantly, to say that almost all
change is modernization and that everything has been altered by it explains
everything, and thereby explains nothing. Especially in advanced industrial societies,
each already the object of decades if not centuries of pervasive change, such
overstatement tends to discourage rather than stimulate inquiry.
For present purposes, we are interested only in establishing whether these four
post-industrial settings represent fairly congruent contexts for kinship behaviour. We
may begin with the process of urbanization, a necessary but not sufficient condition
of modernization. The four societies are all urban, the degree of urbanization ranging
from well over 80%, for Germany, to the 60-70% range, for France. Since about
1970, the proportion has been stable everywhere except Germany. However, the
definition of "urban" is too inclusive to be very meaningful, for it includes people
living in small communities with populations of 2,000 or more (for Quebec, 1,000),
along with everyone in larger centres.
The four societies are more differentiated with respect to "metropolitan living,"
defined as the percent of population residing in centres of 100,000 or more.
Germany, the most urban, turns out to be the least metropolitan, with only one third
of its people in large metropolitan centres. France, in line with the "European pole"
or Franco-German model, proposed by Lemel and Modell (chapter 2 of this book),
is similar to Germany, with relatively low metropolitanization, just over 40%, and a
pattern of stability rather than of increase since 1970 or so. Quebec is substantially
more metropolitan, as over half of its population lived in metropolitan areas during
the entire three decades, and there was a noticeable upward trend, to about 60%, by
1990. The U.S. trend is congruent with Quebec's, but higher still, with 63% of its
people in metropolitan areas of 100,000+ in 1960, and almost 80% by 1990. In other
words, the four societies can be seen as representing three distinct "levels" of
metropolitanization (figure 1). By 1980, over three fourths of U.S. citizens lived in
metropolitan areas, compared to only about one third of Germans, and the difference
was increasing.12
12 This example illustrates how choice of indicator, among seemingly comparable alternatives, can totally
alter one's conclusions. If urbanization is the indicator of choice, then Germany is the most "modern"
of the four countries, and the U.S. is tied with France (1990) for least modern. If "metropolitanization"
is the indicator, the results are reversed, and the ratio of difference is greatly expanded. The rates of
urbanization discussed above are from Caplow et al. (1991), trend report 0.1; Langlois et al. (1992), trend
report 2.3; and Keyfitz and Flieger (1990: 201, 262, 264).
124
Figure 1
Percent of Population in Urban Agglomeration of 100,000 and Over,
France, Germany, Quebec, and U.S. 1960-90
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzeret al., 1992; Langlois et al., 1992.
Figure 2
Persons Under Age 15 Per 1,000 Population,
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzeret al., 1992; Keyfitz and Flieger,
1990; Langlois et al., 1992.
125
Consider the 15- to 20-year trends in the five indicators of modernization

summarized in table 1. For only one - telephones per capita - has convergence
occurred. In another, enrolment rates in higher education, there is a modest trend
toward convergence: by 1990, people in Quebec and the U.S. were about twice as
likely as those in France and West Germany to be enrolled in "third level" or higher
education. Fifteen years earlier, the gap had been larger: the U.S. rate had been three
times the European, and Quebec had occupied an intermediate position.
In two other indicators, physicians per capita and gross domestic product
(GDP) per capita, sizeable differences among the four nations were maintained but
trends were uniformly upward. If the number of physicians per capita is the indicator
of modernization, Germany is the most modern of these countries, by a slightly larger
margin in 1987 than in 1970. If GDP per capita is the indicator, the U.S. has the
lead, by a continuing margin in constant dollars of about 50% over France and
Germany, while Quebec's GDP has risen to approximate the U.S. figure. In terms of
energy consumption per capita, the four societies manifest parallelism and no
particular trend: rates of consumption in the late 1980s are about what they were in
1970. However, if we define "modern" in terms of efficiency of energy consumption,
computing ratios of per-capita GDP per unit of energy consumption, France is the
most modern nation, with dollar/energy unit ratios consistently twice as high as those
of the least modern of the four (the U.S.).
Although economic power (GDP) and energy consumption are classic
indicators of modernization, there are serious problems of interpretation associated
with both of them,13 and many current critics of modernization theory ("limits to
growth," "appropriate technology," "alternative futures," and "green" movements)
would reject them as indicators of the kind of "modern" society they prefer. Even so,
they both represent a continuing economic reality that impacts intergenerational
relations in many ways. Other things being equal, a more affluent society has more
resources to devote to the maintenance of kinship relations, and high energy
consumption may facilitate as well as frustrate family interaction and activity. It can
also be argued that the personal stresses associated with low productivity and scarce
energy complicate family life and are destabilizing factors. The point is that high per-
capita productivity and resource use (modernization) may impact family relations in
either direction - or in neither, depending on other aspects of the national and
cultural context.
13 Among these problems are that climate, population density, availability of local energy sources, and
nature of transportation systems must be somehow factored in before international comparisons are truly
meaningful (cf. Dunkerley, 1980). To the critics of classical modernization theory, the correlation of
energy consumption with modernization or development illustrates the exploitative, wasteful, and
ultimately destructive nature of the processes conceptualized as modernization by ethnocentric Americans
and Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s (Kassiola, 1990; Kothari, 1989).
126
Table 1
Selected Indicators of Modernization
France, Germany, Quebec, and the United States, 1963-1989
Year F G Q US F G Q US
Telephones/ 1,000 pop. Physicians/ 100,000 pop.
1963 112 137 329 446 - -- --
1970 172 225 434 587 128 163 137
1975 264 317 550 686 153 193 158 143
1980 452 464 653 788 201 226 182 172
1985 608 621 -- 760 232 204 201
1987 -- 650 -- - 250 280 214 205

Energy consumption/cap
GDP/Cap., 1988$ ('100s) kg coal equity. COOOs)
1970 10,0 10,3 9,8 15,0 4,0 5,4 6,9 11,0
1975 11,5 11,3 12,8 16,0 3,9 5,4 7,4 10,9
1980 12,5 12,7 14,9 17,0 4,4 5,7 7,5 10,6
1985 12,9 13,3 15,8 18,2 4,0 5,7 6,4 9,5
1987 13,3 13,8 17,6 19,0 3,7 5,6 6,5 10,0
1988 13,6 14,2 -- 19,6 3,7 5,6 6,9
Higher educ. ("3rd level" Ratio, GDP/cap., 1988 $

enrolment/100,000 pop.) per kg coal equity.
1970 1333 -- 2988 4144 2,5 1,9 1,4 1,4
1975 1971 1684 3801 5179 2,9 2,1 1,7 1,5
1980 1998 1987 4829 5311 2,8 2,2 2,0 1,6
1985 2318 2540 5883 5118 3,2 2,3 2,5 1,9
1988 2656 2760 5954 5438 3,7 2,5 2,0
1989 2842 2843 5991 5596 -- -- --
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Eurostat, 1984; Force et ah, 1990; Glatzer et ah, 1992; Langlois et ah, 1992; GDP in
constant dollars was computed using international purchasins-power parities and converted to 1988 U.S. dollars
by the appropriate consumer-price-index multipliers. Additional sources are available from the senior authour.
127
If the patterns described thus far are summarized in terms of relative

national position (high, moderate, low), it might be argued that we are dealing with
three types of advanced industrial society, with an apparent distinction between the
European societies and the North American ones, as well as many differences
between Quebec and the U.S. There is little reason to expect uniform or same-
direction effects upon kinship behaviour from ambiguously conceived modernization
processes as reflected in indicators that confirm substantial and continuing national
diversity.
DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS
Changes in the rates of fertility, nuptiality, and mortality affect the number of
potential kindred. If women are the primary kin-keepers, and the bond between
mother and child is the strongest bond, then the number of women in a population,
their fertility, and their longevity all help to define the potential limits of kinship
structure and even, relatively speaking, the intensity of kinship relations. The
potential scope of intergenerational relations is limited in the horizontal sense by
fertility and in the vertical sense by longevity.
Demographic processes interact with cultural rules of kin formation and
household formation to determine socially defined kinship networks and co-residency
groups (de Vos and Palloni, 1989: 176-178). In these groups, the ongoing processes
of stable co-residency are associated with the formation and strength of kinship
obligations. For example, recent research in the U.S. indicates that "the more
cohesive the respondent's childhood family was, the stronger are felt obligations to
parents and children" (Rossi and Rossi, 1990: 234). The demographic processes are
not determinant, but they set limits and establish potentials.
Mortality patterns limit the duration of kinship relations. If adult mortality
is high, the kinship group will contain few ascending relatives. The longer the typical
lifespan, the longer the members of earlier generations live to enact their kinship
roles.14 The trends in life expectancy at birth in these four societies are remarkably
congruent. For this variable, there are not three types of society, but one, in which
over the past three decades expected lifespan increased from 67 to 72 years for men
and from 73 to about 80 years for women.
14 See Matilda White Riley's (1985) discussion of the implications of increased longevity for family and
social life, and especially its impacts on the opportunities and challenges facing women. She concludes
(p. 344) that while longevity creates problems for the elderly and for society in general, it also means
"continuing transformation of kinship relations, continuing proliferation of role options, continuing
increments of accumulated experience, continuing alteration in the social, psychological, and biological
patterns of growing up and growing old." Many of the impacts of increased longevity on family and
kinship relations have been identified by Sullivan (1979) and le Bras (1973).
128
The congruity apparent in life-expectancy trends does not extend to age

structures. Although all four societies experienced a dramatic decline in fertility (see
chapter 3 of this book), there continue to be sizeable differences in the representation
of children in the population (figure 2). In the early 1960s, a European-American
distinction already noted for certain other indicators seemed to apply: in Quebec and
the U.S., about one third of the population were children under age 15, while in
France and Germany the proportion of children was lower, between one fourth and
one fifth. Over the next 30 years, fertility dropped in all four societies, and by 1990
the proportion of children in the most "childful" nation (the U.S.) was as low as it
had been in the country with the fewest children in 1960 (Germany). By this time,
the European-American distinction had given way to one between Germany and the
other countries. Children accounted for about one fifth of the population of France,
Quebec, and the U.S., but only one seventh of the population of Germany. By 1990,
Germany was the only one to have more older people (age 65+) than children, while
Quebec had two children per older adult, and France and the U.S. occupied
intermediate positions.
Another relevant aspect of the demographic context is the ratio of men
to women in the population. If women live longer than men, they come to be
overrepresented in the "vertical" kindred. If they are also socially defined as more
responsible than men for kin care, then the dominant form of adult intergenerational
behaviour will be women relating to women and, as mothers grow older, women
caring for women. Thus it is no surprise to learn that "in Western societies, the
modal pattern of help to older people is that of daughters helping their mothers"
(Brody and Lang, 1982: 18). If declining fertility rates accompany women's increased
longevity, the probability that a given woman will at some time have to care for her
mother increases, for there are fewer siblings to share the responsibility.
Females predominate numerically in all four societies, with the greatest
imbalance in Germany (927 males per 1,000 females in 1988, up from 893 in 1960)
and the smallest in Quebec (974 males per 1,000 females in 1987, down from parity
in 1961). There is a clear convergence over the three decades which combines
increases in the proportion of men in the population in Germany and, until 1975, in
France, with declines in the U.S. and Quebec. The national differences are much
sharper among people aged 65 and over. In terms of relative numbers of men and
women, the profiles in figure 3 show the now-familiar European-American split, with
consistently higher proportions of women in France and Germany than in Quebec and
the U.S. The trend for France is distinctive in not showing an increase in the
proportion of women in the elderly population over the three decades, in contrast to
Germany, Quebec, and the U.S.
129
Figure 3
Sex Ratios (Males/1,000 Females) Among Persons Age 65+,
France, Germany, Quebec, and U.S. 1960-90
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Euromonitor, 1974; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzeret al., 1992;
Langlois et al., 1992.
Figure 4
Total First-Marriage Rates per 1,000 Women,
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzeret al., 1992; Langlois et al., 1992;
Monnier, 1988.
130
MARRIAGE, DIVORCE, NON-MARITAL FERTILITY, AND ABORTION
The primary intergenerational tie, the mother-child relationship, can exist outside of
marriage, and it persists regardless of subsequent changes in the situation of mother
and child, family, or household. It is the basic kinship tie, the essential core,
elaborated in innumerable cultural forms.15 Although marriage is not essential to the
intergenerational tie, it is the traditional institution wherein that tie is created. Ideally,
it creates a socially recognized household context with the expectation of long-term
commitment in which the day-to-day dynamics essential to the formation of kinship
bonds and responsibilities occur in more or less predictable arrangements. Behaviours
that prevent or disrupt marriage, or that lead to fertility outside of marriage, do not
eliminate the primary intergenerational tie, but they change its setting and often
increase the challenges and stresses that accompany the formation of kinship
networks.
Just as, in classic sociological tradition, national and regional differentials
in suicide rates were interpreted as reflecting differences in social cohesion, so
differentials in marriage, divorce, and abortion rates may logically be viewed as
reflections of intergenerational cohesion or commitment. At least, they may be
interpreted as possible indicators of social commitment to traditional generational and
kinship ties, and thereby reflections of general propensities toward change, if not
displacement, of kinship rules and responsibilities. As with altruistic suicide, the
argument can be made that some instances of divorce, and some abortions, are
responses to the power, rather than the attenuation, of intergenerational bonds. Even
so, rapid increases in divorce and abortion rates (and also in singleness and
childlessness) clearly suggest the emergence of an alternative social climate less
favourable to traditional family roles and responsibilities.
Trends in first-marriage rates, summarized in figure 4, show a sharp decline
in all four nations, although U.S. rates have stabilized since 1975.16 Over all, the so-
called "second demographic transition is well advanced," and "the tremendously
changed social significance of the 'married' status ... demonstrates the transition
toward greater individualism." The change amounts to a decline in the status of being
married: "Marriage has fewer implications for one's early adult life," and "not
15 It and other "close" ties are celebrated by Talmon (1970: 511): "The bond is given', it is based on
objective facts which cannot be obliterated and wished out of existence. Commonality of 'flesh and
blood' links relatives ineradicably; it is fundamentally unalterable."
16 The trends for marriage rates that include second and subsequent marriages (and thereby mix issues of
marriage/non-marriage with national differences in divorce and the availability of partners at later ages)
show a different pattern (see chapter 3, figure 6, of this book).
131
marrying or remarrying has become a reasonable option and divorce is far easier to
consider than a few generations ago" (van de Kaa, 1987: 11-12, 16).
Perhaps no social characteristics so sharply distinguish the U.S. from the
other three societies as do divorce and abortion. For both, the absolute level over the
entire period under study is between two and three times higher in the U.S. than
elsewhere, and there is no evidence of convergence between U.S. patterns and the
French and German patterns, but rather a parallelism, with the U.S. profile greatly
offset from the others.
Trends in divorce are summarized in figure 5. Note that the position of
Quebec might represent a third type by virtue of its rapid change. Beginning in the
1960s with a divorce rate lower than that of France or Germany, in less than a
decade Quebec surpassed them and thereafter occupied an intermediate position
between the European countries and the U.S. In the late 1980s, with about 11
divorces annually per 1,000 married women, Quebec divorce rates were somewhat
higher than the nine per 1,000 in France and Germany, but several strata removed
from the 21-22 per 1,000 in the U.S., a rate unmatched by any other modern nation.
Abortion rates in France, Germany, and the U.S. increased in the early
1970s, stabilized late in the decade, and exhibited modest declines after about 1982
(figure 6). Quebec had the lowest rates in the early 1970s, but by the end of the
decade abortion rates there were comparable to those in Europe. As with divorce, the
four trend lines are roughly parallel, but the U.S. rates are much higher. By the late
1980s, German abortions were in modest decline, at 110 per 1,000 live births, and
the French and Quebec rates were stabilized at about 200 per 1,000, compared to
over 400 per 1,000 in the U.S.
In terms of total fertility rates (chapter 3, figure 1), the European-American
differences apparent in the higher total fertility rates of Quebec and the U.S. in the
1960s give way by the 1980s to transatlantic pairings of societies with fertility
slightly below replacement (France and the U.S.) and those with rates far below
replacement (Quebec and Germany). The four societies manifest two distinct patterns
of fertility outside of marriage (chapter 3, figure 5). One, represented only by
Germany, is a continuing low level of out-of-wedlock births, such that, despite three
decades of modest increase, 90% of births are to married women. As late as 1988,
analysts of family change in Germany noted that "the old rule 'If children, then in
marriage,' still holds true" (Hohn and Liischer, 1988: 324). The other pattern is
rapidly rising fertility among unmarried women such that between one fourth and one
third of all births are to single mothers. As of 1988, there was no evidence that this
trend was levelling off in France, Quebec, or the U.S. We must add that out-of-
wedlock births do not necessarily mean that children will live in single-head families;
many of them will spend their lives in de facto families (parents not married).
132
Figure 5
Divorces per 1,000 Married Women,
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Dumas, 1990; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzer et al., 1992; Langlois
et al., 1992.
Figure 6
Abortions per 1,000 Live Births,
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzer et al., 1992; Langlois et al., 1992.
133
The implications of the rising rates of out-of-wedlock births for future

intergenerational relations are profound. Research in U.S. settings shows that children
born to single mothers tend to spend most of their childhood in a one-parent setting:
"If the biological father is not present in the household at birth, he rarely shows up
later" (Wojtkiewicz, 1992: 61). As well, children raised in single-parent households,
especially female-headed households, suffer marked economic and other
disadvantages compared to children in two-parent homes (Whitehead, 1993). Among
the ways they differ, recent research suggests, is in the strength of their affectional
ties to parent(s), with ties to fathers particularly at risk, and in their perceived
responsibility to parents and kindred generally. High levels of kinship responsibility
are associated with stable, intact families of orientation (Rossi and Rossi, 1990).
In some other cultural settings, the negative consequences of out-of-wedlock
births may be much less dramatic. Although there has not been sufficient research
to provide a definitive result, expert opinion has it that in France and Quebec, the
children of single-parent families are often indistinguishable from the children of
traditional two-parent families. Furthermore, there are said to be sizeable national
differences in the probabilities that a child born to a single mother will end up being
reared in a single-parent home.
With respect to trends in modernization and associated demographic changes
as antecedents of or context for change in intergenerational behaviour, our brief
overview suggests that the linkage between modernization (or urbanization, or
industrialization) and kinship behaviour is very complex and culture-specific. Facile
generalizations about consequences of modernization for the family are suspect,
partly because modernization itself shows a diversity of characteristics along with
some apparent uniformities. There are increasing urbanization and metropolitanization
in some countries, increasing urbanization but a stable or declining proportion of
metropolitan population in others. There is convergence in access to telephones and,
to a lesser degree, to physicians and higher education, but continued differences in
per-capita energy consumption, national productivity, and efficiency of energy use.
There is convergence in life expectancy - longer lives for everyone - but continued
differences in fertility and in the presence of children in society. Despite a general
and growing tolerance for a diversity of family forms, there remain vast differences
in the range of abortion, unmarried-fertility, and divorce rates, and sizeable national
differences in propensity to marry, despite some convergence in the late 1970s.
Even where there is apparent convergence, there are important exceptions.
There are declining sex ratios for elderly people, except in France, where there is
stability. Marriage is increasingly out of favour, except in the U.S., where first-
marriage rates have been stable since 1975. By 1980, abortion rates were stable or
declining everywhere except Quebec. Births to unmarried women are rising
everywhere, with no end to the trend in sight, but the rates are greatly divergent, and
134
over three times higher in Quebec than in Germany. Where parallel trends or
convergences exist, often there are sizeable differences in the rate of change, thereby
adding another variable to the situation. The recent experience of Quebec, in
particular, raises the issue of the differential social impacts of varying rates of
change. Specifically, the social consequences of rapid modernization, as opposed to
moderately paced change, need to be explored.
CONTRASTS IN KINSHIP INTERACTION AND SUPPORT

Households
Household characteristics are important indicators of kinship behaviour, because the

strongest predictors of active involvement with kin are co-residence and proximate
residence (Harris, 1990: 74; Lee, 1980: 924-925). Kinship interaction depends on the
availability of kin, and availability is maximized by co-residence. Moreover, the
mutual life-support activities that occur in households are the usual context for the
transmission of kinship norms, the enactment of kinship responsibilities, and the
creation of emotional bonds between generations. Household structure may reflect a
variety of family-related behaviours, among them "the propensity to marry, divorce,
separate, remarry, or cohabit and changes in fertility behaviour and in the ages at
which children leave home, along with mortality trends and differentials" (van de
Kaa, 1987: 32). In other words, patterns of household formation and structure
mediate between certain socio-economic and demographic variables and
intergenerational behaviour. Just as mutual activity among parents, children, and
others creates kinship bonds, so the absence of shared activity inherent in living
alone, labelled "the ultimate expression of individualism" by van de Kaa (1987: 32),
may tend not to foster feelings of family solidarity and responsibility. Accordingly,
a possible inverse indicator of people's commitment to intergenerational relations is
whether they live with others or alone.17
In 1960, one out of five French and German households were one-person
households, compared to about one in eight for the U.S. and only one out of 20 for
Quebec (figure 7). Over the next three decades, rates of living alone increased
consistently and, in Quebec and Germany, quite rapidly. By 1990, one third of all
German households were one-person units, as were one fourth of all households in
the other three societies, a striking convergence. The change was most notable in
Quebec, which posted a 20-point increase in one-person households.
17 Of course, not all who live alone are necessarily "separated" from parents or other family members. Solitary
living is not incompatible with regular and cohesive kinship relations. But the research quite clearly shows
that distance impedes interaction, and, by definition, persons who live alone are more distant from family
members than those who share a household with them.
135
Figure 7
One-Person Households as a Percent of All Households,
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Eurostat, 1984; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzer et al., 1992;
Langlois et al., 1992; Marchand and Balland, 1976; Noelle-Neumann, 1981;
Schwarz, 1983; Villac and Morin, 1983.
Figure 8
Persons by Private Household,
Sources: Caplow et al., 1991; Euromonitor, 1986; Forse et al., 1990; Glatzer et al., 1992;
Langlois et al., 1992; Marchand and Balland, 1976; Noelle-Neumann, 1981;
Schwarz, 1983; Villac and Morin, 1983.
136
Although this rise is notable, the over-all effect is smaller than is suggested
by the scale of the percentage increase in one-person households, because each such
household contributes only one person to the total population. In Quebec, for
example, the dramatic increase in one-person households is much less impressive in
terms of proportion of the total population affected, and the apparent numerical
impact on family living seems to be relatively minor. As table 2 shows, between
1961 and 1986 the proportion of the Quebec population living in family households
declined by only 2%. Although the proportion living alone increased fivefold, the
people seemingly most affected by this increase were residents of households of
unrelated persons, or of related persons and others living in non-family households.
That is, while the proportion of the Quebec population living alone increased by over
six points, the proportion living with others in non-family households showed a
corresponding drop of over five points. There is little retreat from family living
apparent in these figures. Trends in the percent of population living alone manifest,
at lower levels, the same consistent rise and convergence pattern shown in figure 7
for household size. By the late 1980s, one out of six Germans lived alone, compared
to one eleventh of the populations of France, Quebec, and the U.S.
Not only did more people choose to live alone, but those who did not lived
with fewer others. While living in families remained almost as popular as ever, the
family group became smaller (figure 8). This reduction, consistent and sizeable in all
four societies, was largest in Quebec, which formerly had households half again as
large as those of the other countries. Household size converged for France, Quebec,
and the U.S., averaging 2.6 persons by 1990. As with the trends in one-person
households, Germany's profile is parallel but not convergent. German households,
already the smallest in 1960, had shrunk to an average of only 2.2 persons by 1989.
Societies of small households may maintain strong intergenerational ties, and
a decline in co-residence may not always indicate a reduction in solidarity with kin.
Many one-person households are very well connected to a network of kindred and
friends. In accordance with the notion of "intimacy at a distance" (Rosenmayr, 1977;
Rosenmayr and Kockeis, 1965), parents and other relatives may live nearby, thereby
facilitating or even enhancing kinship relations despite residence in separate
households. Even so, the growing popularity of solitary living, combined with
reduced household size and the growing atypicality of households with young
children, has changed the shape and complexity of kin relations.
Related to the trend toward smaller households is a decline in the number
of three- and four-generational households. In Germany between 1961 and 1981, the
number of such "traditional" households dropped from 6% to 2% (Schwarz, 1983:
566). There was a parallel trend in Quebec, where the proportion of the population
in households who were either grandchildren of the household head or parents of the
137
Table 2
Persons in Private Households by Household and Family Status,
Percentage, Quebec, 1961-1986
Household Type
Kinship Status 1961 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986
In family households 90,6 90,4 88,7 9,3 89,9 88,1

Husbands, wives, 39,1 40,2 42,1 47,4 49,8 50,9
single parents
Unmarried children 48,6 48,2 45,0 41,0 37,4 34,8
Relatives 2,4 1,8 1,3 0,9 1,7 1,6
Non-relatives 0,5 0,2 0,3 0,1 0,9 0,8
In non-family households 9,4 9,6 11,3 10,7 10,1 11,9

With relatives 3,1 3,0 3,5 1,6 1,6 1,7
With non-relatives 4,7 4,4 4,6 1,8 2,2 2,2
Living alone 1,6 2,3 3,2 6,8 8,0 8,0
Total population 100 100 100 100 100 100
Source: Census of Canada.
head decreased by almost half between 1961 and 1976, from 2.0% to 1.2%.18 In the
U.S., a similar downward trend in grandchildren cohabiting with grandparents was
reversed in the late 1970s, when increasing numbers of grandchildren accompanied
a divorced parent back into a grandparental household.
Residential Proximity and Intergenerational Contact
One of the best-documented findings about contact between parents and their adult
children is that distance makes a difference. The closest residential proximity - co-
residence - is associated with the highest levels of mutual aid and interaction. As the
distance (or time) separating the households of parents and their children increases,
contacts and shared activities decline.
Lacking comparable national data on residential proximity for all four
societies, we finally assembled a very rudimentary series for France, Germany, and
the U.S., mostly reflecting the distances between the homes of elderly parents and
18 Statistics Canada changed reporting categories in the 1981 census, preventing us from tracing this trend
through the 1980s.
138
their grown children (figure 9). The most notable thing about these data is the lack
of change they show. Over two to three decades of marked economic and social
change, including sizeable shifts in some key modernization variables, the distances
between the households of parents and their grown children changed very little. In
the U.S., there was a slight decrease, from 77% to 72%, in the proportion of older
parents living within 30 minutes of their nearest child. In France and Germany, the
effective distance between elderly parents and their grown children was not much
different in the 1980s than in the two previous decades. There were declines in co-
residence - the two generations were increasingly apt to live in separate dwellings
- but usually these dwellings were not far separated, mostly within the easy access
of a half-hour's trip or less. Thus the probability of having a parent or grown child
nearby remained about the same, while the probability of having them underfoot
declined.
Relatively small increments of distance seem to make a great difference in
frequency of contact. In the mid-1970s, weekly visits by French parents to their
children decreased from 65% to 27% when the distance between their homes
increased from within the same municipality to within 20 kilometres (Roussel and
Bourguignon, 1976). A decade later, contacts between elderly Parisian parents and
their children ranged from 85%, for children living nearby in the same commune, to
8%, for those living outside the Ile-de-France region (Paris and its environs) (Cribier,
1989a: 45).
Contact between parents and children is also influenced by other variables,
among them the number of children, the marital situation and health of both parent
and child, each person's employment status, the presence of grandchildren, and the
"affective closeness" between parent and child (Cribier, 1989a: 45-47; Rossi and
Rossi, 1990: 372-386). Keeping in mind the sizeable intrasample variations that
reflect such factors, we can compare national trends in intergenerational contact for
the handful of studies similar enough to justify such comparisons.
Judging from the profiles in figure 10, rates of parent-child contact have
declined slightly in France and the U.S. In contrast, Germany shows no decline, and
even some signs of increase. In the U.S., the proportion of parents having weekly
contact with a non-cohabiting child dropped 13% between 1962 and 1984. The
decline is even more substantial than these weekly contact figures indicate, because
the largest declines were in the categories of most intense contact. If we add into the
percentage base older persons living with a child (who are not represented in the
profiles in figure 10), then in 1962, of all parents aged 65+ with surviving children,
28% lived with a child and 37% saw a child several times a week, for a total of 65%
with daily or almost daily contact. The corresponding percentages for 1975 and 1984
are 53% (18% cohabitating) and 46% (again, 18% cohabiting). In other words, the
139
Figure 9
Residential Proximity,3
France, Germany, and U.S., 1955-90
a Percent of adults living near their parents and parents living near an adult child; in same household, same
neighbourhood/town/city, within 20 km. or a half-hour trip.
Sources: Baumert, 1960; Collot et al., 1982; Crimmins et ah, 1990; Davis et ah, 1987; Dieck, 1989; Diewald, 1990;
Fortin, 1987; Gokalp, 1978; Hollinger et al., 1990; Hugick, 1989; Klatsky, 1971; Moss et al., 1985; Rossi
et ah, 1990; Roussel, 1976; Shanas, 1979; Stehouwer, 1968.
proportion of older parents in the U.S. who had contact with a child daily or almost
daily dropped by more than one third between 1962 and 1984.
There is also evidence of a slight decline in intergenerational contact among
the French, although in this case the data are shakier because the span is shorter and
the trend line represents two studies of the same cohort of retired Parisians. As
shown in figure 10, among retirees aged 63-69, 74% saw a child at least weekly in
1975; a decade later, the rate of weekly contact had fallen to 67%. The trend in
Germany is different, with parents' rates of weekly contact with one or more children
at least as high as in the other societies, and showing no sign of decline; if anything,
there was more contact in the 1980s than previously.
Everywhere, average rates of adult children's contact with parents run
somewhat lower than rates of parental contact with at least one child. This finding
follows logically from the greater geographic dispersion of several children as
opposed to a "nearest" child. The data on frequency of contact with parents suggest
140
Figure 10
Intergenerational Contact at Least Weekly,"
France, Germany, and U.S., 1955-90
a Percent of parents who see a non-co-resident adult child, and adult children who see a non-co-resident parent.
Sources: Baumert, 1960; Beland, 1984; Cribier, 1989; Diewald, 1990; Gokalp, 1978; Hugick, 1989; Moss et al., 1985;
Pitrou, 1977; Rossi et al., 1990; Roussel, 1976; Shanas, 1973; Statistisches Bundesamt, 1985.
the following conclusions: German adults see their parents more often than
Americans do (about 40% of U.S. adults see their parents weekly, compared to about
60% of German adults); French adults also see their parents more often, although
they probably have less contact than do Germans; and rates of contact with parents,
as computed from adult children's reports, have changed very little over the recent
periods for which there are data.
Mutual Aid
The same finding of continuity holds for helping behaviour between parents and their
children, for which we found comparable data over a decade or more only for France
and the U.S. As figure 11 shows, for both nations the profiles of selected indicators
of intergenerational exchange reveal more continuity than change. In the U.S., about
70% of parents receive some kind of help from their grown children, and about the
same proportion of parents report providing some kind of aid to their children. In
France, grandmothers continue to babysit their grandchildren, with between one
fourth and one third of their grandchildren receiving such assistance.
141
Figure 11
Intergenerational Exchange,"
France and U.S., 1960-90
a Percent of parents receiving some kind of assistance from adult children in the past year or so, and children from
their parents.
Sources: Bengtson et al., 1985; Commaille, 1983; Dechaux, 1990; Delbes, 1983; Dieck, 1989; Gokalp et al., 1982;
Hugick, 1989; Michel, 1970; Neidhardt, 1978; Pitrou, 1977; Rossi et al., 1990; Roussel, 1976.
Less appropriate for charting but nevertheless persuasive are several local
studies of intergenerational resource flows. Taken together, the available data convey
a picture of kinship ties continuing to serve important economic, educational, and
social support functions despite bureaucratic and industrial change in the wider
society. Lacking additional family- or individual-level data on intergenerational
exchange appropriate for national comparisons, we now consider patterns of
intergenerational support separately for each society. We explicitly exclude what was
once the most important transfer of all, formal inheritance.
INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSFERS AND ELDER CARE
The historic role of kinship systems as mediating institutions between economic or

political systems and individuals continues in modern society, although its scope may
be reduced (see Anderson, 1977; Shanas and Sussman, 1977). Among the relevant
changes since the 1960s is a heightened visibility of kinship in urban settings, thanks
to the "discovery" in contemporary society of vital intergenerational linkages
142
associated with patterns of mutual aid and nurturant assistance to the elderly. Such
patterns of familial assistance occur in all advanced industrial societies (Cowgill,
1986).
Much recent study of family networks reflects concern about the present
and future status of intergenerational resource transfers. A sizeable and growing body
of literature on family care as a supplement to national social-support systems
explores these connections (see, for example, Cicirelli, 1981; Conseil de la famille,
1989), as does another body of literature examining the implications of family
variables such as maternal employment and fertility for the future of pension and
social-security systems.
Social and economic trends influence families directly, but they also affect
the political structure and extra-familial support programmes. How much mutual
assistance is needed, the net balance of the flow of resources between generations,
and the way resource transfers are carried out vary according to national, historical,
economic, and political context. In the societies under consideration, the past three
decades have seen major changes in the prescribed role of the family, as opposed to
the state, in caring for persons formerly considered family dependents, whether
under-age children or elderly and impaired adults.
Political changes have strengthened the role of the state as an alternative
parent or a parent of last resort, and as a caretaker of last resort for the elderly. In
addition, the following generalities apply to all four societies: in practice, if not law,
the family continues to be defined as primary caretaker for the elderly, although not
necessarily the source of financial support; economic instability and growing
dependency needs, especially projected increases in medical and maintenance costs
for the elderly, have forced policy makers to anticipate that families must continue
to provide much economic and social support; demographic changes and shifts in
social and moral values - for instance, the partial delegitimation of marriage and
parenthood - have changed the shape and content of some intergenerational
structures, weakening certain links, strengthening others, producing altered, more
varied, but still vital generational ties; women continue to be the primary caretakers,
and there is little sign of increased male involvement in the maintenance of
intergenerational ties or the direct care of aged parents; and the heightened instability
of marriage has tended to strengthen the mother-child tie as the permanent and most
reliable intergenerational bond, and to reduce paternal involvement in child-rearing,
thereby assuring the continued matricentricity of kinship relations.
These generalizations, along with some less universal ones, are elaborated
below as we consider intergenerational exchange in each societal context. The four
societies differ in their legislation regarding family responsibility for other family
143
members.19 There are also diverse customs bearing on family relations over the life
cycle - patterns of family ritual, retirement, elder care, inheritance, and
grandparenting - that vary by locality, class, religion, and nationality and affect
national trends in intergenerational behaviour. We will pay special attention to
changes in patterns of intergenerational support and national responses to the needs
of an expanding population of older citizens.
France
France was the first of the four societies - the first in Europe, with the possible
exception of Sweden - to encounter the problems of an ageing population. This is
due to an early decline in the birth rate such that by 1900 more than 8% of the
population was over age 65, compared to fewer than half that many in other
modernizing nations, such as Germany and the U.S. France's early experience with
low birth rates and a large elderly population did not translate into effective support
programmes for elderly citizens. Until recently, according to Stearns (1976: 16),
France was "merely preceding other countries in gerontological neglect." However,
early national concern with population stagnation did generate policies promoting a
higher birthrate that, in altered form, still have popular support (van de Kaa, 1987:
49). These policies seem to have had some effect, for French fertility is relatively
high by European standards, though below replacement level.
In France, as elsewhere, the combination of declining fertility and extended
life expectancy has changed the structure of kinship relations. In a comparison of
estimates of generational coexistence for French society in the eighteenth century and
in the 1960s, le Bras (1973) demonstrated how rough numerical equivalence in the
size of kinship networks can mask great dissimilarity of content. The number of
parents in the two networks were equivalent, but the number of collateral kin was
greatly reduced in the 1960s because fertility was so much lower than it had been in
the eighteenth century. On the other hand, coexistence between generations was much
more common in the 1960s because of increased longevity. In the past, brothers,
sisters, uncles, and aunts were more numerous but not as long-lived, while now the
structure of the kinship network is more narrow but with greater vertical scope. The
simultaneous presence of four generations exists today in the lineages of one fourth
of French persons aged 45-64.
19 For example, German law requires parents to be responsible for their children until they have a "viable
occupation," rather than up to a certain age, as in U.S. law. "Viable occupation" is interpreted to mean
having a trade (completing an apprenticeship), technical skills (holding a certificate of advanced training),
or a university degree. The law applies equally to men and women (Weatherford, 1981: 147).
144
A long-term emphasis on close rather than extended kindred (Davis, 1977:

100) has been increasingly evident in recent decades. Ardagh (1982: 368) states that
"the main change since the war is that the focus of loyalty has been steadily
narrowing ... from the big multi-generation ... [family] to the immediate home cell
of parents and children." The rate of narrowing has not been uniform. The attenuation
of ties to extended family is more advanced among propertyless city dwellers than
among rural landowning families. Accompanying the apparent attenuation is a
revitalization of intergenerational ties to parents and grandparents (Ardagh, 1982).
Attachment to family lines is expressed in an extensive exchange of goods
and services. Parental aid to children continues over most of the lifespan. As children
grow up and are followed by grandchildren, numerous reciprocal favours and services
bind the generations. Bonds to mothers are especially strong, and, because women
enact kinship roles more than men, intergenerational bonds especially favour the
maternal line. The flow of resources from parent to child or grandchild continues
even in the parents' old age. Even "the co-residence of 75-80-year-olds and their
children often functions as a form of aid to the children, contrary to what is usually
assumed!" (Cribier, 1989b: 189).
Ethnographic fieldwork in the early 1980s revealed an expanding role of
kinship interaction and exchange, in both rural and urban areas. The contemporary
French family is important politically and economically, and not just a setting for
psychological and emotional relationships. In the rural areas,
Family help inaugurates a cycle of exchanges as other kin expect that,

when necessary, they will be helped on a similar occasion. Finding
jobs, especially first jobs, is always facilitated by kinship networks,
inside which information circulates ... Once settled, a young couple
receives much help from older parents, regarding children's care.
Grandmothers are all the more necessary when mothers have to work
in order to help repay the loan required to buy the plot and house. On
the other hand, older parents who are still in agriculture also find a lot
of help from their children during heavy farm work. The wider family
team of former times has been replaced by a much smaller one.
(Segalen, 1985: 24-25)
In cities, too, kinship networks seem to be experiencing a revitalization.

They serve as recruiting agencies, and child-care centres, and have additional
economic and political functions. Commaille (1983: 104) contrasts the conventional
wisdom of the "narrowing of the family network" with the findings of recent research
that grandparents, parents, and children form "an important network of exchange"
that contributes to family self-sufficiency for children of divorced parents, for whom,
it turns out, the efforts of grandparents "offer continuity and support in an otherwise
unstable situation."
145
Intergenerational transfers serve a double function. They operate as buffers,

helping to insulate family members from the full consequences of economic or
personal hardships. They also serve a conduit or intermediary function, facilitating
entry into institutions (employment, home purchasing) or other social networks
(Dechaux, 1990: 94). This double function is very important in French society. In the
late 1980s, two thirds of exchanges between households were between kin (with
intergenerational exchanges the most common), including 70% of child-tending
exchanges, 58% of helping with errands, and 82% of sewing help (Degenne and
Lebeaux, 1991).
Since 1960, the French government's family policy has changed from one
favouring large families and the traditional family division of roles to one that
favours poor people generally and is officially neutral about family characteristics.
Roussel and Thery (1988) describe two related trends: a shift from a "golden age of
pro-family policies" to a condition where "the Family" was replaced by a multiplicity
of family types, and one in which aid formerly earmarked to reduce the costs of large
families (subsidizing fertility) was redirected to "disadvantaged" families, whatever
their age or family status (subsidizing the underprivileged).
This evolution toward discontinuity and rupture has many implications for
intergenerational relations. If "henceforth the state-family relationship will be
permanently negotiated" (Roussel and Thery, 1988: 348), then intrafamily and
intergenerational rights and obligations are also open to negotiation. In such a fluid
situation, elderly citizens are as likely to lose entitlements and security as to gain
them.
There is already a latent conflict over generational rights to state-regulated
resources between the employed population born after the Second World War and
their elders, who are seen as "a privileged population in ... the 'Golden Age of
pensions.'" Cribier (1989b: 198) remarks that the French generally refuse to
recognize this potential conflict. Even so, the relatively well-off newly retired are
themselves concerned about the implications of an apparent imbalance between the
economic condition of young people, employed and unemployed, and their own more
favourable situations, "this imbalance no longer being acceptable to society."
Despite the changes in family mores and a potential generational conflict,
there is continuity in the French government's policy regarding the family's
responsibility to care for its own elderly members. Since the 1962 "rapport Laroque"
proposed social integration of the aged and their maintenance in private homes, it has
been official policy to try to avoid placing them in rest homes, hospices, or asylums.
Early on, some new public services, such as nursing aid and housework assistance,
were created to facilitate the policy. Faced with rising costs and an economic crisis,
in 1983 the government reaffirmed the principle of integration and maintenance but
restricted public support. Kinship networks, which had been providing most of the
146
support for their aged members anyway, were reaffirmed as the "irreplaceable" group
with ultimate responsibility for the elderly. This policy remains in effect. Officially,
the government encourages the maintenance of kinship ties, as in urban policies
designed to prevent too great a distance between the residences of parents and those
of their grown children. In the 1990s, there are some financial incentives that
encourage people to live with their parents. Some public services exist for the
impaired elderly, but they are inadequate, and the responsibility falls mainly on close
relatives, especially grown daughters.
The proportion of older adults who are institutionalized is very low, though
increasing: in 1962, fewer than 3% of those aged 65 and over lived in institutions;
by 1988 the figure had more than doubled, to 6%. In other words, fully 94% of those
aged 65 and over were living in private homes. Even persons aged 80 and over were
largely domiciled in private homes (and therefore largely self-supporting or supported
by kin): in 1987, 16% lived in instutitions, up from 12% a decade earlier (Joel and
Bungener, 1990). The government's policy of relying on families to maintain most
of the elderly population is nothing new; it merely formalizes a continuing reality.
It also continues a disproportionate burden on French women, who are the main
providers of personal support to the elderly.
Germany
In Germany, as in France, family policy over the past three decades has evolved from
a system officially supporting certain "traditional" social forms designated as
"family" to a more comprehensive, diverse system that acknowledges "a progressive
plurality of family forms." A public manifestation of this trend was the 1986
renaming of the Ministry of Family Affairs as the Ministry of Youth, Family,
Women, and Health, and its involvement in programmes facilitating both family and
occupational careers for women (Hohn and Liischer, 1988: 330-333).20
The differentiation of household and family forms since the end of the
Second World War exhibits several characteristic tendencies sometimes cited as
evidence for increasing personal isolation and an erosion of family relationships in
German society. These tendencies include less willingness to marry, lower fertility,
persistent shrinkage in the size of private households (the reduction of multi-
generation households and those with many children being particularly notable),
decreasing stability of marriage and family, and a diminution of horizontal kinship
networks due to scarcity of same-generation relatives and family members.
20 In 1991, this ministry was divided into a Ministry of Youth and Women and a Ministry of Family and
Elders.
147
On the other hand, there are many indications of continuity and even
increased commitment to family and kindred. In 1953, asked "If you had more time
or money, what would you like do?," 45% of adults responded, "Spend more time
with my family." Twenty-six years later, the response was about the same (46%). In
the same survey was the question, "What would you probably miss most if you had
to move?" In 1979, 45% said "Relatives who live here," compared to 38% with this
response in 1953 (Noelle-Neumann, 1981: 11, 86). Additional evidence of heightened
kin solidarity despite smaller households and a societal trend toward individuation is
an enlargement of the circle of relatives defined as "family." Persons outside the
immediate nuclear family, such as parents, parents-in-law, siblings, and
grandchildren, were twice as likely to be defined as "family" in 1979 as in 1953
(e.g., for parents, from 19% to 34%; for siblings, from 10% to 23%) (Glatzer et al.,
1992; see trend 2.2).
One review of trends affecting the German family cautions that the
continuing increase in single-person households does not necessarily mean increasing
social isolation (Hohn and Luscher, 1988). Other recent surveys21 demonstrate that
changes in household composition, specifically increases in one-person households,
are not good indicators of whether people are tied into networks of contact and
support. As many as one third of adults under age 35 living alone said that they had
a life companion living outside of their household, as did about 10% of older
respondents. Lower-than-average integration in contact and support networks tends
to characterize older single persons living alone, childless older couples, and the
widowed, and seems to be largely a consequence of the increasing verticalization of
kinship relations.
Turning to intergenerational assistance, in the early 1970s grandparents
accounted for 46% of the care of children under age three whose mothers were
employed (Neidhardt, 1978: 235), and intergenerational ties were said to have
"growing relevance for young families with a job-holding mother" (Pfeil and Ganzert,
1973). Fifteen years later, employed mothers still had to fall back on private
resources to take care of their very young children, and for married women, help
from close relatives was still the typical solution (Brand, 1989: 191-193).22 Studies
21 Based on findings from five data sets, the Wohlfahrtssurveys of 1978, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and Allbus
1986; see also Diewald, 1990.
22 The continuity of aid provided by grandmothers as babysitters can be explained by a national inadequacy
of public child-care services. In Germany, the functions of pre-schools and kindergartens are understood
much more as pedagogic than as service institutions for working parents. In 1989, only 60% of preschool
children attended a kindergarten, compared to 88% in Italy and 95% in France and Belgium. Furthermore,
88% of the children who did attend kindergarten were registered for only half-day attendance
(Zweiwochendienst, 1989: 13).
148
of mothers' social networks in four nations (Sweden, Germany, Wales, and the U.S.)
in the 1980s reveal German (and Welsh) mothers' main support networks to be
particularly dominated by kinfolk, especially primary kin (Cochran and Gunnarsson,
1990: 92-96).
In traditional Germany, individual welfare was first the responsibility of the
family, then the church, and then the government. The government's role, in the
sense of "charity" for low-income persons, including the elderly poor, was always
substantial. Nowadays, the government shares responsibility with the so-called
welfare organizations, prominent among them the Catholic and Protestant churches.
Although government now assumes greater responsibility, and the church a somewhat
diminished role, the main agency providing personal services to elderly Germans is
still the family (Smyer, 1984: 243). Adult children continue to represent by far the
most important source of help for their parents, even after they leave the parental
home.
Up to a travelling distance of a half-hour, parents living alone enjoy almost
the same degree of attention and support as parents living with their children in the
same house or household. In fact, the balance of positive over negative interaction
may be improved because of the separate quarters, for "multi-generation households
are as a rule fraught with conflict and demand adaptation processes which do not
affect all members equally" (German Centre of Gerontology, 1982: 49).
Short distances and frequent contact between parents and their adult
children are the rule. Young singles living alone have somewhat less contact with
relatives and live farther away than do young married couples and families, but these
differences are less distinct than commonly assumed. Their lack of involvement in
the kinship network is far less dramatic than that of childless older persons, whose
situation is, in addition, irreversible due to lack of relatives. In fact, singles prove to
be the most active of all when it comes to assisting relatives and friends.
Reviewing the available empirical data, Diewald (1990) concluded that no
single interpretive metaphor such as "desolidarity" or "pluralization" was adequate
to convey the complexities of recent change and what they mean to German families
at different stages of life. While no general claim of progressive erosion of
intergenerational relationships can be made, it does appear that the support of a
growing number of dependent older persons is increasingly problematic. The heavy
involvement of family members in the care of the elderly is shown by recent
statistics and refutes the political stereotype of helpless older invalids being carted
off to institutions. In the late 1980s, Germany had about 2.1 million invalids and
chronically (or multiply) ill persons, most of them elderly. Of these, about 420,000
149
partial invalids23 and 210,000 complete invalids were living at home. Another
370,000 persons were in nursing homes or hospitals. The remaining 1.1 million were
considered relatively mild cases, treatable through a combination of assistance with
household chores, minor basic care and treatment programmes, and their own self-
help potential (Gitschmann and Veil, 1990).
In other words, over 80% of invalids in need of care were being tended to
in the home. To some degree, such intense family involvement is necessitated by the
sheer scale of the problem. Government policy is to encourage "domiciliary nursing
care by family members, close friends, or neighbours," for there are simply not
enough public homes for the infirm aged to meet the demand (Lowy, 1979: 219). As
a result, state assistance programmes for nursing and household chore services have
been designed to help families care for their elders at home.
Approximately every 20th private household is a Pflegehaushalt, in which
at least one permanently handicapped or chronically ill family member, or one
needing care, is nursed. These are mostly older persons; over 25% of persons in care
are over 80 years old. At the same time, 75% of the other members of such
households are over 50 years old. In the cases of at-home care for serious or
complete invalids, the person responsible for providing care, generally a wife,
daughter, or daughter-in-law, devotes from four to six hours daily to nursing work.
In 94% of the cases, these tasks must be performed daily, and in 60%, the nursing
effort takes more than four hours a day.
These findings dramatize the fact that in Germany it is not so much
"family" that cares for older family members, but, rather, women. Of daughters aged
55-70 with at least one surviving parent, 46% were caring for parents or parents-in-
law in their own households, and an additional 27% had previously cared for parents
who now were in homes for the aged (Lehr, 1985). Some observers, noting the
conflict between such self-sacrifice and modern norms of self-actualization for
women, anticipate serious future declines in the quality of elder care:
Care for the old is the main task that falls on women, who are able to
perform this duty only if they give up a work life of their own free
will or as a consequence of insufficient professional qualifications. As
the participation of women in the work force becomes greater, the
willingness to give up their jobs in favour of family duties declines.
(Schumann, 1988: 68-69)
23 Defined in the Health Care Reform Act as persons "ascertained by physician to be so helpless in
consequence of illness or handicap ... that they are permanently and to a very high degree in need of help
in the common and frequent tasks of day-to-day life."
150
As yet, there is little evidence of any trend toward significant male

involvement in such nurturant care, in the service either of invalid parents or of
children. Neidhardt's (1978: 233) observation of more than a decade ago that "in the
F.R.G. ... the father is not seriously expected to take the mother's role, nor is any
outside institution" still seems apt. More likely than increased male involvement or
a continuation of "family" self-help in its traditional form would be additional public
services in response to heightened advocacy by both professional organizations and
self-help groups among the German elderly (Gelfand, 1988: 65-67). Such an
extension of services would probably reflect political acceptance of the emerging
notion of individually attained rights in public support systems.
Much of the current debate about revision of the social, health-care, and
nursing policies is aimed at creating a new balance between public and private
responsibilities. Two concepts of solidarity, one old and one new, each based on
different fundamentals, collide in the search for possible solutions to the present, and
worsening, Pflegenotstand (crisis in the nursing situation) (Baldock and Evers, 1991:
32). According to the older concept, based in the subsidiary principle of Catholic
social theory, the family is the smallest social unit and should receive help from
larger units such as associations or government only when it has exhausted its own
resources. Care of older persons in the home is financed in accordance with the
tradition of relief-funding legislation (forma pauperis), and not until private and
family resources have been exhausted and self-help is no longer possible because the
invalid has become pauperized, is government support to be granted.24 This support
is seen as relief or "charity," a designation many older people define as stigmatizing.
In line with administration of other forms of welfare, family members may be
subjected to official financial scrutiny or other government demands associated with
eligibility for public assistance. In the competing conceptualization, services granted
to a state-assistance recipient fall under the definition of social insurance, not welfare.
They are to be viewed not as government charity, but as the "properly attained
rights" of the individual.
Traditionally, social-insurance systems are closely tied to a recipient's
gainful employment, and they discriminate against persons whose work does not
qualify. Just as the 1883 introduction of the German social insurance system was an
immediate consequence of lobbying by the labour movement,25 the emergence of
the individual-rights notion is an outgrowth of lobbying by feminists on the value of
24 The same principle can also develop an effect completely contrary to care "from above," as in the
purposeful public promotion of a "new subsidiarity" of self-help associations and voluntary civil
engagement.
25 Because it represented a political instrument "from above," and by no means satisfied the labour
movement's desire for self-administration, the movement rejected this system.
151
women's labour at home. Since 1986, time spent rearing children counts toward
social-security retirement pensions. The decade-old controversy26 about how to
manage nursing care in the future seems to be taking a similar turn, and heading
toward radical change, "away from the nonobligatory responsibility of the
government after all private resources have been exhausted, and towards a
socialization of nursing care, guaranteed by its integration in general health insurance,
so that the right to care in old age is no longer bound to any particular duties"
(Baldock and Evers, 1991: 33).
Quebec
Studies of Montreal families in the 1950s revealed patterns of urban living organized
around kinship networks of exceptional density (Garigue, 1956; Rioux, 1959).
Kinship relations in French-Canadian cities were seen as paradoxical, because they
were much like rural family patterns elsewhere. Urban Quebec was thus identified
early as an exception to the hypothetical processes whereby urban living led to the
isolation of the nuclear family.27 Similarly, a postwar study of Quebec City
(Lamontagne and Falardeau, 1947: 246-247) reported the persistence of a traditional
family complex that exhibited "symbols of social stability while immersed in often
unnoticed violent industrial and social changes." Despite industrialization and
metropolitanization, families in Quebec City continued to "show social and economic
characteristics which, according to usual American standards and criteria, were more
'rural' than 'urban.'"
26 Various reforms have been proposed since 1980. The mid-1980's saw several draft laws, though the only
oneto pass (in 1989) concerned the possibility of the caregiver applying for a substitute for private nurses
while on vacation. In 1991, supplementary care was granted, though health-insurance agencies view this as
mandatory only for persons seriously in need of care living at home. The question of whether private sources
should be expected to bear more of the costs of elder care re-emerged recently as a contested political issue.
The liberal-economist wing of the Christian Union coalition parties, among others, demanded the upgrading
of self-help contributions by non-government bodies - that is, by families and private households - who
were accused of shirking their responsibilities. Although there is declining support for the formerly
fundamental liberal-conservative position that too much guaranteed social security undermines individual
helpfulness and feelings of duty, the concept of the "enabling state" in its entire spectrum is still part of the
debate. Its forms include proposals of tax relief to encourage enrolment in private nursing insurance, a
moderate position in which the state makes nursing insurance mandatory, and the position favoured by the
present (1992) government, socializing nursing insurance in the same manner as health insurance.
27 Garigue (1956: 1098-1100) was among the earliest to refute the theoretical link between urbanization and
the isolated nuclear family. Rather than seeing urban processes in Quebec as atypical, he argued that kinship
networks were adaptive mechanisms that might function as efficiently in urban settings as in rural. Whether
kinship organizations turned out to be useful in the city was more a function of culture than of urbanization
itself.
152
In this traditional complex, kinship relations were largely directed by the

women, who were expected to take the lead organizing "family affairs" and who
"acted as links between the various households of the kin group" (Garigue, 1956:
1093). Ties to immediate family - parents and siblings - were the ones most strongly
supported by community expectations and affirmed in contact and exchange.
Though we lack the benchmark data necessary to chart trends in
intergenerational helping behaviour, descriptive accounts and case studies highlight
the continuing vitality of kinship ties in Quebec social life. While it appears that
kinship formerly played a more important part in Quebec's economic and political
life than it does at present, it remains an important force. Declining fertility and
heightened geographic mobility have thinned some of the remarkably dense kinship
networks studied in urban Quebec in the 1950s, but a substantial proportion of all
exchanges of goods and services continue to be carried out within the framework of
kinship.
Levels of intergenerational exchange seem to be at least as high in Quebec
as in other industrial societies. It can also be argued that they are at least as high in
Quebec as in the rest of Canada. For example, in a comparison of rates of co-
residence with adult children reported in several local Canadian studies, Beland's
(1984) studies of Quebec showed higher rates of co-residence than any of the other
samples (Rosenthal, 1987: 316). A 1985 study of family support and friendship ties
among Canada's older population found that about 50% of women aged 65-69, and
well over 70% of women older than that, received help from others in yard work;
almost 59% of men over age 65 received help from others in housework, and almost
60% received help in meal preparation. In these and other, less frequent, kinds of
support, family members were more important than friends and acquaintances. In
cases in which involved family members are identified, daughters were more likely
than sons to be providers of help, partly because for the very elderly, surviving
children tend to be daughters (Stone, 1989). There is no reason to believe that
comparable figures for Quebec would be lower than those for Canada as a whole.
Roberge (1985: 7), studying the informal exchange of consumer goods and
services between households in a semi-rural community near Quebec City, observed
that exchange of goods and services formed the very core of kinship. He found that
71% of married women were involved in informal exchange with relatives, and that
such exchanges made up as much as 85% of the value of all informal exchanges
(Roberge, 1987: 63-64).
Delage (1987) documents the persistence of traditional kinship values and
practices among contemporary families in a Quebec City neighbourhood. However,
alongside traditional families are the more modern instances of divorce, single
parenthood, poverty, and low fertility. Delage predicts that the traditional family,
sustained by social relations largely enacted by women members, centred on the care
153
and raising of children, and with economic relations structured more by blood
relationships than by impersonal market forces, is doomed. It has persisted into the
present, he says, only by virtue of the high fertility of the grandmothers.
In a similar vein, Beland (1986: 178) maintained that the Quebec family
was no longer able to provide the necessary support for elderly people, although, he
said, it should continue to be the first source of support. His research among elderly
pensioners in three urban areas in 1978 revealed high rates of elderly residence in
multigenerational households and prompted a recommendation that policy makers
should attempt to further encourage aged parents to live with their children. At the
same time, he found that rates of helping behaviour by adult children not co-resident
with elderly parents were surprisingly low, ranging from 9% to 18% over a six-
month period. He concluded that help given by children who do not have their
elderly parent in their household is almost nil. When a child, relative, or friend takes
the parent into his or her home, other children give up all responsibility for rendering
help in daily activities (Beland, 1984: 305, 312).
Evidence of continued high concern about family values and the need to
care for older family members was revealed in surveys in which respondents rated
the importance of "personal values" such as prosperity, pleasure, friendship, success,
love, self-fulfillment, and family security. In surveys conducted in 1977 and 1981,
58% of Quebecers selected family security as the most important personal value.
Quebec's recently enacted (1987) family policy is both more modern and
more traditional than the policies of France and Germany. It is "modern" in the sense
that, when forced to define what constitutes a family, it has settled on a
nontraditional definition - an adult and a child living together, whatever their
biological relationship. In contrast, the policy principles state as government
objectives the reinforcement of the family as a fundamental collective unit, the
strengthening of its cohesion and stability, and the affirmation that "parents have the
primary responsibility for raising children," although government has an interest in
protecting the children's interests (Ouellet, 1989). Obviously, this official emphasis
on parental obligation for children has implications for intergenerational relations
later in life, for here, as elsewhere, obligations to parents are learned in the context
of family nurturance of children. An official weakening of the latter, in the sense of
the government substituting itself for family, is likely to be accompanied by
substitution of government for family at the other end of the life cycle as well.
The official family policy also promotes a high birthrate. That the rapid
collapse of fertility to levels far below replacement is defined as a social problem is
apparent in the title of a 1989 government publication, Denatalite: des Solutions. Part
of the concern about low fertility stems from fears that if present trends continue, the
continually declining population of working-age people will be unable to bear the tax
burden necessary to support the high medical and pension costs of a relatively large
154
elderly population. The Quebec government's family policy, which emphasizes each
family's responsibility for its own as a first line of effort, is an attempt to try to limit
expenditures for elder care by encouraging family care.
There are proposals that the burden on the state be reduced by encouraging
more retired people to live with their children, and that older people be constrained
to remain in the workforce longer (Patterson, 1980; Ridler, 1979, 1980), along with
warnings that Canadian citizens must be prepared to bear much greater tax burdens
(Barker, 1980). There is growing concern that continuing low fertility may lead to
a declining population, along with some hope that increased immigration will
ameliorate the problem (Gauthier, 1989).
Analysts in Quebec have noted the potential for intergenerational conflict
fueled by a demographic structure that places increasingly heavy burdens on a
shrinking working population. Writing that the impact of the "demographic crisis"
is more than a family matter, Mathews (1987) states that, in addition to the issue of
support, there is the question of the general orientations and preoccupations of the
society as a whole, which will be different if a majority of adults are over 50 than
if the most of the population is younger.^ There is already an implicit conflict between
the politics of old age and the politics of family responsibility. Resolving the issue
of who shall care for the elderly promises to create major family stresses. It means
that the households of 40-50-year-olds must agree to look after their aged parents,
not only financially but also in terms of providing personal care (Mathews, 1987: 15).
United States
The image of isolated nuclear families in urban America has been replaced by the
image of the "modified extended family," in which family members live relatively
close to each other, communicate frequently, and exchange resources and other
assistance. The new image includes some suggestion that urban living may actually
encourage kinship ties - for example, that urban dwellers have an enhanced ability
to live near each other because of the diversity of occupational opportunities the city
offers (Haller, 1961) or because urban-transit systems facilitate easy contact between
family members.28
28 The strength and continuity of kinship relations in American cities are illustrated in this description of a
typical middle-American city: "Kinship ties permeate Middletown. No other affiliative bond directly links
as many of the city's people in or near Middletown; and no other affiliative bond, apart from that between
a husband and a wife, has the combined power of normative obligation and personal affection to the same
extent ... Most Middletown adults recognize an obligation not only to keep in contact with their close
relatives but to help them when necessary. Both the amounts of obligation and contact decline rather sharply
between primary, secondary, and tertiary relatives. Women in Middletown seem to enjoy the maintenance
of kinship ties more than men do; men are more apt to stress the obligations involved. The greater
155
Government support programmes for the aged date from the social-security
programmes of the 1930s, and were augmented in the 1960s by anti-poverty and
medical-cost-support programmes. By the 1980s, these had become so expensive that
there were serious efforts at retrenchment.
Most Americans believe that family members have some responsibility to
help care for their aged kin, but primary economic support of older adults unable to
support themselves is assigned to the state. In the mid-1970s, 96% of the public said
that the government was responsible for supporting retired old people, and in 1981,
91% of adult children said they did not expect that they would have to provide
"income services" for their own elderly parents (Treas and Spence, 1989: 184). A
1986 national survey stated,
In general, Americans see state income maintenance efforts as an

entitlement for the needy, whether young or old ... Public assistance
has come to be seen as something to which the needy are entitled
regardless of kin's ability and willingness to help ... Expectations about
intergenerational obligations are not linked with judgments about social
welfare benefits. Whether the middle generation helps out does not
factor into decisions about the level of financial assistance the state
should provide to needy members of the younger or older generation.
(Treas and Spence, 1989:191)
On the other hand, there are strong norms making families responsible for
providing various kinds of nonfinancial support for family members, such as help in
shopping or advice in financial management (Treas and Spence, 1989: 192). In the
mid-1970s, over half of persons aged 80 and older continued to provide some
material assistance to their adult offspring (Harris, 1975), and 80-90% of older
urbanites had visited an adult child in the week previous to being surveyed (Shanas,
1973, 1979b). Between half and two thirds of older people in the U.S. say that they
receive help from their children (Cowgill, 1986: 89; Shanas et al., 1968: 214). Much
of this aid is services, rarely coerced; children often provide more than parents expect
(Cowgill, 1986: 89; Streib and Thompson, 1960: 483). If aged parents need financial
support, it is more likely to come from sons than daughters, but there is little call for
this kind of support. The numerous other types of assistance are the province of
daughters (Cowgill, 1986: 90). Even though impaired elderly family members may
receive government payments, when the sum total of supports and services they
involvement of women in kinship activities appears at every turn ... Having examined kinship activity in
Middletown in 1976-1977, we can say with assurance that it is the principal focus of social life in
Middletown. People's social activities with their relatives who live in or near Middletown are frequent and
highly valued. There is no evidence for any weakening of kinship ties during the past 50 years" (Caplow
et al., 1982: 222-224).
156
receive are evaluated, it turns out that family members and friends provide most of
the services, and the more impaired, the larger the portion of care provided by family
members and friends, "up to as much as 80% of all help received by the most
impaired" (Smyer, 1984: 326, citing GAO 1977 and 1979 studies of care received by
1,600 elderly persons in Cleveland).
Analyses of patterns of exchange in several U.S. studies suggest that there
is substantial reciprocity between generations. Where there is an imbalance, it occurs
"with the older generation receiving more than they give and the middle-aged parent
generation being squeezed with demands from above and below in the generational
hierarchy" (Bengtson et al., 1985: 323). It also appears that older couples give more
assistance to their children than they receive, while the widowed are more balanced
in their exchanges.
In the popular media, the "problem" of adult dependency is generally
defined in terms of employed workers versus the retired, or the "productive" middle-
aged versus the elderly. However, not all dependency is measurable in terms of GNP
and pay cheques. Older people not on payrolls - even in their children's homes - may
take care of many of their own dependency needs, and often contribute greatly to the
well-being of other members of the household. They "remain active contributors
throughout the life span, until impairment or advanced age requires that they become
recipients" (Smyer, 1984: 326).
Although much of the legal basis of obligation for familial aid has been
removed, many patterns of assistance continue. For while there may be extra-familial
sources of support for aged parents, bonds of affection and compelling norms of
family obligation persist (Treas and Spence, 1989). Also, the aid continues to be
mutual until very late in a parent's life. Much of the "problem" of older Americans
is not isolation from kin, but rather the continuing stress of being expected to help
meet the dependency needs of grown children (Cohler, 1983).
CONCLUSIONS
The connection between change in kinship relations and change in other sectors of
society is neither straightforward nor unidirectional. Moreover, the aspects of kinship
structure that are typically quantified may be its least interesting elements in the
sense that they miss much of the richness and variety of the interplay between
kinship and other elements of social life. A second methodological conclusion is that
we do not know enough about even the typically quantified kinship variables to chart
with confidence trends in intergenerational behaviour over the past three decades.
When we turn from the many particular studies to those that are similar enough to
generate points on a trend line, it turns out that much of our "knowledge" is
157
superficial and idiosyncratic. The near past turns out to be much less well illuminated
than we anticipated.
Presumably, some of the variables generally associated with modernization
or urbanization, especially the demographic trends, do indeed relate to changes in
family and kinship behaviours. However, often the linkage is neither obvious nor
carefully demonstrated. Here, we have argued that national variations in the
"independent" variables are sometimes much greater than those apparent in the
"dependent" kinship behaviours, and often apparently irrelevant. The metaphoric
generalizations in the literature about the impact of modernization on kinship
relations typically distort or mislead rather than explain.
It is apparent that since 1960 there has been a transformation of the family,
but not necessarily an attenuation of intergenerational relationships. The extent of the
transformation varies by region, culture, and ethnicity, but its general shape is quite
consistent. It seems to involve weakening of conjugal bonds, continuity of
intergenerational bonds, and a partial transfer of economic responsibility for family
members from families to governments.
There have been major shifts, in the definitions, emphases, and usages of
kinship networks, but not in the apparent vitality and efficacy of relations between
adult children and their parents, as least as indicated in the few standard measures
of contact and exchange we have examined. In France, the narrowing focus of
loyalties from a horizontally and vertically extended kinship structure to the familial
bonds connecting parents and children has maintained, and even revitalized,
intergenerational relations. In Germany, the widespread retreat in the 1950s to the
"private sphere," a reaction to the confrontation with the results of National
Socialism, has been replaced by increased openness and trust toward people outside
the family, but ties to family have not diminished in importance. In Quebec, family
size has declined dramatically, and norms governing family behaviour have been
altered and even reversed, but commitment to a narrowed set of responsibilities for
a smaller circle of kin remains strong. And in the U.S., apart from changes associated
with declining fertility and a growing percentage of older family members,
intergenerational relations exhibit remarkable stability. There is as much evidence for
increased intergenerational linkages - for instance, in response to family needs
associated with high divorce and single parenthood rates - as for decline.
In all four societies, intergenerational relations, especially between parents
and their adult children, continue to be among the most important, if not the most
important, social relationships outside the nuclear family, and tend to be maintained
throughout the lives of the parents. When children move out, it does not signify
isolation and rupture between generations. Parents and their adult children may not
live in the same household, and may not want to, but they see each other frequently
and engage in mutual support, a kinship relation that has been labelled "intimacy at
158
a distance." This model which represents a reconciliation between the individualistic

desire for autonomy and the necessity for mutual support that makes family life
possible, will probably continue to characterize kinship relations in advanced
industrial societies.
In each of these societies, an acknowledgement of the increasing plurality
of family forms took place. Its most radical form was observed in Quebec, where the
definition of family is no longer based on consanguinity, but solely on the social
category of an adult and child living together. In each society, there has been a
sequence of government assumption of partial responsibility for care of the aged,
followed by spiraling costs, a movement to resist additional claims for financial
support, and state efforts to stabilize expenditures by reaffirming the responsibilities
of families to care for their own, at least in part.
In France, a policy former favouring large families has been modified to
favour the poor, redefining family problems as problems of "the disadvantaged." In
the United States, there has been steady growth of state support for the elderly since
the 1930s, but, with the notable exception of the 1960s, much less federal effort to
help the economically disadvantaged. Perhaps as a result of a relatively long history
of social-security systems, Germans in need of help tend to feel entitled to state
support. The debate about "care insurance" for the elderly has changed the prevailing
definition from one that stigmatized impaired and impoverished old people as objects
of public charity to one in which the recipient has a "properly attained right" to
support.
An examination of the trends in living alone, out-of-wedlock births,
abortion, marriage, and divorce clearly conveys the sense that in all of these societies
the traditional family is "in trouble," with its structure altered and its normative
authority diminished. On the other hand, examination of the trends in
intergenerational contact and support suggest that these kinds of family ties maintain
their vitality.
This apparent incongruity is partially resolved by the observation that some
of the behaviours apparently destructive to the "traditional family," such as divorce
and out-of-wedlock childbearing (and, under some circumstances, abortion and
solitary living), actually increase the need for intergenerational contact and support.
The divorced adult child may return to the parental home for a time, or at least spend
more time visiting. Parents of a divorced son or daughter may feel more
responsibility to look after the emotional and physical needs of that person than if he
or she were married. Similarly, compared to marital births, out-of-wedlock births are
apt to generate more, rather than fewer, grandparental responsibilities and essential
intergenerational contacts, both in support of an unmarried adult child, who now must
also be a single parent, and in support of the grandchild, who usually lacks a father.
However, there is the suggestion, as yet unsupported in research, that in some of
159
these societies nonmarried but stable cohabiting couples exhibit the same "family"
characteristics as married couples.
We have noted theoretical and research support for the finding that the most
basic kinship bond is the mother-child bond. While that bond may be threatened by
some of the current trends, most notably declining fertility and increased abortion,
the other trends pointing to a weakening of "the family" have to do with conjugal,
rather than generational ties.
Specifically, the traditional role of the husband-father seems most
threatened. Some of the literature explicitly talks of the substitution of the state for
the male provider (Christensen, 1990: ix-x; Elshtain, 1982: 46), and some of the
trends in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing point to a weakening father-child
link. Even among more or less traditional families whose parents are now elderly,
mother-daughter bonds are the strongest, followed by mother-son bonds, with fathers'
links to offspring of either sex usually weaker than those of the mother. The mutual
exchange over increasingly long periods between adult children and their elderly
mothers will further enhance these mother-child ties.29
It thus seems that the apparent vitality of intergenerational relations reflects
a continuity of mother-daughter or mother-adult-child ties. There is little evidence in
the literature reviewed to suggest that the ongoing changes in the nature of the family
will alter these ties appreciably. On the other hand, the continuity of father-adult-
child ties seems much at risk; they are already weaker than mother-adult-child ties,
and trends associated with the "second demographic transition" that threaten the
legitimacy and priority of conjugal bonds seem likely to further erode them.30 At
any rate, there is need for intergenerational research that explores trends in
relationships to fathers, and fathers' involvement with children over the life cycle.
29 Segalen (1985: 27) interprets recent changes in the Western family as an evolution in the direction of a
matricentric model rather than decline: "All these indexes seem to define a new type of family model, in
which the couple seems to be more and more often questioned; besides, contrary to the time period where
the norm left place for only one type of family, regularly married couples, it now admits juvenile
cohabitation, and rather transitory matri-centered family structures ... We believe it is wiser to look beyond
the couple and its fortunes to the whole kinship network ... Family and kinship are universal structures,
taking on various forms ... The matri-centered family is not a European invention but is quite common
throughout various human groups generally studied by anthropologists." Implicit in her comments, and
evident from many of the trends we have reviewed, is that along with matricentricity comes reduced
involvement of men in most aspects of family and kinship relations.
30 In support of this position, see Hawkins (1992). Some writers take an opposing position, arguing for the
emergence of a "new father" role with paternal characteristics better fitted to the postmodern era
(cf. Yablonsky, 1990). However, systematic efforts to identify such fathers in representative surveys have
been notably unsuccessful. Contemporary fathers, although often present at the birth of their children, tend
not to take advantage of the "parental leave" to which they are entitled and are more likely than are men
without children to hold traditional values (Leube, 1988).
160
Finally, there is the question of whether the apparent stability of

intergenerational relations is a historic artifact or a structural consequence of mother-
child bonding. The middle generation who now, with their parents and grandparents,
demonstrate continued intergenerational solidarity, as demonstrated by helping,
visiting, and caring, are the children of 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s - of the Great
Depression, the war years, and the baby boom. They antedate much of the second
demographic revolution and its attendant shift in emphasis from
commitment/traditionalism to individualism/progressivism.
The "dependency crisis" foreseen by some analysts - an approaching strain
on pension and health-care systems due to high proportions of older people in the
advanced Western nations - is predicted to arrive at a time when the middle
generation consists of the children of the 1960s to the 1980s, many of whom
represent a generation whose lifestyles and political decisions have affirmed
individualism as opposed to commitment, and state support systems as a substitute
for traditional family responsibilities (van de Kaa, 1987: 11, 24-26). It remains to be
seen whether children reared in cultures emphasizing individualistic priorities, yet
faced with heavy dependency responsibilities, will continue the present levels of
contact with and support for their elders.
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171
6
Trends in Religion and Secularization
Bruce A. CHADWICK
Madeleine GAUTHIER
Louis HOURMANT
Barbara WORNDL
Discussions about religion in modern society usually assume that secularization has
been an inevitable consequence of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization.
The rise of rational thought, the advancement of science, and the emergence of
occupational specialization are felt to have reduced both societal and individual
dependence on religion. The common-sense wisdom of this industrialization-
urbanization-secularization link is so persuasive that most social scientists, as well
as the general public, uncritically assume that secularization has occurred in industrial
societies. Recently, however, a few social scientists have challenged this assumption
and have pointed out religion's contemporary influence in American and European
society (Bacot, 1991; Caplow, Bahr, and Chadwick, 1983; Greeley, 1972; Hervieu-
Leger, 1986; Robbins and Robertson, 1987).
Although theologians and social scientists have produced a variety of
definitions, secularization is generally thought to involve a lessening in the
importance of religious institutions in society and a decline in individual acceptance
of religious beliefs and participation in religious activities (Roberts, 1984). Recent
multi-dimensional theories direct attention to the influence of religion on both
individuals and social institutions (Wilson, 1985). Dobbelaere (1981, 1985, 1987) has
developed a conceptualization of secularization with three distinct dimensions. The
first is the autonomy that social institutions such as politics, education, and family
have from the religious institution. Forbidding prayer in public schools (educational
173
institution) and increased premarital sex, cohabitation, divorce, and abortions (family
institution) are examples of this dimension in the United States and Western Europe.
The second dimension involves the degree to which religious institutions focus
on "worldly" issues, as compared to "other world" concerns. Examples of this
dimension are the energies religious groups and denominations devote to reducing
poverty, racism, and sexism and to protecting the environment in contemporary
society. Such a focus was clearly evident in Europe following the Second World
War, in the United States during the civil-rights movement and the war on poverty
in the 1960s, and in Quebec's "quiet revolution", which precipitated the decline of
the influence of religion on other social institutions.
The final dimension is individual acceptance of traditional religious beliefs
and participation in religious activities. The influence of religion is diminished as
members of society satisfy their emotional and social needs through other social
institutions.
Although the three dimensions are strongly related, they may vary somewhat
independently. Thus, scholars and researchers focusing on only one of these
dimensions have garnered inconsistent results regarding the contemporary influence
of religion in industrial societies.
This chapter examines all three dimensions of secularization. We attempt to
shed additional light on the contention that the influence of religion has been reduced
through industrialization, urbanization, and modernization by comparing religious
trends over the past 30 years in four industrial or post-industrial societies. If
secularization is part and parcel of industrialization and modernization, it should be
readily apparent in Quebec, West Germany, France, and the United States.
DATA
This chapter utilizes data collected by the International Research Group on the
Comparative Charting of Social Change in Advanced Industrial Societies (Caplow et
al., 1991; Forse et al., 1992; Glatzer et al., 1992; Langlois et al., 1990). In addition,
we scrutinized public-opinion polls, government statistics, and social research about
religion in the four societies for the 30-year period 1960 to 1990.
International comparisons are difficult because beliefs, behaviours, issues, and
events vary in their importance in different societies. Thus while one society may
carefully chart particular religious beliefs or behaviours, another society may pay
little attention to them. For example, Caplow (1982) has noted the paucity of
information about individual religious beliefs and behaviours in Europe, while such
data abound in the United States. Even when several societies record information
about a particular belief or behaviour, each may employ different indicators, so that
literal comparisons are not always possible. We have included four figures that
174
Religion
compare at least three of the four societies on significant religious characteristics. We

have tried to minimize the problems of cross-cultural comparison by examining
religious beliefs, practices, and organizations in their national, institutional, and
historical context, in the hope that this study will reveal socio-structural regularities
concerning religion and industrialization that transcend historical differences and
national cultures.
RELIGION IN QUEBEC
Religion in Quebec cannot be understood without reference to its general history

beginning in the sixteenth century. The Catholic church, its clergy, and its religious
communities provided most of the social cohesion and stability during the
colonization period. Indeed, the strength of parochial structures prevented parishioners
from being greatly affected by the change in regime following the British defeat of
the French.
The century following the British conquest found the Catholic hierarchy
exercising finesse in dealing with governors, who were not of the same faith and who
had received orders from London to undermine Catholicism. These difficult
negotiations forced the Catholic church to Canadianize itself, through adoption of a
local clergy and through interventions of the clergy vis-a-vis the government. Gains
made in preserving Catholic influence foretold the emergence of a "national church"
(Voisine, 1971: 37). The Catholic church broadened its influence in all levels of
education, in charitable works, and in numerous other ways. A "religious awakening"
fulfilled the ideal of "restoration" of the Roman Catholic papacy in Quebec during
the second half of the nineteenth century (Sylvain and Voisine, 1991; Voisine,
1971: 46). The prevalence of Christianity gave a broad scope to canon
law-ultramontane ideas gained the upper hand over modernism- and to ritual through
various types of devotions.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when most states in the Western
world were setting themselves apart from the church and moving toward secularism
and atheistic humanism, the church of Quebec had established itself as a national
church and as a powerful political force (Hamelin and Gagnon, 1984; Hamelin,
1984). It was "the most Roman of the national churches," according to Voisine
(1971: 59). It was wealthier than the provincial government and held powers beyond
those of other social groups or institutions. The legal separation of church and state
in no way prevented the former from exercising major influence on political decisions
or from resisting any overly democratic tendencies that might spread the European
revolutionary movement to the new continent.
The triumph of the church was not to last. The homogeneity of parish life
could not continue in a society that was becoming increasingly urban, industrial, and
175
open to new, and sometimes radical, thought. In addition, the church was threatened
as Canadian society questioned its own future as a nation. The economic depression
of the 1930s made the financial situation of the church more precarious and its
humanitarian endeavours more difficult to support. Catholics in all social classes
began to attend mass less often and to distance themselves somewhat from the
church.
The years following the Second World War saw the rise of ideological
pluralism. Tensions within the bishopric itself and then with its laymen, and the
church's inability to continue to support all its temporal works further reduced its
influence (Belanger, 1977: 97; Clement, 1972). The "quiet revolution" of the 1960s
contributed greatly to the decline in church power and influence. The separation of
church and state was fully realized through the emergence of a modern and secular
state. Former church social responsibilities for welfare and education were largely
assumed by the government. This situation led certain observers to comment that the
government employees in these fields had become "the new clergy."
Autonomy of Other Social Institutions
During the 1960s, the process of secularization of Quebec's social institutions was
virtually completed (Hamelin, 1984). Institutions involved in providing public
assistance, including hospitals, were brought under state control. The Catholic
hierarchy is occasionally consulted by government officials and thus is able to
exercise some modest influence. More often, the church takes the initiative in voicing
its opinion about specific legislation, particularly proposals concerning social justice
and human dignity. It continues to exercise discreet moral leadership, but little real
power. The discretion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is parallelled by the silence of
Catholics, who no longer dare to voice their convictions openly (Dumont, 1982).
Secularization of social institutions evolved without much resistance. The only
serious threat to autonomy from religion surrounded the creation of a Ministere de
1'education (Department of Education). The bishops had previously exercised
considerable control over education, since nearly all of them sat on the Conseil de
1'instruction publique, a government body that had some independence from the
political domain. The bishops lost the battle over the creation of the Ministere de
1'education in 1964, but they did not entirely lose the war, for they continue to
exercise significant influence through the committee structure of the department: the
Catholic and Protestant committees are responsible for religious instruction and for
the denominational orientation of the schools. Although it has been a matter of debate
for many years, the denominational status of the school boards of Quebec City and
Montreal has been guaranteed by the Canadian constitution since Confederation in
1867 (Section 93 of the British North America Act). This can be removed only
176
Religion
through an amendment to the constitution, which has been the major stumbling block
for groups that have attempted to complete secularization of the schools. Education
remains the last bastion in which the church is entrenched in the institutional
structure of Quebec society.
The bishops' position in education is supported to a degree by parents who
enroll their children in religious instruction. Since 1983, parents have had the option
of enrolling their children in either religious instruction or irreligious moral
instruction. The majority of parents continue to request traditional religious
instruction linked to their cultural tradition (see figure 1; Milot, 1991).
The presence of the church in social welfare has changed drastically. Almost
all public assistance is now provided by the state. The church does contribute to
social-welfare efforts by meeting some needs that are neglected by government policy
and/or programmes. Chaplains serve in hospitals and in homes for the elderly, and
sometimes there are nuns among the employees, but many people simply ignore
them. The church frequently reminds the government of its responsibilities to the
disadvantaged. For example, religious communities recently called the government's
attention to persistent poverty in Quebec (Conference religieuse canadienne, region
de Quebec, 1988).
While the institutional church had a strong presence during the organization
of the labour-union movement, it withdrew from this sphere of activity in 1960, when
the Catholic unions were deconfessionalized (Rouillard, 1989). The messages
delivered by the bishops on May Day each year recall the principles of social justice
that should guide society's management of its labour force and economy. However,
the church's influence is marginal and sometimes provokes opposition, as was the
case when the Commission episcopate des affaires sociales denounced certain
economic policies that were opposed to the interest of workers (Commission des
affaires sociales de la Conference des eveques catholiques du Canada, 1983).
Economists and politicians accused the bishops of knowing little about the issue and
urged them to return to their sacristy.
The Catholic church's involvement with the family has changed dramatically
over the past 30 years. Prior to 1968, all marriages were performed by religious
representatives. Since then, civil marriages have been allowed. As well, there has
been an increase in living together and common-law marriages. Importantly, Pope
Paul VFs 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, particularly the continued prohibition of
birth control, was not well received by Catholics in Quebec. This encyclical no doubt
accelerated the loss of church influence over moral issues affecting the family. The
contraceptive behaviour of couples in Quebec clearly rejects the traditional teachings
of the Catholic church. Nor has church doctrine prevented the decriminalization of
abortion or the operation of government-sponsored abortion clinics. Within the church
itself, there has been opposition to various official doctrinal positions. Feminist
177
Catholic groups have tried to demonstrate how Christian moral values can be
interpreted to justify abortion (Roy, 1990: 102). A survey conducted following Pope
John Paul IPs 1984 visit found that the majority of Catholics in Quebec disagreed
with him on nearly all of the family issues of contraception, abortion, divorce,
remarriage of divorcees, and marriage of priests.
In summary, there has been a significant increase in the autonomy of social
institutions from religion in Quebec. The so-called quiet revolution has shifted much
of the power and many of the functions formerly the domain of the Catholic church
to various government agencies.
Shift to Worldly Focus
It appears that the Catholic church has shifted its efforts to a degree from
encouraging members to prepare for the world beyond the grave to seeking
immediate happiness and peace. Sermons about heaven and hell, which were common
during most of the history of Quebec Catholicism, now seem to have negligible
impact. A survey conducted during the pope's 1984 visit found that only 15% of
Quebecers still believed in heaven and hell as places where one goes after death (Le
Devoir, September 9, 1984). The "other world" perspective has been joined by a
pursuit of happiness in this world in the official discourse of the Catholic church.
The social, economic, and political messages of the bishops of Quebec (Centre
Justice et Foi, 1984) also illustrate church involvement in contemporary social issues.
Church leaders have taken a strong stance supporting anti-poverty programmes and
have called attention to current economic problems. Cardinal Maurice Roy, who
presided over the pontifical Justice and Peace commission created by Paul VI, made
a notable contribution to the development and peace issues. Financial contributions
to Development and Peace have increased slightly from 1968 to 1990. In addition,
the church officially supported mass demonstrations such as the Grande Marche pour
Femploi in 1983 and other marches for peace through disarmament.
Environmental issues also appear in the discourse of the bishops. The
economy of Quebec is highly dependent on forestry resources, which are located in
remote regions. The distant forests are usually discussed in the context of regional
development, and some bishops consider it their responsibility to protect the
environment in these isolated rural areas.
Although the bishops are reserved in their discussion of political issues, they
do not abstain from evoking them in provincial and federal elections. Some bishops
have become involved in the spirited discussions regarding the constitutional future
of Quebec and the Charter of the French Language. Generally, the bishops have
reiterated the rights of minorities, self-determination of peoples, and greater tolerance
of diversity.
178
Religion
Women's issues have received considerable attention from both the Catholic
and the Protestant church in Quebec, as women have questioned family violence,
contraception, and issues surrounding women's labour-force participation, including
child care. The Catholic hierarchy has taken a position against injustices perpetrated
against women in a document called La place desfemmes dans I'Eglise, prepared by
an ad hoc committee presided over by a woman theologian at the request of the
Catholic Conference of the Bishops of Canada (Roy, 1990: 106-110).
In summary, the church in Quebec is less involved in contemporary social
issues than in the past, because of its withdrawal from control of social welfare. In
spite of this forced separation, the church and its members have become involved in
advocacy for the disadvantaged. Over all, this has led to a smaller financial and
institutional commitment to social issues, but at the same time a greater awareness
of social problems. Finally, an "other worldly" orientation is not preached as often,
and church members are encouraged to help create a more responsive society.
Individual Beliefs and Practices
Religious affiliation remained steady over the past 30 years, even during the period
of institutional secularization described above. In 1970, 99% of the population were
church members, and 98% were in 1980 (figure 1). Approximately 88% of the
population identifies itself as Catholic; this figure has remained steady. Protestantism
has decreased from 8.1% in 1961 to 5.9% in 1991 (Census of Canada). This decrease
may be explained in part by the exodus of Anglophones to other Canadian provinces.
The religious landscape has become slightly more diversified with the arrival of
immigrants from Southeast Asia, although a modest proportion of these are also
Catholics. The proportion of individuals who indicate that they do not belong to any
religious institution was zero in 1961 and rose to 3.9% in 1991 (Census of Canada).
Although the vast majority of Quebecers continue to define themselves as
Catholics, their religious practice has declined. On any given Sunday in 1980, 40%
of Catholics were in church, but only 33% were in 1985 (figure 2). In only five
years, from 1981 to 1986, weekly church attendance decreased from 51% to 36% for
the population as a whole. Among Catholics, 88% attended mass at least twice per
month in 1965, but this figure had plummeted to only 38% 20 years later. Similar
data were not available for Protestants in Quebec, but for Canada as a whole, a
Gallup poll conducted periodically since 1957 reveals that weekly church attendance
among Protestants decreased slightly, from 32%, in 1965, to 26%, in 1988 (La
Presse, 30 May 1988).
Religious practice among youth is even lower. According to a study conducted
in 1987, 93% of Quebecers aged 15 to 25 years considered themselves Catholic, but
179
Figure 1
Membership in Religious Organizations
in West Germany, Quebec, and the United States, 1960-90
Note: Occasionally, data for a given year were not available and information from a previous
or later year was substituted.
Figure 2
Weekly Attendance by Roman Catholics
in France, West Germany, Quebec, and the United States, 1960-90
or later year was substituted. In 1965, for Quebec, 88% represents attendance at least
twice per month.
180
Religion
only 17% attend mass every week. Only 7% of young people consider themselves
active members of their parish (Bibby, 1990).
The "electronic church" allows individuals to participate in religious services
in the comfort of their own homes. Although fewer minutes each week are now
devoted to religious radio broadcasts than in the early 1960s, television time has
increased. Religious programming on TV rose from 115 minutes per week, in 1957,
to 195 minutes, in 1990, in the Montreal region. Mass is broadcast on television
every Sunday morning, and additional religious programming is available on cable
(Office des communications sociales, compiled by Mario Doyle). The government
television channel also provides public-affairs broadcasts exploring religious issues.
For example, a recent programme was devoted to new forms of spirituality.
Interestingly, television evangelists seem to appeal less to Francophone than to
Anglophone audiences.
Religious newspapers and magazines have had a fairly stable circulation, and
some have even experienced an increase (Association canadienne des periodiques
catholiques). For example, the Revue Notre-Dame, which is distributed in savings-
and-loan institutions, is quite popular: its circulation increased sixfold from 1971 to
1991 (Association canadienne des periodiques catholiques).
Unfortunately, we could not find any trend data concerning religious belief in
Quebec, and we thus have only a few cross-sectional surveys. A belief in God was
reported by 92% of the Quebec population in a survey conducted during the papal
visit in 1984 (Le Devoir, 8 September 1984). The belief that Jesus Christ is God was
held by 73% of the population, including 79% of Catholics and 57% of Protestants.
The belief that "religion is above all a moral force to guide us in our life" was
accepted by 44% of the respondents, while 36% believed that it is "a source of
support or consolation during difficult times." The fate of an individual after death
is far from a matter of unanimity. Thirty-nine percent believe that the soul continues
to live, 18% believe in reincarnation, and 20% think that existence ends with death.
Belief in heaven and hell has become marginal: only 15% are convinced that they
exist. Eight percent didn't answer the question.
The proportion of Catholic infants baptized was 81% in 1968; this figure rose
to 87% in 1985, and then dropped back to 81% in 1988 (figure 3). Even though the
number of births among French-speaking women has declined, families have
maintained the tradition of having their children baptized.
Prior to 1968, religious marriage was the only way to get married in Quebec.
Since then, however, couples have the choice between a civil marriage at the
courthouse or a religious marriage in the church. The number of religious marriages
has declined considerably over the past 20 years, from 98% of all marriages, in 1970,
to 72% in 1990 (figure 4). Interestingly, people under age 25 are the most likely to
opt for a religious marriage: 87% of husbands and 85% of wives in 1985
181
(Baillargeon, 1987: 348). Much of the increase in civil marriage is accounted for by
remarriage following divorce, which is not allowed in the Catholic church. As well,
common-law marriages have increased, also reducing the proportion of religious
marriages.
The number of funeral services conducted under religious auspices has been
relatively stable over the past 30 years. However, the Catholic church has liberalized
its funeral policy. Previously, cremation was frowned on, but now it is acceptable:
since 1985, priests have adapted the ceremony accordingly.
Parish revenues show a modest decline. When contributions are converted to
constant 1981 dollars, low of 122 million dollars was reached in 1988, but the total
has since increased to 135 million dollars in 1990 (according to the Assemblee des
Eveques du Quebec). Financial support of the church, however, is not consistent with
a lack of regular attendance; members continue to tithe and contribute to the church
even though they do not attend as frequently as in former times. Religious attachment
is manifested at times of important life events, including births, marriages, and
deaths.
The number of ordinations of priests has fallen sharply over the past 30 years.
Ordinations dropped from 117, in 1961, to fewer than 20, in 1987 (Commission
episcopale des ministeres et de 1'apostolat, 1988). The replacement of priests is a
problem that is not unique to Quebec, but is a serious predicament faced by the
Catholic church throughout the world.
Although ordinations have declined, the number of theology students has
remained steady; the number of part-time students actually rose rather significantly
during the 1980s (Citta Del Vaticano), and a majority of them are women.
The church has continued its essential activities by shifting responsibility from
priests to other members of various religious communities and by appointing
laypeople to duties previously assigned to members of religious orders or to clerics
(Commission episcopale des ministeres et de 1'apostolat, 1988: 9, 22, 23). There are
currently a substantial number of laymen attending theology faculties who are
preparing themselves not only for religious-instruction duties in the schools, but for
roles in the pastorate and in administration of ecclesiastical organizations. Even
though they are not allowed to be priests, women in particular have been recruited
into positions previously reserved for clerics, including proclaiming the Word,
administering parishes, and distributing communion.
The emergence of new religions is difficult to track, since they are not clearly
documented in the Canadian census. Nevertheless, it appears that membership in new
religions has increased from 1.8% of the population, in 1961, to 3.3%, in 1981.
Research has revealed that even though individuals may attend a new religious group,
they will likely indicate on the census their religion at the time of their baptism, and
182
Religion
Figure 3
Baptism of Infants into a Roman Catholic or Protestant Church,
in France, West Germany, and Quebec, 1968-90
or later year was substituted. In France and Quebec, Catholic baptism; in West Germany,
both Catholic and Protestant baptisms.
Figure 4
Religious Marriages
in France, West Germany, and Quebec, 1960-90
or later year was substituted.
183
they do not see any contradiction in identifying themselves as Catholic (Gauthier,

1991: 50). Changes in church membership noted by the census identify a proliferation
of new religious and parareligious groups. Bergeron (1982: 9) identified 300 such
religious groups in Quebec in 1982; the Centre d'information sur les nouvelles
religions distinguished more than 650 of them in 1988.
Within the Catholic church itself, a renewal of faith has been expressed with
varying degrees of intensity over the past three decades. The Charismatic movement
had nearly 30,000 members in Quebec in 1980 (Zylberberg and Montminy,
1981: 62). Fundamentalist tendencies are expressed through Neo-Catechumension,
Opus Dei, and the Cursillists. Churches that are half empty on Sunday are filled for
Lenten conferences focusing on social injustice (according to les Caremes de Notre-
Dame de Quebec).
In summary, affiliation with the Catholic church has remained quite high, over
80%, but acceptance of traditional religious beliefs has diminished. In addition,
church activity, especially attendance at services, has declined considerably.
Conclusions
Prior to the Second World War, religion played an enormously important role in
French-Canadian society. Since the end of the war, the following changes have
occurred.
1. A rapid decline of the influence of institutional religion. Social
institutions have vastly increased their autonomy from religion. What is interesting
is that this secularization of institutions in Quebec occurred later than in the other
three societies we examined. However, once the process started, it proceeded rapidly.
The Quiet Revolution, as it is called, took place over just a few years (Rocher, 1973).
Vestiges of church influence remain in religious instruction in the public schools and
in the denominationality of certain school boards, but over all the church has been
removed from formal participation in other major social institutions.
2. Continued involvement with contemporary social problems. The
Catholic church and its clergy are heavily involved in reducing poverty and
promoting peace.
3. A rejection of some Catholic beliefs and a decline in participation,
especially attendance. Although attendance has declined, other religious practices,
such as baptism of children, religious marriages, and religious funerals, continue at
a high rate. The Christian press has maintained a large readership, and the electronic
church is growing on television. Belief in God and weekly attendance at religious
services has declined considerably. Even though few continue traditional religious
practices, Quebecers have not let go of all association with religion; many maintain
184
Religion
its cultural heritage. For example, the majority of parents still opt for religious
training of their children, which leads to first communion and first confession.
4. An increase in unusual forms of religious beliefs and practices. An
important change is occurring in the diversity of religious beliefs, such as the
explanation of what happens after death. The multiplication of esoteric and new
religious movements constitutes an indicator of the shifting of beliefs, rather than
their disappearance.
RELIGION IN FRANCE
The French Revolution, marked by a strongly anti-clerical character, seriously

strained relations between the Catholic church and the republic. The church's close
association with the monarchy of the ancien regime made it an obvious target for
French revolutionaries, who duly decreed the disestablishment of the Catholic church
in 1795 and confiscated its lands. At the centre of the ideological conflict between
the church and the anti-clerical movement was the question of who would dominate
the peasantry. The church was the most important institution within the anti-
republican camp, and it united those who wanted to re-establish the ancien regime.
Church and state reached a compromise under Napoleon's concordat of 1801, and
Catholicism was recognized as the religion of the "great majority" of French people.
The church provided enthusiastic support for the restored monarchies of 1815-30, for
the July monarchy of 1830-48, and for Napoleon Ill's Second Empire of 1852-70.
In regions of strong religious observance, as well as in social classes in which
religious practice flourished (the nobility), to be a Catholic was to participate in a
counter-culture. For these Catholics, everything could be explained in terms of
religion, and behaviour patterns, opinions, and values conformed to a Catholic
viewpoint.
The church itself acted as a counter-society. It provided a whole range of
social institutions that enabled Catholics to escape from those of the republic.
Children were sent to schools run by Catholic nuns or monks, and were encouraged
to train as priests. Access to a seminary provided upward social mobility for
Catholics from poor backgrounds similar to receiving a grant from the republic.
Wealthier Catholics devoted considerable time and money to sponsoring charitable
activities and associations benefitting the poor, such as sewing circles, youth clubs,
and sporting associations.
The organizational strength of the church most strongly emerged in the
agricultural sector of society, where an impressive network of para-Catholic
associations was established, including farmers' co-operatives, friendly societies, trade
unions, and banks. They were so successful that the republicans attempted to imitate
them in order to win peasant support away from the church.
185
A democratic political system gradually came into existence in France toward

the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of the Third Republic. Relations
between church and state degenerated rapidly once the Third Republic was
established. The confrontation came to an end in 1905, when the Radical government
of Combes decreed the separation of church and state and the Catholic church ceased
to be the official religion. Despite sporadic conflicts between the church and the
republic since 1905, harmony has generally prevailed in their relations.
Control over the nation's educational systems continues to be a source of conflict

between church and state. The church believes that it has a duty to teach Christian
values. The state rejects this claim and is determined to inculcate French citizens with
republican values.
Between 1960 and 1990, the jurisdiction of the church in the education system
has stabilized. The church's successful defence of its schools against the Socialist
government's attempts to incorporate them within the state education system in 1984
illustrates its continuing institutional strength. In response to the government's reform
plans, the church did not hesitate to intervene in the "defence of liberty." The opinion
polls suggested that three quarters of the French people backed the church's right to
retain independent schools, despite the fact that practising Catholics represented at
most 15% of the population, and only 10% of French families enrol their children in
private schools. The overwhelming majority felt that the right to choose their
children's education was one of the fundamental principles of democracy. By
opposing the proposed reform, the church showed itself to be still a powerful
institution, speaking for a wide range of pressure groups. The combination of the
church, a burgeoning pressure-group movement, and overwhelming opposition from
public opinion was sufficient to force the left-wing government to abandon its
planned reform. This conflict reversed the values traditionally associated with left and
right: the church defended the "principle of liberty," whereas the left-wing parties and
the lay teachers' union called upon "respect for authority." The majority of French
people felt that in order to defend its position of power, the left had abandoned its
traditional principles of liberty and equality for all citizens.
After the First World War, the church established a series of para-Catholic
organizations in an attempt to increase its institutional influence in economic sectors
of society. Three groups were established initially to extend the church's appeal
among workers, peasants, and students, united under the control of a mother
organization, Catholic Action. These organizations were remarkably successful: the
Young Christian Farmers (JAC) brought all those who lived in the countryside back
into the fold of the church, and it was followed by the Young Christian Workers
186
Religion
(JOC) and the Young Christian Students (JEC). In the interwar period, the JAC was,
indeed, too successful, for it eventually demanded its independence from the church.
The more it distanced itself from the church, the more it adopted an overtly political
stance and transformed its task from that of winning converts to Catholicism to that
of training Catholic activists to exercise influence in other professional and political
organizations. The student organization, JEC, also, quarrelled with the church
hierarchy and eventually declared itself independent of any ecclesiastical influence.
Its success can be measured by the fact that many of its student leaders of the 1950s
held prominent positions in government in the 1980s, including Michel Rocard
(prime minister), Henri Nallet (minister of agriculture), and Robert Chapuis (minister
for technology).
The workers' organization, JOC, attempted to increase church influence among
industrial workers. However, it increased the feeling of class consciousness, rather
than attracting workers to the bosom of the church. Thus formal links between the
JOC and the church did not last long. In the 1950s, "worker priests" invested
themselves in the workers' milieu in spite of the hesitations of the church hierarchy.
The increased involvement of Catholic âctivists among industrial workers led to the
creation of a Christian trade union, the CFTC, in 1919. The CFTC became
independent of the church in 1964, when a majority of its members declared
themselves in favour of secularizing the union. A minority of members formed a new
Christian trade union, which kept the old initials, CFTC. Fewer than 3% of all unions
members belong to this union. Thus, the various attempts by the church to extend
its influence within economic institutions have, more often than not, backfired.
Catholics disagree with their church hierarchy about traditional sexual norms
and family life. Discussions about the encyclical Humanae vitae revealed the
church's loss of influence in family life. Recent (1974) legislation liberalizing access
to contraception, divorce, and abortion received little opposition. A pro-life
movement emerged, but it was unsuccessful in preventing the legalization of abortion.
Religious institutions, both Christian and Jewish, have focused on the ethics of
genetic engineering as a means to inject morals back into the discussion of sex and
birth. They are joining with other groups, physicians, biologists, and "free thinkers"
to promote legislation restricting such experimentation.
Since the Second Vatican Council (1965), catholic church doctrine has changed so
rapidly as to be barely recognizeable to older generations, who grew up in a church
that held out the prospect of hell and damnation for sinners. Such threats are now
regarded by younger people as superstitious nonsense. As God has been transformed
into a symbol of love rather than fear, the gravity of sin has been greatly diminished.
187
Rather than being a prelude to eternal damnation, sin has become an obstacle to
leading a happy life. Because it is no longer punished by the threat of damnation, it
does not provoke the same feelings of remorse and guilt. The ritual of confession has
relentlessly declined as a consequence.
Instead of postponing the pursuit of happiness until they are in heaven, as
believers were encouraged to do under the old theology, the Catholic church now
accepts that people have a right to happiness on earth. Far more than merely a
relaxation of stricter religious beliefs and practices, the change in church doctrine
constitutes a fundamental transformation of its vision of the world. Not surprisingly,
many devout Catholics feel cheated by the dilution of the traditional doctrine. In
contrast, many activists in para-Catholic associations, as well as in the church itself,
have been encouraged by what they see as its adaptation to the modern world. All
things considered, there has been a significant shift of focus in the Catholic church
in France. This has been accompanied by involvement of the Catholic church in
ameliorating social problems such as poverty and in supporting social movements
such as world peace and protection of the environment. In summary, the church in
France has greatly increased its attention to moral existence at the expense of the
hereafter.
Since the law does not permit the census to ask about church membership, such
information is not available. Surveys have found that 80% of the population identify
themselves as Catholic with remarkable stability. Nevertheless, response varies when
the question is phrased differently. For example, when asked "Now, do you consider
that you belong to a religion?," only 75% in 1970 and 58% in 1990 claimed to be
Catholic. Conversely, the rate of those belonging to no church varies from 18% to
38%, depending on the wording of the question. Fewer than half of all young people
have reported church membership for some years, which suggests that the proportion
of the population belonging to the Catholic church is declining.
Doubts about the extent of religious affiliation in France, which the church
contended to be almost universal, first surfaced in a 1943 study by Godin and Daniel.
They claimed that while the majority of French people were baptized, fewer than one
quarter were attending mass every Sunday. In certain regions, the proportion of
regularly practising Catholics even fell below 10%. Only in a few, deeply pious
regions was there a high, quasi-unanimous level of religious observance. Elsewhere,
regular church attendance averaged between 10% and 15% of the population. Indeed,
contemporary historians are providing evidence that certain areas in France (for
example, the Paris Basin and the northwest Massif Central) never really succumbed
to the influence of the Catholic church.
188
Religion
As can be seen in figure 2, attendance at mass dipped from 32% of church

membership, in 1960, to only 11%, in 1990. The decline in religious observance can
be traced, in part, to the changing nature of Catholicism itself. Since attending mass
on Sunday is no longer portrayed as a strict moral obligation, it is hardly surprising
that regular attendance has fallen. Other factors, such as a drop in the number of
priests, the closing of churches, and the holding of fewer masses have all contributed
to the decline in religious observance.
According to various studies of religious practices in France from the 1940s
onward, the church had previously greatly exaggerated the extent to which people
regularly attended church. In reality, for most people church attendance was irregular.
The mode of religious observance was celebration of the "four seasons" of the life
cycle: baptism at birth, first communion as an adolescent, marriage at the start of
adult life, and funeral at death. This minimal conformity was extended in certain
regions to include celebration of a number of annual religious festivals, such as
Christmas, Easter, the Feast of the Assumption, All Saints' Day, Ascension Day, and
Whit Sunday.
The proportion of children who are baptized at birth has declined. In 1968,
82% of the births in France were followed by a baptism (figure 3). After a slow
decline, only 64% of all infants were baptized in 1987, and fewer than 50% of
children went to catechism. A similar decrease occurred for religious weddings
(figure 4). In 1965, 78% of the weddings in France were conducted by clergy, while
only 55% were in 1985. It is notable, however, that although baptisms and church
weddings have declined, nearly two thirds of infants in France were still baptised and
over half of all weddings took place in the church.
Individual religiosity in France can also be measured by the strength of the
priesthood. The number of men training to be priests began to decline at the
beginning of the twentieth century, from around 1,500 per annum, in 1900, to around
1,000 per annum, in 1950. That figure fell to 500 in 1960, to 200 during the 1970s,
and to a mere 100 in the 1980s. Moreover, increasingly large numbers of priests have
expressed their dissatisfaction with the role of the priesthood. Growing
disillusionment motivated a large number of priests to leave the church, which was
followed by a decline in church attendance by their former parishioners. A
diminished band of ageing priests is left to staff the Catholic church. In 1965 there
were 45,003 secular priests in France, in 1975 there were 41,461, and in 1985 there
were 36,617 (table 1). By 1995, this figure will decline to only 20,000 unless married
men and women are allowed into the priesthood.
There is a striking contradiction between the decline in church attendance,
baptisms, and religious weddings and the flourishing state of other religious activities,
such as the religious press and church schools. The press that falls within the
Catholic orbit has a large circulation: Le Pelerin has more than one and a half
189
Table 1
Clergy in France, West Germany, Quebec,
and the United States, 1965-90
Year France West Germany Quebec United States

Cath. Prot. Cath. Cath. Cath & Prot.
1965 45,003 — 26,667 8,758 —
1970 45,507 14,762 26,286 8,589 218,000
1975 41,461 15,544 24,909 8,149 262,000
1980 38,876 15,614 23,842 7,316 265,000
1985 36,617 16,696 23,842 6,603 289,000
1990 27,000 18,040 23,862 6,428 331,000
Variation -41% +22% -9% -25% +52%
1990/1970
Note: Occasionally, data for a given year were not avalaible and information from a previous or later year
was substituted.
million readers weekly, and La Vie (catholique) almost one million. Catholic
publishing companies are also enjoying a boom. Religious programmes on national
TV are broadcast only on public channels. However, the liberalization of radio
frequencies in 1981 allowed local religious stations to begin broadcasting. Currently,
there are 19 Christian stations on the air.
Acceptance of Christian beliefs appears, on the basis of limited data, to have
remained fairly stable in France. In 1967, 57% of the population reported that they
believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and the proportion rose to 64% in 1986.
On the other hand, belief in God dipped from 62%, in 1962, to 57%, in 1990.
Table 2 shows that the proportion of French citizens who believe in life after death
increased from 35%, in 1965, to 46%, in 1980. Orthodox Christian beliefs are being
challenged to a degree by non-Christian beliefs such as reincarnation. Thirty percent
of French men and women reported in 1990 that they believe in "heaven," and 16%
affirm the existence of "hell." Thus it appears that about half of the population in
France believe in God, Christ, and some kind of life after death.
When Pope John Paul II reiterates the traditional doctrines of the church,
in particular denouncing the excesses of modern society, his message is widely
190
Religion
Table 2
Belief in Life After Death, in Percentage,
in France, West Germany, Quebec, and the United States, 1960-90
Year France West Germany Quebec United States

1960 78
1965 35 38 78
1970 37 __ —
1975 50 36 70
1980 46 40 66
1985 — 39 57 78
1990 -- 44 76
Note: Occasionally, data for a given year were not avalaible and information from a previous or later year was
substituted.
accepted. Most citizens agree that societies are in the throes of a moral crisis. When
the pope condemns modern society in general terms, opinion polls suggest that the
vast majority of people (83%) agree with him. However, when he speaks of people's
personal behaviour and intrudes into their private lives - for example, by dictating
codes of sexual morality - his message is far less popular. In one opinion poll, 52%
of all practising Catholics refused to recognize his right to interfere in their personal
lives.
In fact, John Paul II has called into question the individual's moral autonomy,
which the Second Vatican Council conceded. According to the Council, all
individuals are free to make their own moral choices, as long as they are prepared
to assume the consequences. In France, religion is a matter of the private relationship
between individuals and God.
By admitting that religion falls into the private rather than the public sphere,
the church no longer can claim a right to participate in politics. Paradoxically, having
denied itself any right to intervene in the public sphere (for example, in politics or
in economic, social, or cultural policy), the Catholic church has had to intensify ifs
action within the private sphere to recover its influence. However, it is precisely in
the private domain that many believers today reject the church's right to exercise
influence. The pope is given a far more favourable reception when he focuses on
public affairs (as long as he defends human rights and individual autonomy against
the state) than when he speaks out on private affairs. Thus, he evoked virtually
unanimous support when he praised the spirit of Polish resistance against bureaucratic
191
Communist rule, but met a lukewarm response when he condemned abortion and
divorce.
The Charismatic movement, the Catholic version of Pentecostism, has about
250,000 adherents. This movement was initially regarded with suspicion by the
Catholic hierarchy, but is now embraced by the church. These small, emotional
communities emphasize personal experience over tradition (Hervieu-Leger, 1986).
Although a majority of French people remain nominally Catholic, other
religions have sprung up in France. The second most important religion in France
today is Islam. The third is Judaism, which has grown considerably in importance,
in part because of the Jewish faith of many of the pied-noirs who returned from
North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Protestantism has been relegated to fourth
position. Finally, those who are confirmed non-believers comprise around 18% of the
population.
New religious communities have emerged that are composed of individuals
searching for a superior spiritual logic to which to subordinate themselves, or for
fulfilment of their personal needs for self-development and realization. It is not
necessary to be converted, in the formal sense, in order to enter one of these
"emotional communities." A commitment is, however, demanded in terms of seeking
personal spiritual satisfaction. The rituals within these communities are strongly anti-
intellectual and stimulate "emotional convergence" between members by means of,
for example, expressive body movements during prayers. Because they are anti-
intellectual, such religious communities distrust abstract theologians, as well as
established clerics. Their advent is a sign of a religious revival taking place outside
of existing churches.
Data on new religious movements are controversial, and membership in them
is often overestimated. Even the most popular groups attract just a few thousand
members. It is estimated that only between 150,000 and 500,000 individuals are
involved with religious cults in France.
Conclusions
1. The institutional influence of the Catholic church has greatly declined

in France over the past 30 years. This is part of a long-term trend of weakening
influence of traditionally powerful social institutions over individuals. In addition, the
church is more clearly separated from formal association with other social institutions
than in the past. The only exception is the preservation of Catholic schools. The
Catholic church is no longer the majestic institution that once spoke, by general
consent, in the name of God. However, it is important to recognize that although the
church can no longer claim to reign undivided over spiritual life in France, it remains
192
Religion
a powerful organization and maintains considerable informal influence with other

social institutions.
2. There has been a major shift to a worldly focus in the doctrines and
practices of the Catholic church in France. The eternal consequences of sin have
diminished and are viewed instead as a deterrent to a happy life. In addition, the
church is involved in combating social problems and supporting popular social
movements.
3. Personal acceptance of traditional religious beliefs has declined only
modestly, while most practices, such as attendance, baptism, and church
marriages, have decreased significantly. On the other hand, the Catholic press
seems to be growing in France, and new charismatic movements signal a renewal of
religious fervour among some segments of the population. The charismatic movement
is strongest among Protestants, but has also attracted a sizeable number of Catholics.
All things considered, there has been a decline in activity in the public religious
sphere in France, while activity in the private religious sphere has diversified.
RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES
Since most of the early immigrants to North America were fleeing religious
persecution in other lands, religion played an important role in the settlement of
North America and in the founding of the United States. As a consequence, religious
freedom was guaranteed in the American constitution and its first amendment.
Although a sizable Catholic contingent arrived from Europe in the 1800s,
Protestantism has dominated the religious scene throughout the country's history.
The constitution establishes a clear separation between church and state, but
the founding fathers never intended that this would stifle the role of religion. To a
large degree, it has not, as church and state have historically been deeply entangled,
churches freed from the state have been a greater moral force than in other societies,
where they are a part of the establishment. As Wills (1990: 25) notes, "The first
nation to disestablish religion has been a marvel of religiosity, for good or ill." Prior
to the Civil War, state courts generally held that Christianity was a part of the
common law inherited from England. For example, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
ruled in 1824 that "Christianity, general Christianity, is and always has been, a part
of the common law of Pennsylvania" (Reichley, 1985: 155). Following the Civil War,
states' rights were curtailed by the expansion of the federal government's influence,
and a more strict separation of church and state followed. Such comments by courts
are infrequent in this day; Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was
criticized by some and applauded by others for her 1989 reference to the United
States as a "Christian nation" (Dershowitz, 1989).
193
Churches, their leaders, and their members have been seriously involved in
political activities in the United States, especially in struggles against social
injustices. Organized religion rallied its members and resources in the battle against
slavery. Many of the leading abolitionists were affiliated with liberal Protestant
denominations (Unger, 1989). The Civil War, in many respects, was a holy war.
Religious values against drunkenness and churches' lobbying efforts were influential
in the temperance movement and the passage of prohibition legislation. As the
industrial revolution swept across America, some clergy and church members were
distressed by the blatant economic exploitation they observed, and they joined the
struggle against the poverty. The "social gospel" of the early twentieth century sought
to reform social and economic evils such as sweatshops, rotting tenements, and
oppressive child labour. The New Deal and its economic reforms were supported by
a coalition of Catholics and liberal Protestants. Some of the larger denominations
have formalized their efforts to influence the federal government's social policies by
opening lobbying offices in Washington, D.C.
More recently, the civil-rights movement, including the landmark Civil Rights
Bill of 1964, was greatly assisted by organized religion and its clergy. Most of the
black leaders in the civil-rights movement were ministers, and much of their support
flowed from white churches. The protest against the Vietnam war had its share of
religious leaders, perhaps the most visible being Father Daniel Berrigan. The war on
poverty, the women's-rights movement, more humane treatment of prisoners, and the
patient's-rights movements have all been assisted by churches and religious leaders
(Unger, 1989).
The last three decades, however, have witnessed a resurgence of tension in the
relationship between church and state. Federal courts, especially the Supreme Court,
have re-emphasized the separation of church and state, as evidenced in a ban on
prayer and religious displays in public arenas and a challenge of the tax-exempt
status currently enjoyed by most religious groups. At the same time, the courts have
exercised greater constraints on expressions of religious freedom, including bans on
religious rituals and practices such as snake handling, drug consumption, and harsh
punishment of and withholding of medical care from children. The rationale applied
by the courts is that an individual's welfare as a member of society is considered first
and as a member of a religious organization second.
Some analysts are convinced that the resurgence of the separation doctrine and
the limits on free expression were precipitated by the entrance of larger numbers of
Catholics into the American mainstream (Demerath and Williams, 1987). Increased
separation is seen as a reasonable price to pay for ensuring that no religious
denomination, including the Catholic church, gains pre-eminence in American
society.
194
Religion
The degree of autonomy of social institutions - the state, family, education, welfare,
labour, and politics - from religion is difficult to determine with exactness, but
general trends are apparent. The level of interdependence between church and politics
is considerable. Much has been made of the recent foray of religious leaders into the
political arena. In the 1980s, two religious leaders, Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson,
sought the presidency of the United States. They were unsuccessful, but they did
attract considerable support. The last four presidents - Ford, Carter, Reagan, and
Bush - all declared themselves "born-again" Christians.
The 1980s witnessed the organization and emergence of the "moral majority."
Moral Majority, Inc., organized by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, has received the most
media attention, but several other New Right Christian organizations have also
entered the political arena. These organizations, their members, and their followers
are absolutely convinced that America's survival is contingent on returning to its
Christian values. They contend that although the founding fathers separated church
and state, the intent was never to have a government devoid of God. According to
Falwell, the United States was founded upon Christian principles and thus has
"enjoyed a unique relationship with God because of that foundation" (Falwell,
1980: 266). The battle for reshaping America around such values includes electing
"moral" political leaders, the creation of alternative institutions such as schools,
media campaigns, and economic boycotts, and legal action. A study conducted in
1980 found that born-again Christians constituted a distinct political subgroup with
rather conservative political values (Patel, Pilant, and Rose, 1982). The Moral
Majority has had, and in all likelihood will continue to have, a significant impact on
American political life.
Ascertaining the autonomy of other institutions, especially state and political,
from the religious institution is complicated by the indirect influence of religion.
Herberg (1955), in his insightful book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, argued that America
is dominated by a "civil" religion, the American Way of Life, which is based on a
belief in God, the rewarding of virtue, and the punishment of evil. The separation of
church and state has not deprived politics of a religious dimension, which is
institutionalized throughout society. According to Bellah (1973), Americans worship
society itself through its civil religion, which unites churches, denominations, sects,
and cults in their support for things American. Manifestation of civil religion are
numerous: the Pledge of Allegiance refers to "One nation under God," both coins and
currency proclaim the message "In God We Trust," sessions of Congress and the
Supreme Court are opened with prayer, and the bald eagle and the flag are sacred
symbols of national unity. The founding fathers would not find it paradoxical that the
courts continue to insist on a strict separation of state and church, and yet a belief
195
in God and other basic Christian values are tightly woven into the political and social
fabric of America.
Political leaders, as well as churches and religious leaders, appeal to religious
values in encouraging public policies supportive of traditional family life. The focus
of organized religion on out-of-wedlock births, teenage pregnancy, divorce, family
violence, and abortion indicates the continued interdependence of religion and family.
For example, religious leaders are at the forefront of the pro-life movement and have
organized massive demonstrations to influence state legislators to support restrictive
abortion laws. Among the 2,000 people arrested in 1991 for blocking access to an
abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas, nearly 100 were men and women of the cloth.
The separation of church and state doctrine has been used to limit the overt
presence of religion in education, especially in public schools. Recent court decisions
have forbidden opening school with prayer and praying at school-sponsored events
such as athletic contests or graduation ceremonies. Nevertheless, religion has a long
history of influencing curriculum content. Religious leaders and laity alike have in
recent years become exercised that the public schools are teaching their children to
be "Godless" under the guise of "secular humanism." Fundamentalists are pressuring
schools to teach creationism as an alternative to secular humanism, limit sex
education, and eliminate "offensive" literature from English classes and libraries.
Basic Christian values are still in evidence in the curriculum, especially in civics,
citizenship, and family-life courses. Approximately 16% of students enrolled in
elementary and secondary schools attend private schools. Of this number, 60% attend
Catholic schools, 26% are in schools sponsored by various Protestant denominations,
and 14% attend private schools not affiliated with any religion. In other words, nearly
15% of the students in elementary and secondary schools are being educated within
a religious environment. In addition, some parents are opting to keep their children
out of the "Godless" public schools and are educating them in home schools. Private
religious schools and home schools help to maintain a modest link between religion
and education.
The involvement of religion in the American labour movement has been
considerable, especially for the Catholic church. Church and labour are still, to a
degree, intertwined; various denominations and churches contribute sizeable sums of
money and goods to help the poor and socially disadvantaged (social services). But
their overall contribution to the welfare effort is rather modest in comparison to that
of state and federal governments.
As discussed above, religion has a long history in American society of being

concerned with societal issues such as slavery, poverty, child labour, temperance,
196
Religion
civil rights, family disruption, and abortion. Generally, mainline Protestant

denominations - Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran - have rather
liberal political views, and they have thrown themselves into struggles on behalf of
racial minorities, women, the poor, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the homeless.
At the same time as they were heavily involved in various civil-rights movements,
their memberships were declining significantly. It is tempting to assume that
members were rejecting involvement in social issues in favour of the search for
salvation. An alternative explanation is that members were supportive of addressing
social issues, but repudiated the liberal solutions offered by their churches.
While the mainline churches were losing members, fundamentalist churches,
especially evangelical denominations, experienced rapid growth. During this period,
there was a political and social reawakening among evangelical denominations, and
they entered the fight against contemporary social ills. According to Liebman and
Wuthnow (1983), the "assumption that fundamentalist convictions are too
otherworldly to countenance political involvement" must now be re-examined. The
acceptance of political and social problems as church business is illustrated by a
survey of members of the "700 Club": more than one third reported that "learning
about politics and what is right and wrong in America today" is a very important
reason for participation. Such groups make up the "moral majority," aligned on the
conservative side of the issues, opposite the mainline churches.
Attempts by the Internal Revenue Service to remove the tax exemptions of
racially imbalanced Christian schools and colleges triggered a grassroots storm of
protest from the fundamentalists. This seemed to be a wake-up call, and they jumped
into the fray against what they see as threats to traditional morality and family life,
such as gay rights, abortion, and pornography. The political awakening of
evangelicals after several decades of inactivity is testimony to the capacity of religion
to adapt to changing social conditions.
Religion in America has kept one eye on heavenly pursuits and the other on
social problems. The pattern is one of various denominations joining different causes,
and the groups frequently oppose each other. The worldly pursuits of their churches
at times seem to have offended some members, who have opted to disaffiliate or
withhold financial support. This appears to have occurred with mainline Protestant
churches during the civil-rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s. At other times,
political and social involvement appears to have spurred believers to even greater
faith. The American experience is one of recurring "great awakenings," in which
religious groups exert a burst of energy in worldly activities interspersed with periods
of inactivity. There has not been a direct and continuous shift from an other-worldly
perspective to a worldly focus among religious groups in the United States over the
past 30 years, as predicted by the secularization hypothesis.
197
A large majority of Americans report a religious preference, as figure 1 shows. A

vast majority of Americans, 92%, listed a religious preference in 1960, and this
proportion has remained over 90%. In 1965, 73% of the population claimed
membership in a church, and this number has hovered around 70% in the past three
decades. Denominational preference and church membership declined only slightly
from 1960 to 1990.
There are contradictory findings about church attendance. First, Catholic
attendance dropped from a high of 74%, in 1960, to 46%, in 1990 (figure 2). On the
other hand, the proportion of Protestants who attend at least one service a week has
been constant at 40% for the 30-year period (table 3). In perspective, even with this
modest decline in attendance, more people go to church each week than attend all
sporting events combined (Wills, 1990: 16).
Financial contributions contradict the notion of declining commitment to
religion, as per-capita contributions to Protestant churches rose steadily from 1945
to 1987. Standardizing for inflation by using 1967 dollars, per-capita contributions
from members of Protestant churches rose from $36 to $108 per year. Comparable
figures are not available for Catholics.
The proportion who report that they believe in God and that Jesus Christ is
God or the son of God has changed little over the past 40 years. Over 95% of the
public acknowledged a belief in God between 1960 and 1990, while approximately
80% professed a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Table 2 shows the consistently
high level of belief in life after death, at around 75% of Americans, over the past 30
years. Modest support of secularization appears in perceptions of the importance of
religion in individuals' lives and in society in general. In 1952, 75% reported that
religion was an important influence in their life; by 1986, the proportion had dropped
to 58%. The perceived importance of religion in society was 70% in 1957, dropped
to a low of 13% in 1970 and since then has steadily risen back to 50% in 1986.
Whether the recent rise will continue remains to be seen. Both of these items suggest
that the influence of religion in American society has declined over the past three
decades.
Over all, the production of religious books shows a modest decrease. The
number of books published rose slightly during the 1950s, dipped during the mid-
1970s and then increased again in the 1980s.
The ratios of clergy to employed persons and of clergy to the general
population rose during the 30 years from 1960 to 1990. The number of Protestant
ministers has increased considerably, while the Catholic ministry has held constant.
Catholics will have trouble maintaining the current level of clergy if seminary
enrolment continues to drop. In 1965, there were 800 students in theology school for
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Religion
Table 3
Weekly Attendance of Protestants, Percent of Members,
in West Germany and the United States,
1960-90
Year West Germany United States
1960 6 39
1970 5 38
1980 4 43
1990 4 42
Note: Occasionally, data for a given year were not avalaible and information from a previous or later year was
substituted.
every 1,000 practicing clergy. This decreased dramatically, to under 200, in 1987. At
the same time, the number of Protestant theological students has slightly increased.
In summary, citizens in the United States have high religious affiliation and
activity. About 90% of adults currently have a religious preference, a slightly lower
rate than in the 1950s and 1960s. Rates of church membership have declined slightly,
and among Catholics rates of weekly attendance at services are lower than formerly.
Donations and the popularity of the clergy as a vocation have increased among
Protestants; the latter has decreased among Catholics. There are more religious books
being published, but the proportion of all publishing devoted to religious matters is
down.
The Princeton Religion Research Center (1990) has been collecting information
about religion in America for a number of years, and has combined several beliefs
and behaviours into a religious index. A perfect index score of 100 would be
achieved only when all people interviewed believed in God, had a stated religious
preference, were members of a church, attended religious services once a week,
considered religion very important in their lives, believed that religion provides
answers to today's problems, and had high confidence in organized religion and the
clergy. The religious index was 73 in 1940, and declined slowly, to 65, in 1990. The
eight-point decline over the past 50 years indicates a very modest secularization in
individual belief and practice. In other words, there seems to be "a continuous
'bloom' in American adherence and belief (Lipset, 1973: 44).
199
Conclusions
Religion has had consderable influence in the United States throughout its history.
While secularization has occurred in some religious domains, others continue
unabated.
1. In spite of rigorously enforced separation of church and state,
institutional religion continues to influence major social institutions. Civil
religious underpinnings are so deeply entrenched in other institutions that religious
values have a significant effect on them.
2. Churches have increased their worldly power by greater involvement
in ameliorating some social problems. However, most churches have not neglected
their spiritual, salvation, or heavenly orientation. It appears that many churches have
taken on worldly problems as a part of their salvation seeking.
3. Specific beliefs and practices have ebbed and flowed over the past 30
years. Although beliefs have changed somewhat over time, the proportion of the
population who believe in God, Jesus Christ, and a life after death remained quite
high in American society. Activity in organized religion has declined somewhat and
there appears to be a shift to more personal religious observance.
RELIGION IN WEST GERMANY
Religion was extensively woven into the fabric of the German state organized in the
mid-sixteenth century (Hegel, 1935). This intricate fusion began to dissolve in the
seventeenth century, as feudalism gradually gave way to more democratic forms of
government. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the old feudal guarantees
benefiting the church were slowly superseded by constitutional provisions (Maier,
1989).
The constitution of the Federal Republic, signed in 1949, decrees a separation
between church and state. However, it also guarantees freedom of religion and
establishes the dominant churches as public corporations. Such status obliges the
government to subsidize the churches, even paying the salaries of the clergy. The
federal government collects taxes from members for the individual churches, Sundays
and Christian holidays are officially recognized, and religious instruction is a
mandatory subject in the public schools.
The institutional influence granted to religion by the Federal Republic emerged
from the critical role churches played in the German restoration following the Second
World War. When the Third Reich collapsed, the Lutheran and Catholic churches
were the only functioning social organizations left in Germany. They performed a
profusion of tasks normally performed by government, and in many ways acted as
advocates for the conquered nation. These two churches have since been able to
200
Religion
maintain a strong voice in education, social services, labour relations, and the mass
media (Greschat, 1983; Hollenstein, 1983).
Religion continues to play a major role in distribution of social welfare services;

Protestant and Catholic organizations are influential social-service agencies. These
organizations deliver health care and assistance, and ambulant services for various
disadvantaged groups.
Religion continues to have a modest influence on family life. Over half of all
marriages in Germany are performed in a church by a member of the clergy, and
nearly 80% of all children are christened. Traditional family values are encouraged
by the churches, but public acceptance of alternative family life styles has increased
over the past 30 years.
Aside from a high incidence of war-caused divorces in the early 1950s, divorce
occurred relatively infrequently until well into the 1960s. In 1960, 36 of every 10,000
marriages ended in divorce; this figure rose to 86 per 10,000 in 1985 (Statistisches
Bundesamt, 1988: 78), in spite of religious teachings discouraging it.
Extramarital cohabitation is widely accepted by the general public. In 1976,
63% of West Germans saw "nothing wrong" with a man and woman living together,
and this proportion rose to 78% in 1988. Cohabitation tripled between 1972 and
1982, and currently over two million men and women live together without benefit
of marriage (Schenk, 1987).
Although the number of West Germans who disapprove of abortion increased
from 8%, in 1978, to 15%, in 1986, the number still remains rather small. The
majority of both Catholics (four in five) and Protestants (nine in ten) favour legalized
abortion. The number of legal abortions jumped from 54,000, in 1977, to 91,000, in
1982, and then dropped slightly, to 88,500, in 1987 (Statistisches Bundesamt,
1987c: 163, 1988: 387).
There is a modest link between religion and education. In the 1960s, the
confessional schools that had been so jealously protected by the churches largely
disappeared. The influence of religion on education is now limited to the requirement
that students in the public schools enroll in religious instruction. If parents do not
want their child to take religious classes, an ethics class can be substituted. This
happens rarely; over 90% of the students in German public schools attend religious
classes each year (Glotzner, 1981). Finally, the two dominant churches also have a
strong voice in the nomination of theology professors appointed to the country's
universities.
Religion as a social institution has only minimal influence on organized labour.
A very small proportion of the men and women in the labour force belong to a trade
201
union characterized by a Christian orientation (Armingeon, 1988: 461). The Christian

Federation of Trade Unions (CGB) comprises a mere 1% of the work force, though
it has increased its membership slightly over the past few years.
The direct influence of the churches on politics is rather weak. Political parties
such as the Christian Democrats (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Social Party
(CSU), have an attachment to Christian ideals, as indicated by their names; however,
the churches have no direct control over party platforms or candidates.
Churches attempt to exert some impact on politics by issuing public statements
about political responsibility. The Protestant church, for example, publishes its
Denkschriften, which are guidelines for government policies and activities. The
Denkschrift on real estate was published in 1962; the one on agriculture in 1965; the
one on Eastern Europe in 1965; the one on peace in 1968; the one on Christian
values in 1979; another on peace in 1981; and the one on liberal democracy in 1985.
These "orientations" receive little attention from public officials and do not give
religion any additional influence in the political arena.
Overall, the major institutional influence of religion in West Germany is its
provision of social services. Religious instruction in the public schools gives churches
some modest influence in education, and traditional family values are officially
espoused. In addition, the government's collection of the church tax institutionally
links church and state. Although its institutional influence is mainly confined to
social welfare and education, these are important functions; as a consequence, the
church exercises considerable influence in society.
One evidence of a shift to a worldly focus by churches in West Germany is their

extensive involvement in providing social services. They are largely responsible for
looking after the poor, the homeless, the aged, immigrants, asylum-seekers, and other
groups. In addition, organized religion is strongly involved in fighting hunger in
Third World countries. The Lutheran church founded an extensive foreign-aid
programme in 1962, which was funded by the federal government. The focus of this
programme has shifted from "mercy" to "more active social reorganization" in
underdeveloped countries. Foreign aid presently consumes 2% of the Lutheran
church's budget.
Another sign of "worldliness" is that churches themselves are being influenced
by new social movements. In the 1960s, "grassroots parishes" sprang up within
Protestant and Catholic churches to press for democratization of church structures and
a larger say in church practices. In addition, new forms of church services have been
experimented with occasionally. The churches are also involved in social movements
aimed at improving the quality of life. The German peace movement of the 1980s
202
Religion
received powerful support from both major churches. The environmental movement
replaced the peace movement to a considerable degree during the past decade, and
currently receives substantial support from churches and associated groups.
Although there has been an increase in involvement in issues pertaining to this
world, the major focuses of most churches remains on heaven, hell, and other-worldly
concerns. Not only have churches supported important social movements, but also,
generally within the context of Christian values, social responsibility.
Religious Beliefs and Practices
Reliable data on religious behaviour and practice are abundant in West Germany.
Germans have long been members of either the Lutheran or Catholic church; since
1945, approximately 90% of the population has affiliated with one of these
denominations (figure 1). Protestant membership has dropped slightly, from 52% of
the population, in 1960, to 41%, in 1985. Catholic membership has remained fairly
constant at around the 44^4-5% range, so that in recent years believers have been
fairly evenly divided between the two major churches.
The high percentage of church members in Germany is somewhat puzzling,
given the marked increase in members "leaving" a church. A rather sizeable exodus
has occurred since the early 1980s (Statistisches Bundesamt, 1986, 1989b; Zapf,
1977). This loss was compensated for by the immigration of Catholic foreign workers
and their families.
Although most of the population are affiliated with a church, only a few are
actively involved. This is certainly true for Protestants, as can be seen from their
attendance at services (table 1). In 1960, only 6% attended services on any given
Sunday, and this declined to only 4% by 1990. Catholics have maintained a higher
level of attendance than Protestants, but their involvement has also dropped: nearly
50% attended mass each week in 1960, and this decreased by half, to 24%, by 1990
(Statistisches Bundesamt, 1987a, 1989a).
Modest support for secularization is evident in the decline in the number of
church weddings and christening of children. We cannot separate Catholics from
Protestants, but between 1960 and 1987 the proportion of weddings in the Federal
Republic performed in church by a member of the clergy declined from 80% to 55%.
During the same period, christenings dropped from 97% of children born to 79%.
Although the percentage of church weddings and christenings have declined, a solid
majority of all marriages and births still involve the church (Statistisches Bundesamt,
1987a, 1989a).
Generally, financial contributions are insightful indicators of religiosity. The
case is somewhat less clear in Germany, since the federal government collects a
church tax from members. There has been a significant increase in the per-capita
203
church tax in recent years, but it is more likely a function of inflation than of rising
religiosity. Church taxes can be avoided by leaving the church, and the fact that
nearly 90% continue to affiliate and pay is evidence of religious commitment.
Voluntary donations by both Catholics and Protestants are rather modest, but they
have risen during the past 25 years. For example, per-capita donations to the
Protestant Bread for the World organization rose from 0.6 marks in 1963 to 3.5
marks in 1987 (Diakonisches Werk, 1988). A similar trend appears for contributions
to Misereor, the major Catholic charity: Catholics donated 3.3 marks per capita to
Misereor in 1978, and increased their support to 4.8 marks per capita in 1988
(Bischofliches Hilfswerk, 1988).
The size of the clergy has declined a little. In 1964, the Catholic church had
one priest per 1,000 members; this dipped to .96 per 1,000 by 1987. The Catholic
church's world-wide difficulties in recruiting priests is evident in the number
ordained in Germany in recent years, which dropped from 473, in 1965, to only 163,
in 1978, but then rose to 240, in 1986 (Informationszentrum Berufe und Kirche,
1987). Protestant ministers have historically served more members than Catholic
priests, and this is true in Germany. In 1970, there were .5 ministers for each 1,000
members, and this increased to .7 in 1987. The number of men and women entering
the ministry reveals little change in West Germany. Catholic students studying for
the ministry declined from 5,200, in 1960, to 2,000, in 1973; since then, the number
has steadied at around 3,000 (Hauschild and Wilkens, 1978; Informationszentrum
Berufe und Kirche, 1987).
Subscriptions to religious magazines are quite high. The number of magazines
steadily increased from 1975 to 1987, while overall circulation remained fairly
constant. It seems that more specialized religious journals and newsletters were
launched during this period, but each appealed to a narrower audience, so that total
subscriptions to religious periodicals remained the same.
A national survey explored how often German families offer a prayer, grace,
or blessing at mealtime (Noelle-Neumann and Piel, 1983). The question asked was,
"There are things commonly done in some families but not in others. For example:
Thinking back to your childhood, did you pray before or after meals?" In 1965, 62%
replied "yes," but the proportion dropped to 47% in 1982. The survey then asked
whether the family currently offers a prayer at mealtime. In 1965, 29% did so all the
time, 17% did so sometimes, and 54% never did. The proportion of families praying
at mealtime declined during the next 17 years: in 1982, only 11% prayed regularly,
14% did so sometimes, and 75% never did. It is obvious from this survey that family
prayer at mealtime has greatly decreased, to the point that in 1982 only one out of
four families prayed some of the time.
The Bible is read by a minority of Germans, as from 1966 to 1978
approximately 60% of those surveyed claimed "never" to read it. The proportion who
204
Religion
"seldom" read the Bible increased from 17% to 22%. "Occasional" readers dropped
from 15% to 11%, while only 5% reported that they "often" read the Bible.
Belief in life after death is held by about 40% of the population, and this has
remained fairly constant since 1960 (table 2). Approximately 30% reject the notion
of life after death, and the remaining 30% are undecided (Institut fur Demoskopie,
1992). Longitudinal surveys have documented changes in acceptance of church
beliefs and doctrines. Catholics who affirmatively answered this query declined in
proportion from 49%, in 1970/71, to 38%, in 1982. The loss of faith and works was
significantly greater for Protestants, among whom the proportion fell from 37% to
14% (Noelle-Neumann, 1974; 1983; 1984).
A survey conducted in 1978, 1984, and 1988 found that members' satisfaction
with their church declined a little. For Catholics, the number of "very satisfied"
members dipped from 9% to 8%, while those "very dissatisfied" rose from 23% to
31%. Similar results were garnerred for Protestants: those "very satisfied" decreased
slightly, from 8% to 7%, while those "very dissatisfied" increased from 26% to 30%
(Statistisches Bundesamt, 1989b).
The general trend in these surveys seems to be a slow withdrawal from the
institutional church and a modest increase in personal religiosity.
Conclusions
Organized religion played a major role in the reconstruction of German society

following the Second World War. Institutional ties have preserved the influence of
Catholic and Lutheran churches in German society.
1. The autonomy of other social institutions in West Germany is somewhat
greater today than 30 years ago. However, the church's institutional position of
distributing social services and public assistance, along with a state-collected church
tax, continues to ensure organized religion of a significant position in the German
government.
2. There has been a significant increase in church involvement in worldly
affairs involving human rights, world poverty, and environmental protection. At
the same time, traditional concerns about sin, heaven, and hell persist. It seems that
the churches have expanded their domain to include current concerns, while
maintaining their attention to "life after death."
3. Many traditional beliefs are not held as inviolate as previously, and
church activity has decreased dramatically. It seems that Germans are maintaining
their institutional ties, but have greatly reduced their personal religious involvement.
205
RELIGION IN POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES
Our review of religion in the four societies for the past 30 years corroborates
Hunter's assertion that the relationship between modernization, industrialization,
urbanization, and religion is much more complex than simply the "institutional
demise of the latter" (Hunter, 1983: 11). He argues that modernity and religion
engage in considerable bargaining, or negotiation, which generally produces "mutual
accommodation, mutual permutation or even symbiotic growth." The same conclusion
was reached in a comparison of religions in Holland, Japan, and the United States
(Sasaki and Suzuki, 1987), which concluded that "secularization cannot be viewed
as a global phenomenon of modern societies" (p. 1055).
Greater institutional autonomy has occurred in all four societies as rational
structural pluralism has emerged as a part of modernization. Institutional autonomy
is most pronounced in Quebec, but is also visible in the other three societies.
Accommodations between religion and other social institutions are also clearly
evident, and different patterns of change in interdependence of social institutions have
emerged. The shift in autonomy in Quebec has been dramatic: from a religious
welfare institution and a government largely controlled by the Catholic church to a
civil state. In Quebec, and to a lesser degree, France, societies in which a single
religion held a dominant institutional role, social institutions have obtained the
greatest autonomy from religion. As these two societies industrialized and
modernized, and as greater cultural diversity appeared, the Catholic church was
unable to maintain its position. Both societies have been reorganized in ways to
diminish greatly the position of the church. Deprived of its institutional presence in
Quebec and France, the Catholic church seems to be negotiating other ways of
influencing society. In Quebec, religion has bargained for influence with other social
institutions, especially education. The presence of church leaders as counsellors to
Jacques Delors, president of the Association of the European Economic Community,
is an example of the attempt by organized religion in France to forge new
relationships with other social institutions.
The experiences in the United States and Germany have been quite different.
The United States constitution prescribes the separation of church from state, yet
much of the social fabric of American society is based on Christian values.
Institutionally, church and government are separate, but Protestantism has
considerable indirect influence on other social institutions through a civil religion
based on traditional Christian values. As well, a religious diversity has allowed
individual churches or denominations to occupy insititutional positions at various
times without raising as much fear about oppression at the hands of a dominant
religion. Finally, the constitutional separation of church and state and religious
206
Religion
divinity has permitted denominations to proclaim their values openly and to lobby for
legislation supportive of them.
Germany, with its two major religions, has followed a pattern closer to that of
the United States than to that of France and Quebec. The Catholic and Lutheran
churches served in the place of destroyed political and social institutions following
the Second World War, and have maintained significant institutional positions within
the state since that time. In Germany, religion still maintains a strong institutional
presence in society through its role of dispensing social welfare. Recently, the
Protestant church played a decisive part in the reunification of Germany, nurturing
the "unification" that precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall. The German experience
illustrates the negotiation between religion and other social institutions during times
of change to either assume or maintain a significant role in society.
In summary, several social institutions in the four societies have increased their
autonomy from religion, but religion has negotiated unique ways to maintain a
significant institutional influence. Modernization does not seem to isolate religion as
an institution much more than it isolates other social institutions from one another.
Organized religions are active ia worldly affairs in all four societies. This is
not a new activity for religious groups in these societies. For example, churches in
the United States have a long history of involvement in the amelioration of social
problems. Religion's concern with a particular problem or set of problems has at
times been followed by periods of political or social inactivity. However, these times
of quiet have not signified a permanent abandonment of a worldly focus. New issues
have arisen, or old ones have been rediscovered, and religious awakenings have
ensued. In Quebec and France, with their single dominant religion, the link between
this world focus and salvation is not explicitly discussed as frequently as it is in the
United States and Germany. The relationship between involvement in worldly affairs
and salvation is implied in Catholic values and therefore is not explicated as often.
In Germany and the United States, where denominations compete for members and
positions in society, the importance of relieving the misery of the poor and the
oppressed as a prerequisite to salvation is regularly expounded.
The anticipated pattern of a steady and large-scale shift from sacred to secular
activities by churches has not materialized in the four societies. In fact, in Quebec
and France, the Catholic church has lost many of its institutional positions in the
struggle against social problems. Over all, there has been an increase in involvement
in secular issues during the past 30 years, but no wholesale abandonment of spiritual
concerns has occurred. It is entirely feasible, if not likely, that the future will bring
about a decline in religious concern about social issues, followed by religious
awakenings, while concern with spiritual matters will continue at a more even pace.
Different patterns of adjustment or adaptation of individual beliefs and
practices emerged in the analysis of the four societies. Quebec and France, the
207
societies with a single dominant religion, have witnessed the greater decline in
acceptance of religious doctrine, practices and beliefs. This suggests that in societies
like the United States and Germany, which have religious pluralism, when individuals
are dissatisfied with their church, rather than drop out of the religious realm they
seek another church whose doctrine they approve of. Germany has experienced a
more modest decrease in religious beliefs, and a major decline in some practices,
especially attendance. But other religious practices in Germany, such as membership
and financial support, have remained at rather high levels. The United States has
maintained strong acceptance of God and basic Christian values. At the same time,
there has been moderate decline in some religious activities and an increase in others.
Significant life events continue to be celebrated with religious rituals. Baptism
of newborn infants, confirmation of children, marriage in the church, and a religious
funeral are experienced by a majority of the citizens in the four societies. For some,
these occations comprise their only visits to the church; nevertheless, religion seems
to provide a unique sense of meaning to these significant passages. The decrease in
some traditional religious practices does not signal the disappearance of religion. New
forms of worship have appeared, which may not show up in the body counts taken
in the churches on Sunday. Religious programmes on television and radio provide an
electronic pathway to God for many in all four societies. The elderly especially enjoy
worshipping God in the comfort of their own home. It is clear from observations in
all four societies that the cultural pluralism associated with modernity has led to
greater tolerance of religious differences. Catholics can now be found attending
Protestant services with their friends, and Protestants feel comfortable at mass.
A trend from the institutional church to a privatization of the religious
experience is also clearly observable in the four societies. A personal relationship
with God and the living of a 'moral life' are more important than attendance at
Sunday services for increasing numbers.
In spite of its heuristic value, the secularization hypothesis was not confirmed
by the analysis of religious change in these four industrial societies: secularization
has not been associated with industrialization, urbanization, and modernization in
France, Germany, Quebec, and the United States. Rather, a broad range of change
and adaptation has evolved as religion, like other social institutions, has adjusted to
the social change inherent in industrialization. Religion today is not what it was
30 years ago, but we were amazed at its ability to maintain a meaningful presence
in modern society. In unique ways in each of the societies, religion has an influence
at the institutional level as well as in individual beliefs and activities.
208
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7
The Reduction of Personal Authority
Theodore CAPLOW
This chapter reports partial findings from a search for major commonalities in the
profiles of social trends in four societies developed by the members of the
International Research Group for the Comparative Charting of Social Change. Among
the trends that appeared in all four of these societies during this period were the
following:
. The movement of married women, particularly those with small children, into the
labour force; the movement was weakest, but still important, in Germany.
. The legitimation of unmarried, consensual unions.
. A sharp decline in fertility.
. The reduction of paternal responsibilities.
. The relaxation of ancient taboos against promiscuity, bastardy, and homosexuality.
. A massive shift from blue-collar to white-collar employment.
. A vast expansion of secondary and higher education.
. A vast increase in leisure activities and facilities.
. A spectacular improvement in the machinery and equipment in private households.
. The decline of political extremism.
. The institutionalization of social movements.
. The proliferation of specialized publics.
. The fading of collective hatreds that seemed immutable - between bourgeois and
proletarian, Christian and Jew, rightist and leftist.
. A great increase in the per-capita consumption of consumer goods.
. A great expansion in bureaucratic regulation, both public and private.
The institutions that had to adapt to the above trends - family, church, school,
workplace, voluntary associations, government - proved remarkably resilient,
215
preserving their structures and functioning without serious interruption despite drastic
changes in the laws, rules, and norms by which they are governed. Thus, for
example, the family continues to be the fundamental unit of affiliation for most
people in these societies, despite easy divorce, the employment of married women
during the infancy of their children, the toleration of illegitimacy, and the removal
of legal sanctions against unmarried unions. The factory of 1990 looks very much
like the factory of 1960, although its workforce is differently composed, differently
selected, and differently managed. The same may be said of universities, political
parties, suburban neighbourhoods, and social movements. Changes of form have
lagged far behind changes of function.
The acceleration around 1960 of «the gradual progress of equality» that
Tocqueville had noted more than a century earlier is confirmed by all of the
foregoing trends and is related, as both cause and effect, to a number of technological
and social innovations. Pregnancy was made elective for women by oral
contraception, legal abortion, and easy sterilization. They elected to bear fewer
children, and - with the risk of unwanted pregnancies removed - they claimed the
same sexual freedom as men. The parental obligations of men were reduced
accordingly. Meanwhile, developments in industrial technology were making labour
less strenuous and women more employable, while domestic technology changed the
work requirements of housekeeping and greatly increased the number and variety of
mass-marketed consumer products.
Patterns of household and personal consumption in the four societies were
profoundly affected, on the one hand, by the virtual disappearance of servants from
the homes of the affluent and, on the other hand, by the nearly universal acquisition
of domestic machinery - indoor plumbing, central heating, telephones, refrigerators,
laundry machines, television, automobiles - by the moderately poor. There were
parallel trends in services. Educational facilities formerly reserved for the exclusive
use of privileged strata were opened to the entire population. Moreover, since formal
education prepared students for sophisticated forms of leisure, the educated poor
began to attend symphony concerts and play golf. Health care was democratized in
a similar way. House calls and personalized medical service ceased to be available
at any price, while advanced medical technology was brought within the reach of
most people.
In three brief decades, the conditions of work, leisure, and family life were
fundamentally transformed and the apparatus of social control was reconstructed on
new principles (Caplow, 1991; Mendras, 1989). The revolution that reflected and
ratified these changes was an uprising against society rather than against the state,
as was illustrated so clearly in the spring of 1968. The uprising at that time did not
challenge the essential authority of the state; it did challenge the personal authority
of officials and, more broadly, the personal authority of superiors over inferiors
216
Personal Authority
throughout the social structure. Authority, as used here, means legitimate power -
that is, collectively sponsored coercion. The authoritative superior controls the actions
of subordinates by virtue of a social franchise that puts appropriate punishments and
rewards at his or her disposal. Personal authority differs from other forms of
authority in that it is exercised by a person rather than by a collectivity and expresses
the independent volition of that person. Nearly every form of personal authority is
embedded in an institutional matrix that sets limits within which it can be exercised
legitimately and provides external sanctions, including the ultimate recourse to
violence that constitute legitimacy. The conventional forms of personal authority in
these societies include that of parents, teachers, employers, managers, officers, priests,
and chiefs of various kinds over their designated subordinates, and also the more
diffuse authority of persons belonging to a superior social category over persons
belonging to an inferior one.
Governments, at first apprehensive about the uprising against society, soon
recognized that the lessening of personal authority would strengthen their own and
made common cause with the insurgents. The revolutionary ideologies - feminism,
nondiscrimination, participation, self-realization - were enacted into law. Every form
of personal authority by which social control had been exercised in these societies
was weakened and replaced, at least in part, by collective authority, which commonly
took the form of bureaucratic regulation. Among the forms of personal authority most
affected were those of managers over workers, men over women, parents over
children, masters over servants, teachers over students, priests over parishioners,
officers over soldiers, and party leaders over followers. The consequences extend
throughout the social structure.
Between 1960 and 1990, the rapidly declining ratio of blue-collar to white-
collar jobs and the elimination of many of the dirty and dangerous jobs in the
industrial sector removed much of the visible difference between managers and
workers. The mechanization of agriculture had similar effects. Mendras (1989: 28-35)
has documented the conversion of the French peasantry, once tied to the land, to
rural-dwelling employees obsessed with the acquisition of consumer goods. As well,
the sharp contrasts in daily and annual work schedules between blue-collar and white-
collar workers that were still observable in 1960 have nearly disappeared. The
shrinking gap in working conditions would in itself have reduced the authority of
supervisors, foremen, and managers, but this tendency was strongly reinforced by
intervention by the state in the manager-worker relationship on behalf of the workers.
In 1960, it was not uncommon in the United States for an industrial foreman to
enforce an order with his fists. A foreman who tried to do that today would probably
be arrested for assault, and the enterprise sued for damages. In all four societies, most
workers are now employed in large, closely regulated bureaucratic systems that allow
supervisors to exercise only minimum authority - and that under close surveillance.
217
The authority of men over women was formerly evident in a variety of

settings: in the modal family, where the husband-father was the sole breadwinner and
the ultimate disciplinarian; in the workplace, where women were normally supervised
by men but were rarely allowed to supervise men; in the educational system, where
women were expected to stop short of the higher professional degrees; in the
churches, where women were not permitted to become bishops, priests, or ministers;
in sports, where women were frequently coached by men but men were never
coached by women; and in politics, where women voted but were seldom elected to
office. Women were not allowed to join police forces, to become soldiers, or to
operate common carriers. Women patients were usually treated by male physicians;
men were seldom treated by female physicians. In most of these relationships, a male
advantage remains but its moral underpinnings are gone.
The personal authority of parents over children has likewise been
conspicuously reduced since 1960. The extension of the median educational career,
subsidized by public funds, has had the unanticipated effect of establishing
adolescents as independent consumers, even while they continue to live at home. And
the state now stands ready to intervene in the parent-child relationship at a moment's
notice. In the United States, this tendency has gone so far that the relationship
between a father and his female children is always open to accusations of sexual
abuse, and such accusations, whatever their source, are taken very seriously.
At the other end of the life cycle, the prolongation of life expectancy (least
marked in Germany) and the consequent deferment of inheritance, together with
ideological shifts, seem to have reduced the authority of parents over adult children.
That decline is reflected by conspicuous increases in inter-class, inter-confessional,
and inter-ethnic exogamy; the parents of adult children are no longer able to enforce
their preference for endogamous unions.
The personal authority of teachers over students has been sharply curtailed by
state regulation and by new ideologies. Teachers at the lower educational levels have
lost most of their power to discipline pupils; at the higher educational levels, the
authority that teachers formerly exercised in loco parentis over the comportment and
attitudes of students has virtually disappeared.
As recently as 1960, priests and ministers in the major denominations of these
four societies had sufficient authority over their parishioners to command their
observance of religious duties and to enforce, at least partially, ecclesiastical
prohibitions against fornication, adultery, divorce, exogamy, illegitimacy, abortion,
homosexuality, suicide, blasphemy, domestic violence, and intoxication. By 1990,
most of that authority had been nullified, either by the resistance of the laity or by
the abdication of the clergy. The mainline Christian churches now tolerate most of
the behaviour that they formerly stigmatized and punished.
218
Personal Authority
There has been a similar decline in the authority of party leaders over their
followers. In all four societies, political parties became less authoritarian and solidary
in this period; leaders in organized labour, social movements, and parliamentary blocs
have lost most of their ability to impose decisions on their followers.
The diffuse but real authority that members of privileged strata used to
exercise in their contacts with the less privileged has eroded as well. The caste
etiquette that subordinated blacks to whites whenever they interacted was largely
intact in the U.S. in 1960. It is totally gone today. The class etiquette that required
a measure of deference toward persons of higher socio-economic status is rapidly
disappearing from all four societies. This is not only a matter of outward form:
deference implies an appreciable degree of social control.
The trends described above are variable in detail but highly consistent in
direction. Even the most authoritarian relationships that can now be found in these
societies - physicians to patients, judges to litigants, keepers to prisoners - are
increasingly regulated by bureaucratic third parties and constrained by laws and
regulations that limit the discretion of the superior and enlarge the rights of the
subordinate.
The reduction of personal authority is inextricably connected with a partial
and irregular reduction of other forms of status differentiation in these societies that
occurred after 1960. At that time, each of them had a coherent system of
stratification, and despite innumerable differences of detail, the four systems
resembled each other enough to be considered together. They were not easy to
describe, because they involved intricate combinations of ascribed and achieved status
and because some status groups were sharply bounded and others were not. But the
main outlines were clear. The core was an informal but universally recognized
occupational scale that assigned a differential value (occupational prestige) to every
male worker. Under normal conditions, that value was transferred to the worker's
nuclear family, and, within rough limits, it determined both the household's
disposable income and the class status of its members. Women, whether or not they
were employed, took their class status from the occupations of their husbands or
fathers.
In these four societies today, the distribution of household income is less
closely connected with the occupational level of a male breadwinner, and the
concept of class status has become more nebulous. With regard to the first point, the
entry of women into the labour force, the delay of marriage, and the rise of female-
headed families have all reduced the association between male occupational prestige
and household income. The income of a military family in which both husband and
wife are enlisted people usually exceeds the income of a family in which the husband
is an officer and the wife keeps house. At the same time, all of these societies have
witnessed an expansion of speculative opportunities: state lotteries, high-risk bonds,
219
superinflation of real-estate prices, the escalation of earnings in sports and

entertainment and - especially in the United States - a great flood of income from
drug trafficking and other illicit activities. Many of today's high-income families
have none of the conventional marks of high status.
Although income inequality is conspicuous in all of these societies, and
indeed has increased somewhat in the United States in the past decade, the variation
in life style by income level declined sharply after 1960, and it is still declining.
There are many more millionaires in all four of these societies today than there were
in 1960, but only a tiny fraction of them can afford what used to be the fundamental
privilege of wealth - authority over servants. The working poor have not disappeared
from any of these societies, but most of them have telephones and automobiles and
some of them travel abroad for pleasure; they are not subject to the personal control
of social superiors and not required to show deference toward them. Instead of being
converted into personal authority, as in the past, much of the surplus income of the
rich is absorbed by large surcharges for the goods and services they purchase.
Since 1960, there has been an enormous widening in the price ranges of
functionally equivalent items (Caplow, 1991: 137). In the U.S. in 1960, the most
costly production automobile cost about seven times as much as the cheapest. Today,
the ratio is 95:1. For men's ready-made suits, the ratio was about 4:1 in 1960; it is
about 18:1 today. For airfares, the ratio was 1.4:1 in 1960; it is more than 20:1 today
- the cost of a roundtrip from New York to Paris on the Concorde compared to the
charter rate. Thus, surplus income is absorbed without providing much utility for its
recipients.
The increasingly nebulous character of class status is clearly shown in all four
societies by conformity to a new norm that prohibits nonmonetary restrictions on the
sale of goods and services. Hotels in these countries are not free to exclude guests
who lack the visible marks of high status, as they routinely did 30 years ago; shops
hesitate to turn away disreputable customers for fear of legal consequences;
physicians cannot legitimately refuse prenatal services to unmarried women.
Differences in class status used to be, and still are, perpetuated from
generation to generation by differential access to formal education, but with the great
expansion of educational opportunities that occurred between 1960 and 1990, the
intergenerational transfer of social advantages and disadvantages has become
markedly less regular and predictable (except perhaps in France).
Needless to say, the ancient practice of asserting status by exclusion has not
disappeared, but it has retreated on all fronts. Upper-class groups that were formerly
able to enforce endogamy - French nobles, German Junkers, Boston «brahmins» -
are by now quite resigned to the exogamous marriages of their children. And since
upper-class lineage no longer guarantees favourable placement in the occupational
220
Personal Authority
distribution or the maintenance of a distinctive lifestyle, the change has not been
strongly resisted.
The influence of ethnicity on personal authority declined significantly in all
four societies between 1960 and 1990, although their ethnic situations are highly
diverse. In the U.S., which has a more troubled history of ethnic conflict than France
or Germany, and a markedly different ethnic situation from that in Quebec, the body
of law and custom that made blacks subordinate in every face-to-face interaction with
whites was systematically demolished by the federal government between 1954 and
1972. For a variety of reasons, including the defective design of the U.S. welfare,
drug-control, criminal-justice, and health-care systems, the same period saw the
emergence of an urban underclass of blacks and Hispanics, of whom many are
fatherless, poor, prone to violence, and resistant to authority. In France, the growing
Muslim population can also be characterized as an urban underclass; their absorption
into French society has been slow and difficult. The situation of the Turkish, Greek,
Italian, and Yugoslav guest workers who comprise most of Germany's foreign
population is slightly more favourable, but German law does not confer citizenship
on the native-born children of foreign parents, and the prospects for their eventual
assimilation are unclear. Within each of these disadvantaged groups, personal
authority appears even weaker than in the majority population.
The individually oriented values that emerge when personal authority is
relaxed favour freedom of choice, not only with respect to consumption preferences,
but also with respect to marriage and parenthood, residential arrangements, career
patterns, leisure activities, attitudes and opinions, manners and morals, and the
presentation of self. New religious cults and secular ideologies flourish today in these
societies, while the diversity of voluntary activities defies description - truck drivers
give poetry recitals, nuns run political campaigns, lawyers practice ballet. This
diversity goes beyond superficial; it extends to the meanings that people find in their
lives and the ways in which they relate to each other.
The decline in personal authority carries both costs and benefits. In principle,
the expected benefit is enhancement of individual freedom and the expected cost is
weakening of social control, but the specific effects vary enormously from one
situation to another. Highly authoritarian organizations are likely to become more
productive and better integrated when personal authority is reduced, as happened, for
example, in U.S. military units between 1960 and 1990. But organizations with
initially weak authority structures, like the Catholic church in France, may become
less effective. In all four societies, the decline in personal authority has been more
costly for poor families than for rich ones. In the former, where the personal
authority of husbands over wives and parents over children was barely sufficient to
hold the family together, the loss of that authority and of the responsibilities that
went with it have greatly increased the number of single-parent households,
221
unsupported children, and uncontrollable adolescents. In more prosperous families,

where personal authority, buttressed by ample resources, might otherwise be
excessive, its reduction probably contributes to the happiness of all concerned.
Similarly, it appears that the reduction of managerial authority in German industry,
which was traditionally over-controlled, improved productivity, while a parallel
reduction in American industry, where supervision was much weaker, had an adverse
effect on productivity.
A society without much personal authority must be managed more
continuously and more skilfully than a society whose institutions have strong internal
controls. Under the emerging new order, bureaucratic failures in the regulation of
social relationships produce extraordinary hardships, as for the homeless, or profound
maladjustments, as in the escalation of health-care costs, or striking injustice, as in
the massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old that has been unintentionally
achieved by the American welfare state (Caplow, 1991: 140).
But the trend described by our data is not likely to be halted or reversed in
the short term. A revival of personal authority in family, school, and workplace is
unlikely as long as public and private bureaucracies continue to expand their
regulatory functions in these areas. That expansion is facilitated by the continued
expansion of information technology and by the redefinition of social roles that the
new technology seems to encourage.
Both of the major, long-term trends in Western society that Alexis de Tocqueville
discerned so presciently 160 years ago have come into full flower in these four
societies in the past three decades: on the one hand, the gradual progress of equality;
on the other hand, administrative centralization. Most of the personal authority that
formerly ruled the innumerable, small compartments of society has been revoked,
leaving individuals face to face with larger collectivities. They are emancipated from
submission to nearby persons and thereby given a wider range of options in many
spheres of life, but this apparent freedom masks their increasing submission to
bureaucratic agencies that are less responsive than the old patrons were in their time.
222
References
Caplow, Theodore
1991 American Social Trends. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Jean-Hugues Dechaux
Jean-Pierre Simard
Mendras, Henri
223
8
Conflicts and Conflict Regulation
Karl-Otto HONDRICH
Theodore CAPLOW
This chapter started from the assumption that as national societies become more
complex, oppositions of interest and values become more numerous and may or may
not develop into overt conflicts. The problem is to understand why some of them do
and some do not. The comparative analysis of conflict data from three large industrial
societies - France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the United States of
America - does indeed disclose a tendency toward the replacement of violent by
nonviolent forms of conflict.
We take for granted that the three societies have had different traditions of
conflict resolution, but we expect to find some convergence in the recent past. In
each there seems to be increasing recognition that social conflict has benefits as well
as costs for a democratic polity. The integrative benefits of conflict are likely to
exceed the costs when the divisions between major factions are cross-cutting and the
coalitions formed around any given issue dissolve when another issue is raised. The
costs are likely to exceed the benefits when class, political, ethnic, religious, and
ideological boundaries coincide, dividing a society into irreconcilable factions (Coser,
1956; Simmel, 1922). Most observers of our three societies agree that this sort of
polarization has been diminishing during the past half century as the lines between
blue-collar and white-collar occupations and between urban and rural culture have
softened and class, religious and ethnic identities have blurred.
Social conflicts contribute not only to integrative processes in social systems
but also to learning processes. They inform societies about their choices. The number
of possible choices being overwhelming, societies must establish "a hierarchy of
relevance," giving more attention to some choices than to others, thereby sharpening
225
the resulting conflicts. The relevance assigned to particular issues can be measured
empirically, for instance by content analysis of the mass media. Changes in the
hierarchy of relevance seldom occur because conflicts are resolved; typically, old
conflicts are displaced by new ones that have attracted the attention of the public.
Although empirical data are scanty, we think that we are seeing that
traditional religious and industrial conflicts, and conflicts about the legitimacy of
political institutions, are fading away, while new conflicts are assuming importance.
Among these are conflicts between work and welfare systems, between educational
and industrial values, between ecological and economic goals, gender-role conflicts,
and a conflict between industrialized and developing societies.
Some other general remarks about social conflict may be in order.
Without social interaction, there can be no social conflict. With an increasing volume
of interaction, the potential for social conflict must increase too. In today's world,
which has developed a global division of labour, a global balance of power, and the
rudiments of a global culture, there are innumerable differences of interest that might
generate conflict, but relatively few that actually do so.
The reasons are evident. Social .conflict carries both direct costs - in human
energy and material resources - and the indirect costs of disrupted routines and
foregone opportunities. As a society increases in size and complexity, both kinds of
costs grow disproportionately, so that it may not be able to support as much internal
strife now as in former times, when it was less developed. On the other hand, the
integrative and learning functions of conflict are so essential to modernization that
despotic regimes that attempt to suppress internal conflict generally fail to achieve
their modernization goals.
THE RELATIVE DECLINE OF VIOLENT CONFLICT
Successfully modernizing societies require a large, aggregate volume of conflict, but

since violent conflict is very costly for them, they are driven perforce toward
nonviolent modes, such as lobbying and litigation. Their technology of violence has
developed to a degree of destructiveness that strictly forbids its application. In this
sense, it can be said that only underdeveloped or developing countries can afford
civil wars or guerrilla movements under current conditions. These observations are
consistent with Norbert Elias's (1978) proposition that the progress of civilization
constrains individuals and organizations to refrain from violent action and reinforces
the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.
There are several important exceptions to the general trend of diminishing
violence in advanced industrial societies. In the first place, the trend does not seem
to affect the criminal underworlds that flourish in metropolitan cities, particularly in
the United States. Rates of violent crime oscillate with the size of successive cohorts
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of underprivileged male adolescents, but the incidence of murder, robbery, and rape,
which rose sharply after 1960 in the United States, showed no definite trend in
France or Germany.
It can be argued that most of this violence is confined to segregated urban
sectors that resemble underdeveloped societies in having low incomes, poor living
conditions, and limited opportunities, but that is not entirely persuasive. An
alternative interpretation is that criminal underworlds are created, for the most part,
by inept public policies, such as the welfare measures that promote single-parent
families and the law-enforcement practices that make drug-related crimes uniquely
profitable in the U.S. By establishing specifically criminogenic conditions within
circumscribed areas, the state inadvertently counteracts the society-wide tendency to
reduced violence.
The other major exception to the trend of diminishing violence in recent
decades is a dramatic increase in the scale and lethality of the means of violence
monopolized by the state. Governments that regard flogging as excessively inhumane
plan for the nuclear massacre of entire populations with perfect equanimity. The
inhibitions that restrain the internal use of violence by the state do not apply to
external use, and while systems of mutual deterrence have protected the major
industrial powers from each other for almost half a century, they have not prevented
those powers from conducting or sponsoring military operations in dozens of Third
World countries, from Korea to Iraq.
Another apparent exception to the downward trend of violence is the rioting
that breaks out in the advanced industrial nations from time to time: the quasi-
revolutionary riots of the 1960s, the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1970s, the
ecological protests of the 1980s, neo-Nazi activity in Germany in the 1990s. But
although these episodes of political theatre are cloaked in the rhetoric of violence,
they seldom involve any large-scale damage.
The displacement of violence by other modes of conflict resolution in the
advanced industrial societies in the second half of the twentieth century seems to be
self-evident. The bloody and protracted strikes of the previous era have virtually
disappeared, and there is strong normative pressure to reduce violence in family life,
in schools, in the workplace, and in politics. In the private sphere, the falling
incidence of violence is accompanied by increasing recognition of it, creating the
illusion, for example, that wife beating has increased, whereas the practice has almost
certainly declined. As far as public violence is concerned, Germany illustrates the
recent tendency most dramatically. Between 1918 and 1945, its history was marked
by attempted revolutions, street fighting between right- and left-wing gangs during
the Weimar era, state-sponsored terrorism during the Nazi era, and the general
collapse of internal order in the last days of the Second World War. The current
episodes of public violence have been incomparably less intense.
227
To be more specific, data on German conflict events from the Yale World
Data Programme show that rioting occurred frequently between 1948 and 1952, when
institutionalized conflict regulation was still weak, declined sharply afterwards, then
rose to new peaks with the student and anti-authoritarian demonstrations of 1968-72
and the anti-nuclear and Green demonstrations of 1978-82. During these three
periods, the incidence of conflict events in Germany somewhat exceeded the average
incidence in 15 democratic countries. Otherwise, the Federal Republic lies around the
middle of the range; in general, smaller countries show lower conflict frequencies.
Only about 4% of recent political demonstrations included any violent activity at all.
The French and American trends have been roughly parallel, except that the frequent
and protracted strikes that interrupted public services in France during the 1950s and
1960s have become brief and rare and the incidence of labour-related violence in the
U.S. has declined almost to the vanishing point. Some important mass protests
occurred in France over educational and regional issues in the 1980s, but they were
essentially nonviolent. In the U.S., there were dozens of large-scale race riots,
involving considerable violence, during the summers of the late 1960s. Since then,
the occasional outbreaks of racial violence have been small-scale, except for the great
Los Angeles riot of 1991, which so far has not elicited any imitation.
COMPARING CULTURES OF CONFLICT
Conflict and conflict resolution are inseparable. Every conflict involves explicit or
implicit expectations about how it will be resolved, and the scenario of a conflict is
often dictated by an available mode of conflict resolution.
Viewed abstractly, violence is a basic mode of conflict resolution. Two other
modes, in Albert Hirschmann's (1970) useful terms, are "exit" and "voice". Exit
resolves the conflict by disrupting or suspending the relationship between contending
parties. Voice attempts to resolve the conflict by verbal persuasion directed at
antagonists, third parties, or both.
Different cultures exhibit different patterns of conflict resolution. Strangely
enough, American culture seems to emphasize all three modes. There is a strong
tradition in the U.S. of violent conflict, including armed clashes between strikers and
strike-breakers, lynchings, race riots, and violent social movements, but there is an
equally strong tradition of exit in the same pattern - pulling up stakes and leaving
town. There is no European society in which social relationships can be so easily
dissolved by either party.
But voice, too, seems to be specially cultivated in the United States as a mode
of conflict resolution, whether as oratory, advertising, debate, or negotiation. In no
other country would a small group of friends coming together to pursue a hobby be
likely to adopt the full panoply of parliamentary procedure enshrined in Robert's
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Conflicts
Rules of Order. In the U.S., they do so as a matter of course. A perceptive foreign

observer, Michel Crozier, comments on the importance given to negotiation by
American labour leaders:
In the American working world of 1947, by contrast, speaking up
and negotiating came to the same thing. There was no speech in
the abstract; you always spoke to someone, in this case to the
boss. Americans had a perhaps naive but marvelously human
confidence in the power of speech: as long as you keep talking,
you're bound to find a solution. The bosses, naturally, do not want
to listen. That's what makes them such bastards. But make them
listen and things will work out. After all, they're not monsters.
(Crozier, 1984: 4)
Is there, in the American tradition, really more violence, more exit, and more voice
- in short, more conflict to be resolved - than in Europe? If so, why? One possible
explanation is that conflict in Europe was traditionally resolved by the intervention
of a higher authority, a feudal ruler or the national state. But there were no feudal
rulers in the United States, and the authority of the national government was until
recently much more limited than that of any European state. In America, both conflict
and conflict resolution were distributed more "equally"; when authority was needed,
a voluntary association was formed to exercise it. As Tocqueville noted, "Wherever,
at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man
of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association"
(Tocqueville, 1838). It fits this picture that in our own times, Americans resort to
litigation to settle many conflicts which, in France or Germany, would be resolved
administratively.
In contrast, the European tradition regards the resolution of conflict as an
administrative function of the state. Until very recently, European governments
exercised much broader powers than the American federal government, and
consequently provoked much more resentment and resistance. Moreover, European
states were, to varying degrees, authoritarian; they attempted not only to regulate but
to suppress conflict, thereby creating additional conflicts.
Within the European pattern, there are remarkable variations. In the tradition of
the grand revolution, France developed the paradoxical institution of "legitimized
insurrection" (Mendras, 1988: 134). This scenario of direct democracy is recognized
and well understood by the political class in France: de Gaulle took the 1968 student
riots as a signal to abdicate, and the student riots of 1984 and 1986 vetoed the
educational plans of the government.
Germans have no recollection of a really successful - and therefore historically
legitimized - mass insurrection, except for the very recent "November Revolution"
in East Germany (1989). On the contrary, the abortive uprisings that occurred under
the Weimar Republic are remembered as preparing the way for the Third Reich, and
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there was nothing glorious about the episodes of violence that accompanied Hitler's
rise to power. Thus, the founding fathers of the Federal Republic of Germany, in
devising mechanisms for the regulation of conflict, faced a dilemma: the new state
should be strong enough to suppress violent struggles of the kind that had
undermined the Weimar Republic, but it should avoid the populist and authoritarian
elements of the Nazi Reich. Streitbare Demokratie became the watchword of the new
state.
In German history, it is not only political violence that has an unfavourable
image, but political conflict in general. Parliamentary democracy and its mechanisms
for regulating conflict are not associated, in Germany's collective memory, with
nation-building and industrialization, achievements of Bismarck's authoritarian
regime, which nationalized essential industries like railroads and public utilities while
protecting capitalist entrepreneurs and the working class from each other. Social
security and unemployment insurance were unique inventions of German
authoritarianism.
The classes and groups involved in German industrialization did not see
themselves as oppressed by the state - as in France - or as largely independent of
the state - as in the United States - but as supported by it. The idea that the state
should take care of all groups and suppress intergroup conflict was reinforced by the
negative experience of the Weimar Republic, which was not really accepted by
traditional elites and was too weak to keep peace among important right-wing and
left-wing groups. National Socialism, by trying to re-establish national consensus,
finally liberated Germany from the dream of a conflict-free society under the
protection of a strong and benevolent ruler.
To sum up: after the Second World War, our three societies started from quite
different traditions of conflict regulation. In the United States, the ubiquity of social
conflict was taken for granted: all three modes of conflict resolution were widely
practised. When the federal government intervened in major conflicts, as it did with
increasing frequency after 1945, its purpose was to regulate rather than suppress the
conflict, and in many instances it threw its weight to the weaker side.
In Europe, on the other hand, the suppression of social conflict was one of the
major responsibilities of the national state. While French attitudes toward social
conflict were profoundly ambivalent, torn between admiration for effective authority
and the glorification of revolution, Germany had a tradition of close collaboration
between social classes and the state and a strong distaste for class conflict.
These cultural differences have been eroded by recent developments. In the
United States, the role of the federal government in the regulation of conflict now
resembles that of its European counterparts. The deregulation movement of the 1980s
did not interrupt the steady expansion of federal functions, and the economic
consequences of deregulation were so disastrous that the movement is unlikely to
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Conflicts
recover in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, European states have been evolving in
the opposite direction by transferring functions from the state to voluntary
associations and local authorities. The regulation of conflict is increasingly a matter
for organized interest groups. In this respect, Germany seems to be more
Americanized than France. One comparative study of parallel legislative initiatives
to humanize working conditions in the two countries attributes the failure of the
initiative in France to the inability of French trade unions and entrepreneurs to come
to agreement on their own (Gottelmann, 1983). The relatively slower acceptance of
decentralized conflict regulation in France is explained in part by the great social
distances between government agencies, trade associations, labour unions, and interest
groups. Some political scientists speak of the "fragmented pluralism" of France, in
contrast to the "integrated pluralism" of the United States and the Federal Republic
(Lehmbruch, 1984). However, the German version of integrated pluralism is clearly
more integrated than the American. Co-operation between opposing interest groups
is more firmly institutionalized in Germany, although whether that co-operation can
withstand the strains introduced by reunification remains an open question.
The convergence of conflict-regulating processes in these three societies should
not be misinterpreted as the disappearance of their special traditions - administrative
centralization in France, the collaboration of interest groups with the state in
Germany, self-regulation by voluntary associations in the United States. These are
still in evidence, though modified by the trends described above.
A common recent development in the three societies is a greater acceptance of
the legitimacy of intergroup conflict, and a recognition of its positive functions. The
attitude that social conflict is a normal and necessary feature of complex societies
presupposes a trend toward the moderation of conflict and the substitution of voice
for exit and violence. It is instructive to see how this has occurred in a number of
different conflict arenas.
CLASS STRUGGLE AND LEGITIMACY CONFLICTS
When the factory system appeared on the European stage, the opposition between
capitalists and industrial workers became entangled with the pre-existing opposition
of the old feudal class and the bourgeoisie. In France, the revolution of 1789 united
the new proletarians, the urban artisans, and part of the peasantry with the rising
bourgeoisie against the landowning aristocrats and the remainder of the peasantry.
This configuration persisted through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth at
every level of social organization: republicans against monarchists, rationalism
against religion, collectivism against individualism, workers against patrons. The
congruence of several lines of conflict divided the country into two almost separate
parts with incompatible standards of political legitimacy, les deux Frances,
231
dramatized in the Dreyfus Affair. It took a long time for the French working class
to acquire an identity strong enough to introduce industrial class conflict in the proper
sense into the picture, and the effort was never completely successful. The earlier
conflict about the political, religious, and philosophical character of the state
continued to reassert itself periodically, as during the prolonged crisis over Algerian
independence. It is not totally extinguished yet. But the very fact of that deep rift in
the society favoured the concentration of state power. The state, whether controlled
by the right or the left, had to be strong in order to prevail over its internal enemies
and to unite the two halves of the society against external threats.
Germany, although a late-comer to national unity and industrialization, could
rely on the integrating force of nationalism as well. Its working class developed later
but grew faster than that of France. From the beginning, the effort to mobilize
German workers for the class struggle was weakened by their respect for authority
in general and for state authority in particular. Eventually, the working class formed
an unacknowledged coalition with the old feudal class, which controlled the apparatus
of the state and could protect them from unrestricted capitalist exploitation. This
alliance was not incompatible with the German variant of the socialist vision:
property rights would be taken away from the bourgeoisie and handed over to the
state, which would not shed any of its authority in becoming socialist and democratic.
The class struggle in Germany was not about the distribution of economic resources
but about the legitimacy of the social order. In that respect, it resembled the French
situation, but with far more emphasis on the industrial class struggle.
Having no feudal order to overthrow, the United States did not experience the
legitimacy conflicts so familiar to Europeans. The deepest American divisions were
ethnic, and they were inextricably entwined with the contending sovereignty claims
of the federal government and the states. These questions divided the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, defined the politics of the Jacksonian era, and led directly to the
Civil War, in which slavery and federal sovereignty were equal and inseparable
issues. Similar issues continue to dominate American politics to this day. The ethnic
issues include not only the relative status of whites and blacks, but of early-comers
and late-comers, natives and immigrants, angles and Hispanics, even Protestants and
Catholics. The supremacy of the federal government was firmly established in 1865,
but the scope of federal authority is still an unsettled question. In general,
Republicans win elections by promising to reduce it; Democrats win elections by
offering to enlarge it.
When industrial class conflict first appeared on the American scene, in the late
nineteenth century, it had a distinctly ethnic character: virtually all of the capitalists
were descendants of early British immigrants, virtually all of the workers were recent
immigrants from other parts of Europe. The early labour movement was stigmatized
as radical and un-American. It gained some footholds in heavy industry but never
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Conflicts
attracted widespread public support, and it was eventually suppressed when both
federal and state governments sided with the business interests. The agrarian and
populist movement of the same period was more successful, but it too was eventually
suppressed by the same coalition. When large-scale labour organization finally came
to the United States in the New Deal of the 1930s, it was made possible by a vast
and controversial expansion of federal authority. Most of the recent social movements
that have transformed American society since 1960 have remained focused on the
same pair of issues: the relative status of ethnic groups and the proper limits of
federal authority (Caplow, 1991: 201-213).
What happened to the French and German conflicts about the legitimacy of the
political and economic order? In West Germany, just after the Second World War,
the authoritarian legacy, although deeply discredited, was still supported by about
15% of the electorate who voted for right-wing parties, and by about 6% who voted
communist, By the end of the 1950s, the extremist parties had disappeared from the
federal parliament. The Social Democrats, in the Godesberger programme of 1959,
abandoned the goal of a socialist economy, substituting a "social market economy"
and the integration of the Federal Republic into the Western bloc system. The trade
unions also gradually ceased to advocate a collectivist reorganization of the economy.
Opinion polls show a long-term, continuously increasing acceptance of the market
economy and of parliamentary institutions; this consensus has been marred
symbolically - though not statistically - by the recent resurgence of the extreme
right.
The development of a political consensus in France has been more uneven. The
politics of the Fifth Republic have been dominated by recollection of the dangerous
instability that characterized the Fourth Republic. Given the impossibility of doing
away with the multi-party system in the Chamber of Deputies, that body has been
bypassed by the installation of a very strong president, elected under a system that
reduces party influence in the final run-off. By this means, the extremist parties of
both left and right, which still have substantial followings, are virtually excluded
from the determination of national policy.
In France as in Germany, the legitimacy of the political and economic order is
no longer seriously challenged, either in politics or in labour relations. The class
struggle has become obsolete in the face of the nearly unanimous commitment to
democratic and market institutions.
By contrast, some observers see an erosion of the American commitment to the
same institutions. Sidney Verba wrote, in The Civic Culture Revisited,
In the United States and Britain, the nations in which we found
such [civic] attitudes, [supportive of a democratic political system]
to be widespread (around 1960), there has been a steady erosion
of confidence in the government. We had assumed that other
nations might move in the "civic" direction of the United States
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and Britain; in fact, the latter two nations moved away from that
position. (Verba and Almond, 1980: 399)
A decline of confidence in the Congress, the executive branch, and the courts,
recorded by annual General Social Survey since 1972, and a decline in voter
participation that began around 1960 are unmistakeable, but it is not at all certain that
these trends reflect a real decline in the American public's commitment to democratic
and market institutions. On both the left and the right, fewer voices now clamour for
basic change in American institutions than at any time during the past 200 years. The
people are dissatisfied but not at all rebellious.
There seems to be neither tradition nor future for legitimacy conflicts in the
U.S., and West European countries today resemble the U.S. in this regard. In
Germany and France - and in Japan, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia - the old issues
of legitimacy are in abeyance. What about the other perennial types of conflict:
religious, industrial, ethnic, and international?
TRADITIONAL CONFLICTS IN TRANSITION
The old religious conflicts - clericalism versus laicism in France, Protestantism

versus Catholicism in Germany, denominational competition in the United States, and
the several versions of anti-Semitism that flourished in these countries - have almost
disappeared. However, there are new religious conflicts here and there - the
essentially religious abortion controversy in the United States, the anti-Muslim
movement in France, and, of course, the growing menace of Islamic fundamentalism,
directed not so much against Christianity as against the Western democracies.
Industrial conflict too has changed but not disappeared. For more than a hundred
years, the conflict between industrial workers and industrial owners, envisaged as the
last and most important of class struggles, occupied the centre of European politics
and the periphery of American politics. The frame of reference proposed by Marx
and Engels in the Communist Manifesto had a powerful grip on both their followers
and their adversaries; it survived the rise and fall of fascism and the manifest failures
of state socialism. After the Second World War, however, a growing gap developed
between the theory of the class struggle and the actual course of labour-management
relations in Germany, France, and the United States. The theory was undermined by
a spectacular rise in the wages and living standards of industrial workers; by
increasing differentiation within the working class with respect to qualifications and
earnings; by an influx of women, guest, and minority workers; by a massive shift
from blue-collar to white-collar employment; by the automation of dirty and
dangerous jobs; by state regulation of working conditions; by the bureaucratization
of trade unions; and by various forms of worker participation in the ownership and
management of industrial enterprises. With these developments, the key concepts of
the class struggle, exploitation and class solidarity, lost much of their relevance, and
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Conflicts
political parties dedicated to the class struggle lost most of their members, although
they remain much more important in France than in Germany or the United States.
Industrial conflict in these three societies became routinized and less dramatic.
The number and importance of strikes declined. Changes in wages and working
conditions are now negotiated at set intervals by skilled representatives of labour and
management who share the same professional habits (and work under government
oversight). Most industrial issues are local rather than national: displacement of
workers by plant closings, discrimination in hiring and promotion, wage differentials
among job categories, health insurance, and pension plans.
In West Germany, due to the traditionally favourable attitudes of workers toward
authority and the establishment of co-determination in the 1950s, there is a working-
class elite that shares in the mangement of enterprises and is particularly well placed
for negotiation. As in other countries, the number of negotiable issues - job security,
retirement planning, automation, training and retraining, implementation of general
agreements on the plant level — has been increasing, and the existence of facilities
for negotiation has the effect of raising new issues and creating new conflicts, which
are then resolved in more negotiation. As Simmel (1922) observed, conflict and
consensus develop together. German co-determination provides perhaps the clearest
example of how the class struggle has been converted into numerous small conflicts
that integrate more than they divide.
The same effect has been achieved in France and in the United States by
routinization of labour-management negotiations, professionalization of the
negotiators, and increasing participation of the state, either as an interested-party or
as a neutral arbiter. The interested-party role is more salient in France, where the
state manages major enterprises and assumes responsibility for the economy as a
whole. The neutral-arbiter role is more important in the United States, where all
collective bargaining is supervised by federal agencies and a great many labour-
management disputes give rise to litigation. The conventional view of the state as an
instrument of the ruling class does not square with either of these roles as presently
enacted. Complex systems of influence involving money and votes make government
representatives responsive to the interests of both labour and management. They may
tilt a little toward labour under a Socialist president in France, or toward management
under a Republican president in the U.S., but tilting too far invites reprisal at the next
election, and the agents of government share with the agents of labour and
management a set of understandings about the need for compromise and the
importance of the long view. These common understandings sometimes break down,
but the development of an irreconcilable conflict anywhere in the system is not heard
as a call to battle but as a signal to reorganize so that negotiations can resume.
The class struggle, conceived as a zero-sum game played by capitalists and
workers for the control of the state, has been transformed into a set of non-zero-sum
235
games with more modest payoffs, conducted under the supervision of a more or less
impartial state.
By contrast, ethnic conflict has been sharpening in France and, to a lesser
degree, in Germany, as the native-born children of Muslim guest workers form
minority groups that are visibly separate from the rest of the population. In the
United States, the ethnic conflicts that have loomed large on the political scene for
the past 40 years show no sign of winding down, despite the massive efforts of
federal, state, and local governments to remove the disadvantages of minority groups
by vigorous enforcement of civil rights; by mandating the desegregation of schools,
workplaces, public facilities, and voluntary associations; and by the preferential
treatment of minority persons in competitive situations (Caplow, 1991: 185-200).
These measures have been partly frustrated by two demographic trends - the
enormous expansion of the Hispanic minority by legal and illegal immigration and
by high fertility; and the sharply rising illegitimacy rate of the black population,
which means that most black children are now born to unmarried mothers and raised
in poverty without a father or stepfather. Despite the emergence of a large,
prosperous, well-educated black middle class, the failure of expectations for the
remainder of the black population has sown deep resentment among them, while the
high concentration of crime and social disorder in the black underclass has revived
some of the white racist attitudes that had apparently been overcome.
International conflict has been, of course, the principal scourge of the industrial
societies in this century, and not class antagonism. It was nationalism and national
antagonism that changed the world. The great hope of European socialists, at the
beginning of the century, that class solidarity based on class struggle would prevent
national wars proved terribly wrong (Caplow, 1989: 65-66). The First World War not
only inflicted grave damage on the participants but destroyed the international system
that had maintained a degree of stability in the world since the Congress of Vienna.
It led to the continual troubles of the interwar period and then to the vast destruction
of the Second World War and the division of the industrial world into two hostile
camps with competing economic and political systems. Over 40 years, national
struggles were replaced by ideological confrontation. No shots were exchanged
between the major antagonists, but their relations were so far from peaceful that each
felt constrained to develop weapons capable of obliterating entire nations. And
although they were deterred from direct action against each other, they were free to
engage in military adventures in places such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, to sponsor
more than a hundred regional and civil wars, and to arm unreliable client states all
over the world.
There may be some subterranean connection between the declining tolerance of
violence within these national societies and their hyperdevelopment of violent means
for external use, but that mystery lies outside the scope of this essay. What is
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Conflicts
important for our present discussion is that there has been so little dissent about
military policies that seem irrational on their face: the investment of enormous
resources in weapons that put humanity itself at risk in order to repel an invasion of
Germany by Russia that had became strategically implausible by the end of the
1950s, after the People's Republic of China broke with the Soviet Union and the
United States targeted Soviet territory with thousands of nuclear missiles. Although
the Federal Republic was not directly involved in nuclear-weapons development, it
was a major participant in NATO, maintained a mass army, and shared with the
United States control of a nuclear arsenal. Although there was a minority opposition
in the Federal Republic to the nuclear aspects of the NATO scenario, in which
Germany was the chosen battleground, the general policy of remilitarization went
virtually unopposed. It was not until the late 1970s that the new Green Party, some
Social Democrats, and a strong peace movement turned against the escalating arms
race. In France, after the rejection of the EOF project in 1954, popular support for
the development of the nuclear force de frappe was virtually unanimous; there was
no anti-nuclear movement to speak of. Similarly, American defence policy was
supported by both major parties and by the overwhelming majority of the public.
There was a moderately strong anti-nuclear movement, whose influence peaked in
the 1970s, but it advocated a nuclear freeze rather than nuclear disarmament and had
no appreciable effect on defence policy (although it was able to obstruct and finally
halt the development of the nuclear-power industry). In all three societies, the
absence of serious debate about defence policy may be taken as another indication
of the nearly unanimous consensus that now supports the legitimacy of the state, or,
to put it differently, another indication of the disappearance of class conflict.
AFTER CLASS CONFLICT: THE EMERGENCE OF NEW CONFLICTS
As we see it, class conflict has broken down both nationally and internationally.
Historically, it was no more than an intermezzo. What will come after it?
Two events in the former Soviet imperium leave no doubt. As a principle for
organizing society, it is again the concept of nation, with its connotations of freedom
and democracy, that has triumphed over that of class. Thus, conflicts between nations
and/or between nations and supranational political entities, market interests, and value
systems will be on the agenda for the coming decades. These conflicts will remind
us, to some degree, of traditional national antagonisms, but they will be basically
different for at least two reasons. There is a deep-rooted experience of nationalistic
exaggeration and failure in central Europe, particularly in Germany, and there is the
challenge of global problems that invite supranational solutions.
These problems result from the success, not the failure, of industrial societies,
compared to all previous societies, in increasing material and cultural well-being.
237
They bring about new conflicts, which are exclusively the products of mature
industrial societies. Today's salient political conflicts are defined not by antagonistic
classes but by competing necessities. Cross-cutting older social cleavages, they make
class and traditional conflicts obsolete.
The Conflict Between Work System and Welfare System
As broader segments of the population came to share the achievement orientation that
was once the exclusive prerogative of the bourgeoisie, the work system has become
increasingly rewarding to qualified and motivated people. But it rejects a growing
number of people who, for one reason or another, can not meet its performance
standards. Modern industrial economies have a perennial shortage of the former and
a perpetual surplus of the latter. There is chronic unemployment and unemployability
at the bottom of the occupational scale even under the most favourable economic
conditions. A large segment of the adult population is economically worthless; the
cost of employing them, even at subsistence wages, is more than their labour is
worth. They are supported in a welfare system by the contributions of those who
have found a place in the work system. In our three societies today, the major
political parties are structured by the opposed interests of the work system and the
welfare system. Liberal-conservative parties, supporting achievement values, try to
establish optimal conditions for the work system and protect the income and property
rights derived from it. Socialists and Social Democrats in France and Germany, and
Democrats and some liberal Republicans in the United States, promote the welfare
system in the name of social justice. The alternation between left-centre and right-
centre governments that is characteristic of modern democracies reflects trial and
error in balancing the interests of the work and welfare systems.
The Conflict Between Educational and Industrial Values
Another aspect of the rising level of occupational qualification in advanced industrial

societies that are increasingly dependent on high technology is the expansion of
higher education and the opposition that tends to develop between the values it
fosters and the values built into the work system. All three societies greatly expanded
their universities between 1960 and 1975. An unanticipated result was the rise of a
cohort of highly educated young people who, unlike preceding cohorts of university
students, represented a cross-section of the entire population and did not identify with
established elites. They created their own youth culture, focused on the values of
freedom, equality, spontaneity, and self-direction. On behalf of those values, derived
directly or indirectly from exposure to the university curriculum, they attacked the
political and industrial values of authority, efficiency, and order, and challenged the
238
Conflicts
structure of authority in universities, churches, parliaments, and factories. Although

the young intellectuals of 1968 sought solidarity with the working class, they did not
achieve it. Trade-union leaders, fearing anarchy, supported authority against the
young rebels. And as the first cohorts of degree-holders produced by mass higher
education matured in the labour force, they took their places on the upper reaches of
the occupational ladder and moved toward the political centre, while retaining some
trace of their youthful beliefs.
The nuances were a little different in each country. The American student revolt
that began with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1965 was grounded on
opposition to the Vietnam war but included a general rejection of established
authority and conventional behaviour. In Germany, the student revolt was more
pointedly directed against officials attempting to enact their traditional roles. In
France, in May of 1968 and for some time thereafter, the student movement aimed
for a grand revolution in the style of 1789, and attracted enough support from other
sectors of the population to make that goal momentarily plausible.
The Conflict Between Ecological and Economic Values
The replacement of the industrial class struggle by newer forms of contention shows
even more clearly in the opposition between ecology and technology that came to
public awareness in the 1970s and gathered strength in the 1980s as the legitimate
offshoot of the opposition between the educational system and the work system. It
originally had the same configuration: young and highly educated protesters
challenging an entrenched establishment. But in this case, the protesters attracted such
broad support that ecological values were eventually accepted by nearly everyone in
Germany, by a large part of the American population, and by a growing minority in
France. Nevertheless, when specific ecological issues affect the economic interests
of managers and workers, in the chemical industry for example, they generally prefer
their own interests over ecological concerns, such as protection of endangered
species, that they regard as exaggerated.
The opposition between ecological and economic values came to prominence
first in the United States, where voluntary associations such as the Sierra Club and
the Audobon Society had been defending wilderness areas against encroachment since
the turn of the century But most of the current ecological issues emerged in the
1960s and 1970: domestic ones, such as air quality, polluted rivers, toxic waste,
ocean dumping, endangered species, acid rain, radon, toxic fertilizers, overfishing,
and the preservation of wetlands, and global ones, such as ozone depletion,
greenhouse gases, species extinction, and tropical deforestation. The numerous
voluntary associations formed in the U.S. to combat these dangers have grown
rapidly in size and influence, but they have not combined into a unified movement
239
(Caplow, 1991: 208-211). No environmental bloc has formed in national politics,

although about 30 major environmental statutes have been passed by Congress since
1970. Each issue is debated ad hoc and resolved separately. The environmental
platforms of the two major parties are bland and indistinguishable.
In West Germany, on the other hand, ecological issues were politicized as soon
as they entered the public domain. At the beginning, the groups that placed them-
selves on the left of the political spectrum - in terms of the industrial class struggle
- seized on these issues with the hope of revitalizing themselves. But it soon became
clear that ecological concerns cut across the old lines and tended to undermine the
old left. The Greens, founded in 1979, established themselves almost overnight as a
legitimate political party with substantial voting strength. At first, they tried to
reinforce their ecological position with a legitimacy issue, calling for "basic
democracy" as an alternative to parliamentary democracy. But this approach was
soon abandoned - another indicator of the difficulty of reanimating legitimacy
conflicts.
In France, the ecological movement was weak until very recently, when it
suddenly became a force to be reckoned with. The distance between the old political
left and the new ecological movement is even more evident than in Germany. French
Greens are more pragmatic, even technocratically minded.
Gender-Role Conflict
In all three of our societies, the women's movement introduced another set of issues
that tended to supersede class conflict. Thanks to new birth-control technologies that
became available after 1960, childbearing became largely elective. Concurrently,
married women entered the labour force in larger numbers than ever before; by 1990,
the majority of women with young children in these societies were employed outside
the home and fertility had declined to unprecedented lows: far below zero population
growth in Germany, slightly below in the United States, slightly above in France. The
women's movement, and the several versions of feminism it proposed, offered new
social values that responded to the changed situation of women and the changed
relationship between the sexes. The stigma was removed from unmarried cohabitation
and unmarried motherhood. The number of illegitimate births and single-parent
families rose more in the U.S. than in Germany, and more in Germany than in
France. Among black Americans, about two thirds of all babies have no recognized
fathers. In all three societies, the obligation of men to support women and children
has been attenuated without a corresponding reduction of women's responsibilities
for child care, although some role-sharing does occur in two-parent families and day-
care facilities for the children of working mothers have been vastly expanded.
Women have gained access to many occupations formerly monopolized by men,
240
Conflicts
including supervisory and managerial positions, although their average earnings

remain much lower. Finally, women now claim as much sexual freedom as men and
exercise it liberally.
The conflict here should not be misconstrued as a war between the sexes.
Whether the changes wrought by the women's movement are more advantageous for
men or for women is a debatable, and perhaps unanswerable, question. It is true that
men have lost domestic authority and their virtual monopoly of the public sphere. But
they have also shed many of their former obligations and improved their sexual
opportunities. Opinion surveys generally show about as much support for feminist
values among men especially younger men, as among women. The significant
opposition is not between men and women, but between old and new gender roles.
Love and parenthood now fall within a political spectrum whose right wing preaches
a modified version of traditional values - marital fidelity, dual parenthood, male
dominance in the public sphere, and female dominance in the private sphere - and
whose left wing demands the absolute equality of the sexes and regards the Rights
of Man and Our Father in Heaven as sexist concepts. The centre is thoroughly
confused. For activists at both extremes, this conflict takes precedence over any other
and makes the traditional class struggle irrelevant.
The differences among our three societies with respect to this issue are
differences of degree, not of kind. The equalization of the sexes is somewhat further
advanced in Germany than in the United States, and much further advanced in the
United States than in France, but the direction is the same.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CAPITALIST AND SOCIALIST SOCIETIES
The aftermath of the Second World War had the unexpected effect of undermining
the class struggle in the capitalist societies. It was partly a matter of hostility toward
an out-group promoting internal solidarity, but the effect was more complex. Only
by comparing themselves with socialist societies did the Western capitalist societies
discover how successful they had been in producing economic well-being. Thus, the
East-West conflict gave the classes of our three societies a common interest in
defending their high standard of living against potential attacks from the East. And
only by contrast to the authoritarian "people's democracies" did the political
arrangements of the Western democracies acquire the unquestioned legitimacy they
now enjoy - a legitimacy quite incompatible with older notions of class conflict.
From the perspective of the person in the street, the proletarian triumph achieved in
the socialist world had brought less economic welfare and less freedom than the
preservation of classes. The political lesson was clear.
Indeed, it was so clear that it may have been learned too well. Astonishingly,
the poor almost ceased to grumble about the rich. The malefactors of great wealth,
241
as Theodore Roosevelt called them, enjoyed virtual immunity from criticism in these
societies after 1975, if they stayed within the nominal bounds of the law. This was
most striking in the United States, where the Reagan administration, frankly solicitous
of millionaires, was able to slash the taxes of rich families and corporations without
arousing any significant resistance, and capped the achievement with an income-tax
schedule that set a lower tax rate for high-income than middle-income families. In
Germany, where a third of all households are reported to have a net worth of more
than a million marks and poverty has been virtually abolished, the rich so greatly
outnumber the poor that any attack on wealth has an undemocratic ring. The French
are less complacent in this regard, but under a Socialist president, they too have
provided inherited and accumulated wealth with a more favourable climate than at
any time since 1848.
In the United States, this complacency has already proved costly. The unbridled
speculation of the 1980s ruined the savings banks and cost taxpayers many billions
of dollars. In Germany and France, the party is still in full swing. The disappearance
of the class struggle having coincided with victory in the Cold War, the institutions
of the Western democracies are accepted as wise and benevolent, even when they
plainly are not. In Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim, Utopia is
here and now, and the goal of many societies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and
Asia is to follow the same path and arrive at the same place.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES AND THE REST
Not only the class struggle but the competition between capitalism and socialism has
become obsolete. In their place is a new and overwhelming difference of interest
between the advanced industrial societies and the rest of the world. Like the
opposition between the work and welfare systems, this is an opposition between insi-
ders and outsiders. The insiders include the entire population of the industrial
societies, those in the welfare system as well as those in the work system, and the
outsiders are the entire populations, barring a privileged few, of the countries that
have remained agrarian or failed to industrialize successfully. On the international
scene, the principal opposition is no longer betweem competing ideologies but
between high and low levels of living.
The nations with relatively low levels of living fall into several categories, with
dissimilar situations:
. State socialist nations, with failed or partly failed industrial economies. They
account for about a third of the world's population and more than half of its armed
forces. Some of them - the ex-Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, the Czech Republic
and Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria - have begun to forsake state socialism in search
of a new model. Others - Cuba, Albania, Vietnam - have so far refused that
242
Conflicts
option. The situation of China is too uncertain to characterize. East Germany was
removed from this category by its merger with the Federal Republic.
. Black African nations, with predominantly agrarian economies and authoritarian
regimes. In the 1980s, some of these moved backwards with respect to indicators
of modernization.
. India, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Indonesia. These five large, heavily populated nations
are partly industrialized, contain some of the world's largest cities, and have
recently made striking economic progress. But they have high rates of population
growth, very unequal income distributions, and extensive poverty. Many of the
island nations of the Caribbean and the Pacific show similar patterns on a smaller
scale.
. Scattered around the world are desperately poor countries, such as Bangladesh.
Haiti, Bolivia, Mozambique, Nepal, and New Guinea, and others torn by internal
dissension, such as South Africa, Ceylon, El Salvador, Chad, the Philippines,
Afghanistan, and Lebanon, in which modernization has been decisively interrupted.
. The nations of the Mideast display striking contrasts of wealth and poverty among
themselves and internally as well._ Taken as a whole, the region claims a
disproportionate share of the world's wealth in return for its oil, but still makes
millions of its people live under pre-industrial conditions.
As this brief listing suggests, the simple picture of a global conflict
between North and South, between the industrialized haves and the agrarian have-
nots, does not fit the current situation. There are major concentrations of high
technology and industrial wealth outside of the European orbit, major failures of of
modernization within that orbit, and all sorts of mixed outcomes among the world's
200 independent nations. But there is clearly a potential conflict between the areas
of rapid population growth - Africa, Latin America, and some parts of Asia - and
the areas of zero or negative population growth - Europe and North America. Under
today's conditions, the least modernized populations generally have very high rates
of population growth, while the fertility of the most modernized populations has
fallen below the replacement level. The general effect is to lower the living standards
of very poor countries faster than modernization can raise them and to attract as
many immigrants to rich countries as they are willing to admit.
The immigrants are exploited initially but eventually prosper, while the
native-born, especially those of lower status, feel threatened by the influx. In the
Federal Republic, it was low-income people who expressed hostility toward Turkish
guest workers, and who now resent the arriving East Germans and German-speaking
immigrants from Poland and the Soviet Union. There has been a similar reaction in
France, where Le Pen's right-wing movement, motivated largely by hostility toward
Muslim immigrants from North Africa, draws most of its support from low-income
workers. In the United States, the opposition of organized labour to immigration has
243
been a fact of political life for more than a century, and the attitude of urban blacks
to Hispanic and Asian immigrants is fairly hostile. But it is perhaps more significant
that resistance of this type is usually futile. The immigrants eventually find places in
the host society, and their children are likely to join what Ralf Dahrendorf calls the
majority class.
There are many differences between [the members of
industrialized societies] including inequalities of wealth and
income, but there is also a fundamental equality of access. The
new class is the citizen's class, or at any rate the majority class.
A chapter of social and political history which began with a
profound and potentially revolutionary class struggle led after
many travails to the calmer conflicts of institutionalized or
democratic antagonisms of class, and eventually resulted in the
creation of a majority class of those who belong and can therefore
hope to realize many of their aspirations without fundamental
change. (Dahrendorf, 1988: 112)
For reasons that are not very well understood, this beneficent mechanism does not
always work for internal migrants, such as the blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Native
Americans who migrate to metropolitan cities in the United States but remain
disadvantaged afterwards. Their grievances against the majority are more commonly
expressed by street crime, gang warfare, and dependency than by organized
resistance. The radical student movement of the 1960s attempted to politicize under-
class grievances and to create a revolutionary front that identified capitalism, racism,
and colonialism as aspects of the same repressive system. The effort had some
temporary success but faded with the Vietnam war.
Were they alone in the world, the industrial democracies might reasonably hope for
a peaceful future. Their methods of conflict resolution - parliamentary democracy,
bargaining between interest groups, demonstration and protest, the representation of
opposing interests by voluntary associations, lobbying and litigation, uncensored news
media, competitive markets in ideas and commodities - have developed so far that
the appearance of a serious division in any of these societies sets in motion a process
of peaceful problem-solving. It would be premature to say that societies of this type
can no longer develop fundamental cleavages, but it is important to observe that they
have not recently done so.
Since they are not alone in the world, the prognosis must be somewhat
less hopeful. We noted above that the mitigation of internal conflict by advanced
industrial societies has not been matched by any serious effort to restrain external
conflict. In a co-operative competition with their Cold War adversaries, they have
continuously improved their military technology and exported it on a vast scale to
244
Conflicts
less developed nations, either for short-term strategic purposes or for profit or both.
Dozens of undemocratic and irresponsible regimes have been given the means to
threaten their neighbours and oppress their own people. Dozens of civil wars have
been ignited in poor countries. No serious effort has yet been made to interrupt the
continued development of the technology of mass destruction.
The collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe unleashed ethnic conflicts
that had been held in abeyance for many years. The serial wars that have ravaged
Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East since 1945 show no sign
of winding down. As well, thousands of live nuclear warheads are still targeted on
the cities of Europe and North America. The peaceful resolution of internal conflicts
in the Western democracies is a historic achievement, but it can not be a durable one
until comparable progress is made toward peaceful resolution of international
conflicts.
References
Caplow, Theodore
1989 Peace Games. Middleton CT: Wesleyan University Press.
1991 American Social Trends. New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
1991 Recent Social Trends In The United States, 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt:
Coser, Lewis
1956 The Functions of Social Conflict. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Crozier, Michel
1984 The Trouble with America: Why the System is Breaking Down. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Dahrendorf, Ralf
1988 Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Dim, Louis
1990 La societe francaise en tendances. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Elias, Norbert
1978 Uber den Prozess der Civilization. 2 vols. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, [1939].
Dechaux
245
Gottelmann, Gabrielle
1983 Staatliche Regulierung socialer innovation in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich.
Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
Hirschmann, Albert
1970 Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jean-Pierre Simard
Lehmbruch, Gerhard
1984 "Concertation and the Structure of Corporate Networks." In John Goldthorpe, ed., Order
and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism, 60-80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lehmbruch, Gerhard, ed.
1982 Patterns of Corporatist Rule-Making. Beverley Hills: Sage Publications.
Mendras, Henri
1988 La seconde revolution franfaise. Paris: Gallimard.
Simmel, Georg
1922 Soziologie. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
Taylor, Charles Lewis, and David A. Jodice -
1983 World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. Vol 2. New Haven: Yale University
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Tocqueville, Alexis de
1838 Democracy in America. New York: G. Dearborn.
Verba, Sidney, and Gabriel A. Almond, eds.
1980 The Civic Culture Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown.
246
9
Institutionalization Tendencies
in Ecological Movements
Barbara WORNDL
Guy FRECHET
In contemporary industrialized societies, there was a sharp increase in initiatives and

associations in the environmental field, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The postwar drive for industrialization formed the background for this ecological
protest, as the problems of unlimited growth became obvious. The symptoms (growth
crisis, oil crisis, etc.) did their part to expose the "limits to growth"; ecologists'
warnings were confirmed by environmental destruction of major proportions,
chemical-waste scandals, and nuclear accidents. After 30 years of environmental
protest, these problems are now recognized as a political concern. It is commonly
agreed that this social consciousness-raising is an achievement of the ecological
movements. The movements themselves have undergone change in the course of their
work, which can be attributed to the type and degree of their acceptance into the
system.
In this chapter, we will compare the ecological movements in France, West
Germany, Quebec, and the U.S. The centre of attention is how the movements in
these societies have developed, and how they have been integrated into the political
and social systems. Within this framework of empirically oriented comparison, we
will not refer to the controversial discussion on the terminology of social
247
movements,1 but will instead briefly define the basis for our comparison. (For a
theoretical discussion on those topics see Frechet and Worndl, 1993).
New social movements2 of the postwar period are not directly concerned with
problems of production and distribution of material wealth, but rather primarily with
problems of social reproduction (Brand, 1985). Progressing industrial destruction of
natural and social habitats, growing threat of war, concentration of political control,
and so on are all departure points for social movements. They confront society with
demands for collective welfare, individual self-realization, and the desire for a voice
in the political decision-making process. They actively intervene in social-
transformation tendencies and are, in this sense, producers of change (Touraine,
1973). The changes aimed for are by no means necessarily "revolutionary" in the
sense of an overthrow - action is directed toward modifying existing social structures
(Roth and Rucht, 1987). Social movements are subject to more or less distinct
institutionalization tendencies, in two ways. First, no movement remains an
exclusively spontaneous and nonorganized grass-roots movement. In accordance with
the resource-mobilization approach (McCarthy and Zald, 1987; Tarrow, 1989), we
assume that social movements must necessarily take on formalized structures in order
to focus their action potential. In order to optimize their influence possibilities, they
make use of existing forms of conflict settlement and interest representation. Many
theoreticians have - seeing that institutionalization of the labour movement was
accompanied by a certain ossification - dubbed institutionalization of movements a
perversion of goals; some have even called it the end of the respective movement
(Rammstedt, 1978). The spontaneity and informality of movements were presented
as their essential features, organization and institutionalization as their enemy (see the
criticism of this opposition by Oommen, 1990). The question of whether the crystalli-
zation of organizations is equivalent to perversion of movement goals cannot be
definitively answered. This is determined by the type and orientation of the
organization,3 and whether interaction with existing social institutions weakens
1 Many studies have dealt with the definition problem - to mention just a few, Touraine in France; Brand and
Offe in Germany; Klandermans in Holland; B6Ianger and Vaillancourt in Quebec and Canada; McCarthy and
Zald and Tarrow in the U.S., and Melucci and Alberoni in Italy.
2 In European terms, "new social movements" means a variety of protest groups such as the student movement,
new women's liberation, citizens' initiatives, environmental protest, peace movement, etc., and serves to
distinguish them from the "old" movements such as the labour movement.
3 Melucci writes that "the new organizational form of contemporary movements is not just 'instrumental'
to their goals. It is a goal in itself (Melucci, 1984). He points out that the formation of democratic
organizational methods belongs to the goals of new social movements. This means that the question is what
kind of organization is needed, and not whether the organization is or not needed at all.
248
Ecological Movements
movement goals is decided by the institutions' readiness to recognize these goals as

social problems.
Below is an overview of the main trends in the ecological movements of the
societies under study. Attention is focused on the movements' main themes, the
various movement orientations, and characteristic forms of action. We will then
discuss institutionalization of the respective movements according to the following
aspects: how do they interact with existing channels of conflict settlement and use
them (or attempt to use them) to their own advantage? How do they, with new
organizational forms, try to intervene in the social system? How successful have they
been in drawing public attention?
For purposes of terminological differentiation between single groups and
movement orientations, we make use of terminology introduced by Vaillancourt
(1982b) and Rucht (1989), who divided the ecological movements into conservatio-
nist, environmentalist, and ecologist groups. Vaillancourt (1981, 1982a, 1982b, 1985)
also identified sub-branches within some of these groups; for example, the
conservationist groups can be split into pseudo-conservationists and conservationists,
the environmentalist groups into more or less politically involved groups from
moderate reformists to consciousness-raising militants, and ecologist groups into
political ecologists and ecosocialists, aiming toward a more global change. These
terms stand for various, even competing ideologies within the movement, though the
dividing lines are flexible. According to Rucht (1989), the environmental-protection
idea of conservationism is aesthetically, ethically, and religiously motivated: the
beauty of nature is to be respected and protected for its own sake. Conservationist
means to this end are, above all, moral and aesthetic education, public consciousness-
raising, and demanding nature-preservation areas. Environmentalism has a more
pragmatic reason for its advocacy of environmental protection: nature is considered
a resource worthy of preservation in order to assure its continued function as a means
of production and reproduction. The political arena serves as the environmentalists'
main battlefield. Ecologism covers much more than just protection of nature: it allies
it with global social criticism, and aims at an egalitarian, decentralized, and
democratic society in harmony with nature. Readiness to practice unconventional,
even illegal forms of influence such as militant action, civil disobedience, and so on,
separates the methods of ecologists from those of other nature protectionists.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ECOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS IN FRANCE,

WEST GERMANY, QUEBEC, AND THE U.S.
In all the societies observed herein, a protest cycle started in the 1960s and 1970s,
attracting public attention in varying, overlapping phases until the late 1970s. After
the wave of decolonization in the 1960s and the large demonstrations of the time
(student revolts in Europe and the U.S., the civil-rights movements and the anti-
249
Vietnam-war demonstrations in the U.S.) weakened, their resources were mobilized

for more specific and precise sectors of protest activity. Tarrow (1989) suggests, for
instance, that the most important movements of the past two decades (the women's,
environmental, and peace movements) originated in the students' movement of the
1960s, where many of the leaders gathered their experience.
Even before the American environmental movement took off, in the mid-
1960s, there were efforts at environmental protection. Settlement of the west and
exploitation of natural resources turned environmental protection into a government
concern at an early stage. The New Deal was prototypical for this. Instead of nature-
romantic ideology, pragmatic considerations caused political and economic criteria
to be applied in the exploitation and preservation of nature. When the environment
theme became a subject of protest in the 1960s, environmentalism got "ecologized."
Rapid industrial expansion had by that time exhibited its destructive consequences,
visible in such spectactular catastrophes as the polluted beaches of Santa Barbara,
which made it drastically obvious that the immense natural wealth of America was
not inexhaustible. The ecologism of the 1960s differed from New Deal environmenta-
lism in its socially critical viewpoint, and also in its countercultural nature.
Alternative protest forms such as demonstrations and blockades have remained,
however, a typical aside from a few exceptions - for example, the wave of
demonstrations immediately following the accident at the Three Mile Island plant.
Environmentalist groups preferred to agitate through lawsuits and supervisory legal
processes. As early as the 1970s, protest activities started fading into the background
while the movement concentrated on lobbying and litigation (Caplow, 199Ib). The
ecologism of the 1960s, with its criticism of civilization - like Baer and Lovins's
vision of libertarian and cooperative capitalism and Bookchin's anarcho-syndicalism
- could not gain any foothold in the U.S. (Kitschelt, 1985).
The American ecological movements went through four phases: between 1967
and 1972, themes such as air and water pollution and protection of animal species
were in the foreground of discussion. The thematic complex of energy and growth
crises (this was the time of the fight against the Alaska pipeline) was next. In the late
1970s, the nuclear-power conflict took over from the previous themes. During
Reagan's term in office, the fight against his administration's attempt to undo
whatever progress had been made in the environmental field dominated. Today, the
American movement comprises a wide spectrum of groups limited to a particular
region or theme. The list is quite long: protection of endangered species, air and
water pollution, smog, acid rain, energy saving, chemical- and nuclear-waste disposal,
destruction of the rain forest, depletion of the ozone layer, nuclear disarmament
(Caplow, 1991b). The groups have only loose connections with each other or with
other movements.
250
"Older" associations are easily distinguishable from "younger" ones within the
American ecological movement. The older ones are the established organizations such
as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Society.
Previously fairly nonpolitical, they adapted their programme in the course of the
ecologization of the 1960s, gradually responded with more flexibility to these new
challenges, and have been enjoying an unprecedented rise in membership since 1977
(Caplow, 1991b: 208; Kitschelt, 1985: 276). They have a conventional and very top-
heavy organizational structure, which predestines them for activity on the federal
level. Among the younger groups that can also boast of membership growth are the
Friends of the Earth, Environmental Action, the Nader organizations, and the
"Greens," as well as a multitude of local groups intervening in specific conflicts
(Caplow, 1991a, 1992b; Kitschelt, 1985; McCarthy and Zald, 1987). The American
Greens have not yet formed a political party. Their self-image is tied to the principle
of grass-roots democracy, involving direct actions and civil disobedience.
In the late 1960s, there was an upswing of environmental protest in France.
Until then, nature protection was the concern of nature leagues dating from the turn
of the century. As single-purpose associations mainly interested in preserving the
environment directly involved with special preferences and hobbies (fishing, sailing,
etc.), these associations attempted to prevent environmental damage by legal and
political means. Influenced by this conservative tradition, the environment
protectionists of the 1950s and 1960s found themselves in selective resistance to
large-scale technological projects, environmental and urban destruction, and spoilage
of regions with intact cultural identities (such as Alsace). Prototypical for this was
the protest against the transformation of the La Vanoise nature park into a ski resort,
which inspired the first big demonstration in 1969. Against a background of the de
Gaulle government's ambitious industrialization programme, which brought about a
hiatus in environmental and life quality, this protest experienced an ecologization and
fanned out to include global socially critical components (Rucht, 1989: 69). The short
but violent revolt in May of 1968 was decisive. In this protest phase, a network of
ecological groups emerged, some linked with regional movements. The alternative
movement expressed itself in young people moving to the country, experimenting
with co-operative economy (handicrafts, animal husbandry) - a "return to nature."
This was carried out as a practical-radical rejection of the "consumption and growth
model" of French society. Several large cities witnessed the emergence of communes
and flat-sharing, alternative culture and communication centres, and protest actions
against urban destruction. Starting in 1974, the anti-nuclear protest gathered support.
The massive expansion of civil atomic power (the politics of "tout nucleaire": nothing
but nuclear energy) became the central point of criticism of large-scale technology
and environmental endangerment. This protest emerged at the first nuclear-power-
plant locations at Bugy and Fessenheim, consolidating in the mid-1970s into the
biggest mobilization campaigns and mass demonstrations since the May, 1968, revolt.
251
Local committees have since formed, at these nuclear-plant locations and construction
sites, adhering to decentralized and grassroots-democratic structures. Their actions are
dedicated to the principle of nonviolence (Dechaux, 1990; Galtung, 1990; Leggewie,
1985; Rucht, 1989, Touraine, 1978, 1981, 1984). The small but innovative left-wing
party, PSU (Parti Socialiste Unitaire), eagerly seized upon these initiatives. Somewhat
later - in reaction to the "tout nucleaire" programme - the anti-nuclear-power
movement received support from the socialist labour union (CFDT) and the Socialist
Party.
An important point in the development of the French environmental
movement was its early attempt to participate in elections (1973-74). Several ideas
were brought together in a voters' initiative, bringing the movement's most
spectacular success to date. The alliance of the ecologists with the CFDT-trade
unions dates from that time. A green party was not founded until 1984 (Les Verts).
After a strong mobilization of ecological protest potential in the early 1970s, the
boom died out in the second half of the decade. It is obvious that the Utopians of a
"soft" ecological society have faded away, to be replaced by the proponents of
pragmatic intervention and solid political methods.
Similar to the U.S., a spectrum of diverse movements, often contrary in their
goals and strategies, are subsumed under the heading of "environmental protection."
For example, the conservative section could never be mistaken for the socially
critical/libertarian wing. One of the most important associations in the environmental
movement is the FFSPN (Federation franchise des societes de protection de la
nature), founded in 1968 but with origins going back to the beginning of the century,
which has grouped together conservationist and environmentalist organizations in
France. By the beginning of the 1980s, membership in these groups had expanded
considerably. At present, the FFSNP consists of 1,100 national, regional, and local
associations and groups. Its affinities with its antecedents are witnessed by its
thematic points of effort, by its membership (rural and urban middle classes), and its
political orientation (neutral, its leaning toward the left not having appeared until the
1970s).
The original representative of the moderate political ecologists is Les Amis
de la Terre (AT), which has taken up and popularized the economic-growth criticism
of the Club of Rome and the nuclear-power opponents. AT, having agitated against
civil nuclear power since 1974, is a major factor in the French anti-nuclear-power
movement. Its structure consists of a fairly informal and loose-knit network of local
groups. Since 1977, the number of groups belonging to AT has grown to
approximately 100. Not until 1977 did they organize on a national level (Reseau des
Amis de la terre - RAT). A distinguishing characteristic of RAT is its orientation
toward elections and participation in official, institutional politics.
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Ecological protest in West Germany set in later than in France and the U.S.
Not until the early 1970s did the movement start livening up the antiquated and rusty
environmental-protection effort - previously left up to conservationist associations
such as nature-protection leagues, mountain-climber associations, and hiking and
homeland associations - in the form of citizens' initiatives with specific themes, such
as urban traffic, housing, and social services. This environmentalism found its first
advocates in the parliamentary arena, with the enactment of various environmental
protection laws in the 1970s. It was not until the crises of the mid-1970s that this
theme was deprived of its reputation-making character for politicians and trade
unions, as it came to be seen as a Konjunkturbremse (hindrance to economic growth).
This worked to the advantage of an autonomous ecological protest, which took shape
within the alternative scene and subsequently went through the following phases: in
the early 1970s, protests were organized against the nuclear-power plants; in the
second half of the seventies, small towns like Brokdorf, Grohnde, Kalkar, and
Gorleben (with their nuclear-power-plant sites) became targets and epicentres of a
public protest that mobilized greater numbers than any other campaign since the
Adenauer era. The sources of protest extended from critical experts to local
opposition, leftist groups, and subcultural protest. Nuclear power became the source
of hard, and sometimes violent, confrontation between the state and nuclear-power
opponents. Not only the conservative parties, but also the Social Democrats and the
labour unions declared nuclear energy to be an indispensable energy source for the
modern, growth-oriented society.
Nuclear protest was the pioneer of the ecological movements in West
Germany. Numerous citizens' initiatives against destruction of nature merged into the
Bundesverband Burgerinitiativen (BBU) in the mid-1970s. The BBU became the most
important voice of the environmental-protection movement. There was a membership
influx from the crumbling leftist movements of the 1970s, which in turn imparted a
social-critical potential to the new movement. In 1979-80, the "Greens" ecological
party was founded and quickly elected to over half of the state parliaments in West
Germany, as well as to the European and federal parliaments. Ecological protest
entered a quiet phase in the early 1980s; the formerly major targets of conflict - such
as nuclear power - were keeping a low profile (Roth, 1985; Roth and Rucht, 1987;
Worndl, 1992).
What has remained, however, is a many-faceted, disorganized network of
nature-protection organizations, complemented by an infrastructure of natural-food
stores, alternative bookstores, bars, and so on. Under the umbrella of the more
conservative Deutscher Naturschutzring (DNR) are 94 associations, with a total of
3.3 million individual members (in 1985). Its spectrum covers protection of animal
and plant species, nature-environmental education, and hikes. These areas are also
covered by the pragmatic-environmentalist organizations forming under the auspices
of the organization Bund fiir Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND). BUND
253
declares itself against nuclear power and engages in "detail" conflicts (garbage
problems, etc.). In 1986, BUND had 145,000 members. Political ecology, as
represented by the BBU, attempts to combine the autonomous grassroots principle
with an organization possessing political clout. An estimated 300 groups belong to
the BBU, which puts it somewhat behind the more pragmatic oriented associations.
The traditional groups have more influence on public opinion (Rucht, 1989).
As in other societies, ecological movements in Quebec and Canada gathered
much of their momentum from the student movement and youth protest.
Environmental protest really started in the late 1960s, but there were specific actions
long time, before, such as the first air-pollution regulation in 1872, the founding of
conservationist societies at the beginning of the twentieth century, and so on. The
ecological movement got more vigorous and active in the wake of the student
movement, where organizations sprang up and gained focus. The actions have been
most visible when targeted around very specific issues, such as the anti-nuclear
protest in the 1970s and the ecological disasters of the late 1980s (Saint-Basile, Saint-
Amable, and the persistent and growing pollution problems with toxic wastes and the
St. Lawrence River).
The anti-nuclear protest accelerated in the mid-1970s, especially with the
testing in India of a bomb made with plutonium from a Canadian CANDU reactor
(designed for civilian use and intended to be sold for such purposes only). There was
also protest against the installation of nuclear-power stations - Pointe Lepreau in
New Brunswick, Gentilly in Quebec, and a few stations in Ontario. In 1978, a group
of anti-nuclear activists created Alliance Tournesol, representing "the core of anti-
nuclear activity among Francophones in Quebec" at the time (Vaillancourt, 1981). In
Quebec, the anti-nuclear movement is not as active as it is elsewhere, particularly
because greater use is made of hydro-electric power and there is only one nuclear-
power station in the province.
More than 820 ecological groups have been enumerated in Quebec
(Vaillancourt, 1985). The pseudo-conservationists include large industrial enterprises,
which take symbolic action and often proclaim themselves greener than the Greens;
moderate reformist and conservationist associations work for the protection of lake
environments, recruiting from wealthier classes of people owning cottages and
promoting a better quality of life. Quite different groups characterize the
environmentalist associations, whose policy goes further in denouncing the current
environmental status quo and in practising a more political ecology (some are very
nearly formal Green parties); finally, there are the most intransigent groups, including
the ecosocialist militants, whose influence remains insignificant. The ecologists' plea
for replacement of a "wasteful" society by a conserving society does not meet with
the desired acceptance in conservationist circles (Frechet, 1992). Recently, Green
candidates have been trying to gain an electoral foothold in Canada and Quebec.
254
Their success has been very slight in Quebec; in the provincial elections of 1989,
they got only 2.5% of the vote.
INSTITUTIONALIZATION TRENDS
IN THE ECOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS
The evolution of the movements in all four societies shows that the nature-protection
idea, which in simultaneously with industrialization, has experienced a certain
radicalization since the Second World War. Subsequent to the protest movements of
the 1960s and 1970s, ecology was a buzzword for criticism of the growth-and-profit
economy. The oppositional and conflict-oriented direction of the environmental
movement waned during the 1980s in all four societies. What is left of the movement
has turned to traditional interest politics. It should be kept in mind that the American
movement, even in its "radical" phase, was more moderate than the movements in
Europe, which had to work through a series of intermediate steps to reach their
pragmatic turning-point. The following comparison of these movements describes
their typical characteristics and concentrates on how they have been integrated
through the use of established, official means of conflict regulation and interest
representation, the formation of movement parties, and the acceptance of
environmental themes in public awareness.
Use of Established Means of Interest Representation

and Conflict Settlement
Social movements, in the course of resource mobilization, eventually try to go

through established channels of conflict settlement, including court action and/or
strong interest groups such as labour unions" and established political parties.
An overview of the American movements shows that their politics are largely
determined by use of established channels and interest politics. Intervention in
electoral campaigns, clever use of mass media, court battles, and confrontation with
government authorities are the preferred modi operandi. Environmental groups allow
themselves to be involved in government-level negotiations, a method that is
increasingly applied to locally undesirable projects. This procedure requires the
parties in conflict to bargain for compensation for disadvantages, thereby serving to
increase acceptance of risk and environmental damage (Holznagel, 1989: 4). These
processes are only very reluctantly practised in other societies, where they are
encumbered with the unsavoury reputation of paying off the protesters and, thereby,
betraying the environmentalist cause. For example, the German leftist daily
newspaper Die Tageszeitung (TAZ) printed - with obvious distaste - an article about
American environmentalist groups for protection of the rain forest meeting with
representatives of the lumber industry for negotiations similar to wage bargaining
between labour and employers (TAZ, August 24, 1989). The obvious preference for
255
litigation and lobbying, which has gained these groups a reputation for "thinking
small" (Kitschelt, 1985), is based on a specifically American political structure.
Legislation processes are distinguished by their openness to social interest groups.
American legislation pledges its supervisory authorities to receptiveness for
environmental issues. They are more heavily obliged than are their European
counterparts to consider possible objections. The public can participate in
environmental supervisory processes. The environmentalist strategy of bringing about
regulatory or remedial action by the federal government in the U.S.. has been
successful; more than 30 major statutes have been enacted to improve air and water
quality. The anti-nuclear movement was responsible for a number of strict laws, and
also for the reorganization of environmental control via creation of the EPA
(Environmental Protection Agency) and, later, the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory
Commission) (Caplow, 1991b). The relative successes also mean, however, that the
efficacy of environmental politics is hindered by the foot-dragging slowness of
established politics, and that achievements can be revoked according to shifts in the
political mood. This is illustrated by the attempts of the U.S. administration, since
1981, to undo whatever progress had been made in the environmental field, due
largely to pressure from stronger counteracting interest groups.
The environmental movement in France differs from the American movement
in that it has expressed itself more vehemently as an oppositional and socially critical
force, as illustrated by the linking of ecological protest with regional movements,
attempts to build up an alternative co-operative economy, and grassroots activities
such as mass demonstrations. These more radical protest elements can be attributed
to the lack of institutionalized possibilities to exert influence within the French
political system (Leggewie, 1985). There are very few intermediate channels between
the executive and the people in France, and there are further restrictions as a result
of closed systems for recruiting political and administrative elites, centralized state
structures, an absence of administrative courts, and repressive use of police force
against disruptive actions. This has worked to the advantage of the alternative cultural
protest movement. The fact that this protest quieted down quickly and did not
manage to survive as an autonomous/independent emancipatory reservoire can be
explained by the dominant presence of a strong traditional left. In contrast to
America, where labour has very little mobilization, France has a tradition of a strong
and pugnacious labour movement. Equipped with a pronounced class consciousness,
the French left ensured that the hard-won social victories in the industrial and
agricultural sectors could not defanged by government. This made the left a base for
any rumblings of dissatisfaction. Since it was open to the environmental theme, the
ecological movements took the opportunity to champion their cause via a powerful
organization: in the 1970s, there were an "action alliance" with the socialist labour
union and ideological and personnel connections with the non-communist left. The
256
Socialist Party (PSF) was supported in the 1981 campaign by many ecologists hoping
for an ecological turning-point. The price for this "dovetailing" with the left was a
right-left polarization within the environmental movement and an overshadowing of
the ecological paradigm by an economic one. Whereas the ecological movements had
tried to mobilize the left for their cause, they now were instrumentalized by the left.
Leggewie (1985: 124) writes, "The ecologists therefore have, at the most, earned the
honour of playing the role of catalyst in the transformation process of the French left;
they strengthened the 'second left' against the traditional leftist paradigm of party
communism and the CGT, but were not capable of developing and maintaining a
stance independent of the left." The environmental movement did gain some
influence on federal politics via the socialist government. While environmental
groups now have a say in defining public policy in some municipalities and
departments, as well as on a national level (in 1971, a ministry of environment was
created), alternative groups have come to the sobering realization that they probably
cannot survive on their own and that their original idea has been banalized.
Relatively persistent protest in West Germany was - at least in the 1970s -
more radical than that in other societies. This can be attributed to a lack of openness
in the political structure, as is the case in France. The German movements were
repeatedly disappointed in their attempts to take part in political-administrative
processes (for example, public hearings on construction of nuclear-power plants). The
available channels are better suited to blocking citizens' interests than to accepting
them. Especially in the 1970s, this led to activities such as demonstrations and
blockades during pertinent hearings and court cases. In contrast to the French
movement, the German movement did not have the alternative of another
representational organ, such as a well-anchored left. This lesson was unavoidable in
the phase of protest against nuclear-power plants, when the nuclear-power critics
found themselves facing opposition by both the Social Democrats and the labour
unions. This drove protest into social isolation, and the movement developed into a
counter-movement against the "corporatist bloc" consisting of the state, capital, and
labour unions (Esser et al., 1983). In general, the movement in the West Germany
has retained more of its counter-cultural character, even after its pragmatic turning-
point, than did the French or American movements. This is reflected in its continued
involvement with other socially critical movements (women's movement, peace
movement). Visible expression of this is an alternative infrastructure - including an
extensive system of alternative bookstores, bars, institutes, businesses, and so on -
that condones rejection of existing economic and political rationales. The alternative
projects are, however, increasingly adapting to the laws that govern a profit-oriented
economy. For example, the alternative Eco-Bank grants loans to alternative projects
and yet is profit-oriented. Within the remaining oppositional section of the movement,
a discussion is currently taking place concerning the disadvantages of spectacular
actions in Greenpeace style in comparison with the effectiveness of a pragmatic
257
policy of negotiating conflicts (the Frankfurter Rundschau of 10 May, 1992). They

are encouraged to have the opportunity to be taken seriously as participants in the
political-administrative process, now that environmental concerns have been accepted
by official institutions. In 1986, a federal ministry was created for environmental
protection. A myriad of environmental committees and forums have emerged on the
established political level, and administrations and institutions (such as the church)
often have their own environmental agent or agency. But even here, the movement
has made the disappointing discovery that environmental concerns can also serve as
a mere front for business as usual instead of having real effects.
The ecological movements in Quebec seem to be much more involved in
politics than those in the U.S., occupying an intermediate position between the
American and European experiences. While less open to impulses from "below" than
that in the U.S., Quebec's political system does exhibit relative flexibility in
negotiations on the official-institutional level. Its structures have been conceived as
a way to establish a formal link between citizens and decision makers. The
environmental movement in Quebec seems to have made some achievements on the
official level: the governments, both federal and provincial, have, with the
establishment of competing ministries of the environment in the 1970s, acknowledged
certain demands, such as the fight against acid rain and water pollution, the anti-
smoking and recycling campaigns, and so on. Commissions of inquiry have been
established, and the consciousness-raising process among politicians is under way.
The success of the Bureau des audiences publiques sur 1'environnement, when not
short-circuited by the political process, has the power to stop environmentally
undesirable projects. The institutional response of the establishment of "green police,"
though its means are not equal to its needs, is also a step in this direction.
Influence through Founding of Movement Parties
Social movements develop a so-called mixed strategy to fight a take-over by the

system on the one hand, and the ineffectiveness of reliance on purely grass-roots
political action, such as demonstrations, blockades, and so on, on the other. This
strategy consists largely of founding movement parties that offer the organizational
minimum necessary for participation in the political arena, without abandoning grass-
roots mobilization. The party-founding process is different in each of the four
societies studied.
In West Germany, the movement endeavoured to anchor environmental
concerns in the parliamentary arena early on. This can be seen as a response to the
creaking slowness of the established political organs in taking up these matters. Even
in the mid-1970s, ecological parties and voters' initiatives achieved respectable
percentages in municipal and state parliamentary elections. Toward the end of the
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1970s, the Green, Bunte (Colours) and Alternative Lists parties provided enlivening
opposition to the traditional parties. The Greens emerged from this constellation in
1980. They failed to pass the 5% hurdle in their first attempts to gain seats in the
European and federal governments, but it speaks for the new party's strength that it
is now represented in over half of the state parliaments, the European Parliament, and
the federal parliament, (the 5% threshold is difficult for new parties to surpass), with
between 6% and 12% of the vote. These respectable successes have, however, had
their price: whereas the first environmental parties were single-issue movements, the
Greens represent the transformation to a party, complete with political programme.
They have sacrificed environmental protection to political "seriousness," demoting
it to just another plank in their platform. In their fight against pollution and large-
scale technology, they form coalitions and make compromises with established
parties. All this makes for discord within the party. Green "fundamentalists,"
adhering to the grassroots principle, wrestle with the pragmatically oriented "Realos"
about the delicate balance between opposition and adaptation. These conflicts absorb
much of the Greens' energy and detract from their plausibility.
France had a Green Party much later than Germany. While there were
electoral initiatives in the late 1970s (in district and municipal elections of 1976-77,
they enjoyed spectacular electoral successes, with help from the left), it was not until
1984 that an independent Green party (les Verts) was founded. This can be seen as
an attempt to mobilize resources in the face of defeats suffered by electoral initiatives
in the 1980s, and also as a preventive measure against the above-mentioned
channeling-off into the left. But the founding of the party failed to provide the
movement with new impetus; the Greens drew only a negligible share of the vote in
the elections of the 1980s, with the exception of the European Parliament elections
in 1989, in which they got 11% of the vote. The political aspect of the Green
movement - with the addition of a second, competing party, the Generation Ecologie
(GE) - has been consolidated, as evidenced by the results of the local elections of
March, 1992: the Green parties totalled 14 percent of the vote (7.1% for GE, 6.8%
for les Verts), giving them 104 seats in the regional councils (de Brie, 1992). The
Greens have converted to pragmatic and technocratic tactics. How far removed they
are from their previous socially critical impetus is exhibited in their difficulties in
setting down a definite demarcation line between themselves and the rightist parties
(Piermont, 1992).
The Canadian political Green movement is weaker. In Quebec, there are
Green candidates in almost every campaign and in a majority of electoral districts.
The Quebec provincial election of 1989 provided them with a bit of moral success,
as they garnered 2.5% of the total vote. In one particular district, their share of the
vote climbed to 15%, but the situation was influenced by a specific issue - the
location of PCB-contaminated oil barrels from the ecological-disaster site of Saint-
Basile (where many of the barrels caught fire in an unsafe warehouse). When
259
combined with an electoral system (British-type uninominal) that is by nature

unfavourable to third parties (without any proportional-representation principle), the
election of such candidates is highly improbable, if not virtually impossible. In
addition, political coalitions have never been present in the historical context, as has
been the case in Europe. The Green Party in Quebec states that it does not want to
take power, it simply wants to share it. It intends to remain marginal almost by
vocation and principle, just to send a message. There is thus less of a tendency to act
on strategy, whether technocratic or pragmatic, as the institutional level already
makes room for those types of actions.
Developments in the U.S. can be seen as the opposite extreme to those in
Europe and Canada. The American environmentalists, impressed by the Greens'
electoral success in Europe, are currently debating about founding a party, though the
consensus still favours renunciation of state-level elections and party politics. One
factor in the "backwardness" of American environmentalists may lie in their
successful lobbying, which reduces the urgency for a regular party. But it is probably
more decisive that the American political system leaves new parties with next to no
chance for election; the American two-party system is a ritualized tug-of-war for
power, influence, and money, and it is hard for third parties to establish themselves.
So for the time being, the American Greens remain upholders of grassroots
democracy, and are more radical than their European counterparts.
Acceptance in the Public Consciousness
The movement's integration can also be observed on a third level - how present it
is in the general public consciousness. This process finds its expression in the fact
that, for one, the movement can count on a mobilization potential that is not identical
with that of its activists. Moreover, it can count on the fact that the environment
issue is a commonly acknowledged subject of public awareness and discussion.
Surveys in West Germany have shown that such values as the environment
are increasingly highly placed. Survey results from the 1980s show the majority of
the population giving environmental protection priority over material or economic
goals (Glatzer et al., 1992). Conservation of the natural environment counts among
the most important factors of personal comfort for all age groups. The only things
more highly valued are health and interpersonal matters, including family, love, and
affection.4 Reflecting this, satisfaction with environmental protection is, in
comparison to other spheres of life, extremely low in Germany. It was the lowest of
4 The life spheres surveyed were love/affection, health, family, environmental protection, leisure time, work,
income, success, political influence, and religion (Statistisches Bundesamt, 1989).
260
all life spheres in 1978, sank even lower in 1984, and increased slightly in 1988,
without reaching the 1978 level.5
In France too, an overwhelming majority of respondents agree with statements
showing concern with environmental matters. From 1977 to 1990, between 75% and
88% of respondents expressed agreement with the fact that pollution is a real
concern, and between 47% and 64% of respondents said that they support ecological
movements (which is not equivalent to voting for an ecological party) (Agorametrie,
1992). Over-all support of these matters dropped from 1977 to 1984, then bounced
back significantly, returning to its late-1970s level by 1990. Although 41% of
respondents believe that fighting pollution is a top priority, fighting unemployment
and fighting AIDS gained even more support as top priorities (48% and 49%), so it
is difficult to establish which would be considered the most important. In view of
these results, the environmental issue appears to be less well accepted in France than
in Germany. The data on mobilization potential run parallel to these trends; the term
"mobilization potential" defines the portion of the total population principally
sensitive to and approving of mobilization efforts of a social movement. The
mobilization potential of groups in the field of environmental protection, ecology, and
the anti-nuclear-power movement grew markedly in all European countries between
1986 and 1989 (Fuchs and Rucht, 1990). Combining strong and moderate supporters
of the movements, the proportion of supporters was over half of those questioned in
all cases, with occasional peaks of over 90%. This potential is higher in France than
in West Germany. Other studies, however, have shown that de facto mobilization for
protest action - unconventional forms of political pressure such as civil disobedience
- is higher in West Germany than in France. Even though there is some acceptance
of this kind of action in environmental organizations in France, it does not seem to
occur as often as in West Germany, and when it does, it often pertains to regional
protests. This is due to the low level of acceptance of alternative forms of political
activity, but is also a result of low ecological consciousness (the French government's
"tout nucleaire" programme does not meet with resistance comparable to that in West
Germany). The environmental theme plays a lesser role in the French media than it
does in West Germany's.
The American public is less concerned with the environment than is the case
in Europe. In the U.S., Roper's annual surveys from 1974 to 1986 show themes such
as air and water pollution coming in near the bottom of the list, with the item
"energy resources" sinking from top spot, in 1974 (world oil crisis), to last place, in
1986 (Caplow, 1991b). According to other surveys, the "ecology and pollution"
5 The sectors were: marriage/partnership, family life, neighbourhood, life as housewife, work division, place
of work, living standard, housing, leisure time, household income, health, social security,
occupation/professional training, democracy, church, political participation, national/public security, and
environmental protection (Statistisches Bundesamt, 1989).
261
theme stood at 4% in 1970, dropped to insignificant levels afterward, and bounced

back to 4% in 1989, while the "energy" theme dropped from 34%, in 1974, to
marginal values in subsequent years, reaching 1% in 1984 - no more, in fact, than
a flash in the pan (Caplow et al., 1991: 542-543). The environmental theme seems
to enjoy be as popular with the public as classical music, although membership in
environmentalist groups grew enormously in the 1980s.
In Quebec, the environmental problem was cited as the most important
problem by 4.1% of the population in a 1977 survey, and this proportion grew to
20% in a 1989 survey (Langlois et al., 1992: 577). Economic and constitutional
problems are still at the top of the list, but growth in concern for environmental
matters is significant, especially following the succession of ecological disasters in
the late 1980s.
Survey data show that the U.S. and Germany occupy the two extreme
positions with regard to environmental consciousness - lowest and highest,
respectively - with France and Quebec in between. A strong anchoring of
environmental consciousness, as observed in Germany, does not necessarily mean
success for the environmental idea. The darker side of the legitimation process is that
the ecological idea can be diluted to a buzz-word with which disparate interests are
propagated and legitimized. This is illustrated by the following examples: in West
Germany, the nuclear industry has been campaigning for the protection of nature,
stating that nuclear energy is cleaner than coal and pointing out the ongoing problems
just over the former East German border. The chemical industry has also been
advertising its contribution toward cleaner water.
Not only does industry thereby pervert the environmental idea, but there are
contradictory actions and conflicts within the social movements themselves. This has
been the case with a campaign by Greenpeace against hydro-electrical development
in Quebec; its accusation in the media of "genocide" of aboriginal people could not
be documented, and served only to raise suspicions about those whose interests could
be served by such a disinformation campaign, in the context of the ongoing
constitutional debate in Canada. In Quebec, Greenpeace was successful in completely
eliminating the hunting of baby seals on the east coast, although seal overpopulation
is known to be harmful for the coastal ecosystem in general and for fishing in
particular, due to devastation of fish stocks. A few years later, Greenpeace USA was
a dominant actor against hydro-electrical development in northern Quebec (Great
Whale River at Hudson's Bay), thus championing and upholding aboriginal peoples'
traditions, which, paradoxically, include free hunting of endangered species.
The problem here is one of the legitimacy of the means proposed, and on that
specific ground, large industrial enterprises, for instance, can easily show themselves
to be greener than the Greens. For example, enterprises promote recycling on the
basis of the traditional economic approach (cost-benefits), as they have the means to
262
profit from it (Allan Michaud, 1989); this, however, may not mean much in terms
of an alternative economy. In other cases, one of the main environmental demands,
that the polluters pay for cleaning up their pollution, will certainly be more and more
applied, leaving to the state its traditional regulation-making role. This leads directly
to the political sphere, where, theoretically, conflicting ends are put to the ballot. As
soon as there is a cost to be shared, the problem becomes a political one that is likely
to be solved in the political sphere, whether by convincing or by constraining.
As part of the student and youth movements, a protest movement dedicated to

environmental protection formed in all four societies surveyed, which linked
environmental conservation with a socially critical impetus. In the 1980s, the protest
quieted down, and environmentalist groups concentrated their activities within
established forms of interest representation. The subsiding of protest is due to
institutionalization trends among the movements in the respective societies.
The specific ways of channeling protest indicate varying degrees of
opportunity for success of popular concerns. The relative openness of the political
system in North America was responsible for the early taming of the movements,
which were mainly involved in the use of established channels and interest politics.
The relatively closed political systems in Europe caused radicalization of the
movements, which expressed itself more vehemently as an oppositional and socially
critical force. In France, the environmental protest was subsequently carried into the
traditional channels of interest politics via a powerful left. In spite of channeling
tendencies, the German movement was able to remain an intervening force.
Pressure exerted on official parliamentary politics to recognize environmental
protection as a problem to be dealt with was stronger in Europe than in the U.S. and
Canada; it was much stronger in West Germany than in France, and stronger in
Canada than in the U.S. The minor and frequently diminishing electoral success of
Green parties shows greater voter trust in the problem-solving abilities of the
established parties than in that of these "upstarts." Wherever Green parties are
successful, as in West Germany and France, parties have to deal with the quandaries
of their movements' character and of special environmental concerns being absorbed
by the necessities of conventional politics.
We ascertain high public consciousness of environmental protection in
Germany and low awareness in the U.S., with France and Quebec in the middle. The
more aggressive the movements were, the more permanently they were etched into
the public consciousness. Where environmental protection has become a publicly
recognized problem, the idea runs the risk of turning into a lip-service justification
for diverse and contrary interests. While all parties have started "wearing green,"
environmental problems are still on the rise.
263
Our initial postulate was that social movements initiate social change. It was
shown that movements tend to be absorbed by the system. What does this mean for
the possibility of real change? It cannot be denied that the institutionalization process
waters down the movement's original ideas, and that practical application of
environmental protection always lags behind its propoganda. But this very disparity
between ideal and reality is the thorn in the side that keeps consciousness high, and
keeps leading to new conflicts which, in time-lag modus, bring about macrosocial,
structural, and cultural change.
Though things have quieted down regarding environmental protection, the
matter has not yet vanished from the political agenda. It seems to have moved to a
new arena, the international level (for example, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
in June, 1992). International conflict management offers opportunities, because
consolidated actions mean higher problem-solving capacity. It is not, however, certain
that this chance will be taken advantage of. The societies are still bickering about
who will shoulder the main burden for environmental protection.
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268
10
Comparative Structural Analysis
of Social Change
in France and in Quebec
Michel FORSE
Simon LANGLOIS
To perform macro-sociological analyses of change for the purposes of comparison

is a complex project, and we must find a way to reduce this complexity, for
explanation requires simplification. Although the ambition of finding a general theory
still haunts the field, the idea has been abandoned. In La place du desordre, R.
Boudon (1984) gave many reasons for this. Social systems do not obey laws of
history that can be extended to any group of societies, large or samll, since they do
not necessarily produce the same effects. Starting from an a priori reading key, an
aspect that we are sure is dominant (modernization or the rise of individualism, for
example) and that imparts a meaning to all changes has the merit of clarity but not
of systematicity. By its nature, this approach precludes integration of diversity except
through force.
Rather than giving up, we can turn to trends and the charting of their causal
links - what we call a structural analysis - to propose a different perspective. This
approach rejects all a priori hierarchies and all leading ideas that serve as guidelines,
and claims that it is possible to discover the logic of changes through an a posteriori
analysis of causative relations between trends. It is based not on a specific
sociological theory but on a variety of theories, for if there is to be a theory of
change, it must be a formal model that can be adapted to particular situations.
269
As the trend approach has already been presented in detail elsewhere (Forse,
1991), here we will review only its major characteristics. Its point of departure
resides in the identification of a group of medium-term (20-30 years) transformation
trends for a given society. Trend analysis has overflowed the closed circle of
specialists interested in prediction to become a means of describing social and
cultural change. However, a trend is an ambiguous notion, often restricted to a
statistical definition, such as "the direction that a statistical series takes once the
short-term variations have been neutralized.»
In fact, a trend may have a wider meaning, beyond the domain of statistical
analysis; it can be defined as a statement on the evolution of a social segment. It is
possible to distinguish such trends through qualitative observations, through timely
observations made at irregular intervals, or through a number of statistical series.
This perspective was explained and formalized by the French group Louis Dim
(1985), in the following definition: "A trend is a theoretical diagnosis through which
meaning is given to a group of empirical evolutions, described by indicators arising
from a particular societal domain" (Forse et al., 1993: 4).
In a way, a trend is the smallest unit of social change, in contrast to sweeping
interpretations that seek to give meaning or unity to society as a whole. In itself, the
trend has a circumscript, limited range. To identify trends, as Louis Dirn has defined
them, consists, in a sense, of operationalizing social change by outlining a series of
diagnoses of limited range.
If research were to stop at this level, our international comparison would
consist, as many do, of a discussion of similarities and differences between various
countries. This would deprive us of the richest and most promising aspect of this
approach: a systemic analysis of relations between trends that enables us to identify
the structures of change in a given society and then to compare them across
societies-supposing, of course, that a similar trend analysis has already been
performed in several countries with comparable development levels, for identical
periods, and following the same methodological rules. This is exactly the task we
have undertaken for France and Quebec: a first structural comparison between the
evolutions of these two societies since the 1960s. But what does this systemic
analysis consist of?
After listing the trends, the first step is to discuss systematically all of their
possible causal relationships. We do this by placing the trends in rows and columns,
then exploring the existence and the meaning of the relationships that may exist
between each of them, noting with a plus sign (+) a reinforcing relationship between
one trend and another, with a minus sign (-) a trend that constrains or affects
negatively the evolution of another, and with a zero (0) the lack of a relationship.
Once constructed, this square binary matrix can be submitted to a variety of
analyses. Based on graph theory and using network-analysis algorithms (the matrix
270
describes a network of causalities formally identical to a matrix of sociometric

choices), processing is either explanatory or descriptive. In the first case, the direct
and indirect antecedents and consequences of a trend are hierarchized a posteriori.
Such a comparison of direct and indirect causalities, for which a number of methods
have been developed, would obviously have great heuristic value, but we will instead
be focusing on the second orientation, which involves investigating whether the
complexity of the causal structure described by the matrix can be reduced by bringing
to light groups of trends and studying the links between them. These substructures,
called macrotrends, which are revealed from a posteriori processing of the matrix,
give a general idea of the dimensions of change and their interrelationships.
Interpretation of the whole and then a structural comparison are the next steps. The
criterion for deciding that trends belong to a particular group can be either the degree
to which they resemble each other (that is, those that have almost identical causes
and effects) or the density of links with each other; there is no reason, of course, for
groupings made on the basis of similitude to resemble those made on the basis of
cohesion. An examination of the trends for France and for Quebec shows differences
in each case. However, no matter how instructive the study of these differences, and
so as not to complicate the problem from the start, we will confine ourselves to a
comparison of macrotrends, and of the connections between them, obtained according
to the criterion of cohesion.
SOME LIMITATIONS
Before we even begin to compare the results for France and Quebec, we must
acknowledge that the structural analysis raises some overall difficulties and poses
some problems. We shall respond to some of these before getting under way with our
analysis of the matrix.
First, there is the problem of closing the field. Is the list of trends exhaustive?
Have important trends been forgotten? These questions raise the issue not of the
problem itself, but rather of the state of knowledge regarding the society studied. If
we can prove that an important trend has been neglected, researchers can take it into
account by modifying the matrix, which will oblige them to recalculate and re-
analyze. Thus, the matrix is not a closed system; rather, it evolves along with the
society and our knowledge of it.
The most important objection deals with the validity of the diagnosis of
relations between trends. Most of the relationships posited here have not been
systematically analyzed by researchers in a longitudinal perspective. Are these
connections really empirically based, beyond all doubt? Once again, this lacuna
characterizes the state of knowledge - the quality of sociography on the society
studied - rather than the method itself. As we accumulate knowledge and research
results, however, we will be able to refine our proposed diagnoses. The interesting
271
aspect of this approach may very well be the ability to examine systematically certain
relationships, which would then be taken into consideration in the matrix. The most
important point is to ensure that a relationship between two trends persists when a
third (or fourth) trend is taken into consideration. For instance, we observe that the
rise in salaried work among women has resulted in fewer children being born. We
must make sure that this relationship is not in fact caused by a third trend, such as
a rise in education levels, which could be the source of the first two trends.
To this problem of validity is added that of reliability: will two different
teams of researchers make the same diagnosis of relationships between trends? This
is a real difficulty. Many relationships are based on abundant documentation and it
is possible to discern them precisely. In these cases, the problem of reliability is less
acute. However, a good number of relationships have been the subject of little
research. We can circumvent this difficulty by asking experts to make a diagnosis on
the existence of a link. Relying on a consensus among a panel of experts is probably
the best way to create reliability. In the case of doubt or profound disagreement, we
will abstain from making a link between trends. Recourse to experts is an imperfect
solution, of course, but it does have advantages: any diagnosis is better than none,
and such a panel is probably in the best position to have a well-founded opinion on
the phenomenon being studied.
The fourth difficulty is the period studied and the differences over time. Some
trends have immediate effects, while others are felt only over the long term. This is
a major problem for econometric analyses that seek to quantify trend effects precisely
(for example, the effect of the rise in interest rates on unemployment rates). We are
not concerned with this aspect in our more qualitative approach; what is important
to us is the existence of a relationship between two trends, and whether or not the
effect of one on the other differs over time.
The last problem is closely linked to our method. We posit that all
relationships between trends have equal weight. For instance, we have identified that
the increase in household wealth has eight consequences; of course, they are not all
of equal importance. This trend contributes to accentuating inequalities, changing the
value system, increasing the importance of the elderly, and so on. But how can we
judge that one effect is more important than another? Empirical data do not enable
us to answer this question precisely and definitively. It would be possible to quantify
roughly the relative importance of relationships by using a weighting system - giving
a score of 1 to a weak relationship and a score of 4 to a very strong one, for
example. Aside from the arbitrariness of this procedure, it would create major
problems in the analysis, given the state of development of instruments at our
disposal. We must keep in mind that analysis of the matrix is not an end in itself, but
a tool to help researchers formulate an interpretation of the whole that appeals to the
sociological imagination, to borrow from C.W. Mills.
272
THE MATRICES OF TRENDS IN FRANCE AND QUEBEC
The trends in the French and Quebec societies, respectively, were subjected to
profound analysis in Forse et al. (1992) and Langlois et al. (1992). We ask the reader
to refer to these volumes for identification of the trends. For reasons that are
contingent and relate to the history of this research, the French and Quebec matrices
are not the same size; the French matrix contains 60 trends and the Quebec one 75.'
This difference did not create problems in terms of international comparison, since
the Quebec team took as its point of departure the list of 60 trends created for France
and specified some of them in greater detail. The only major difference is the
addition of a group of five trends that characterize social representations, which are
absent from the French matrix. This difference will have to be kept in mind during
the comparative analysis of the two matrices.
The matrix consisting of 75 trends theoretically renders possible 5,550
relationships, excluding the diagonal. A total of 606 empirical relationships have been
identified for Quebec, for a density of 11%. With 60 trends across and down, the
French matrix has a possibility of 3,540 significant cases, from which 509 links were
formulated, for an overall density of 14%. In both matrices, each trend is linked to
at least eight others, as antecedents or consequences. In the Quebec matrix, the
antecedents are less scattered than the consequences; in rank one, the former have a
standard deviation of 4.3, compared to 5.9 for the latter. The results are fairly similar
for France. There are 70 symmetrical links, or 11.6% of the total, in Quebec, and 92
in France.
Although they worked completely independently, the French and Quebec
groups arrived at global results that are stunningly similar - a fact that tends to
validate the methodology. To those who might criticize the subjectivity of the
approach to constructing the matrix, we can respond that if the methodology had this
fault, it would not, in all probability, lead to such consistency, especially since it is
reinforced when we break down the trends according to number of antecedents and
direct consequences. In both cases, the distributions are asymmetrical toward the right
(see figure 1); if we had a strong package of basic trends and a few auxiliary trends,
we would have found a Gaussian distribution. Thus, for both France and Quebec, the
study of change cannot be reduced to the examination of a few major trends. We
must take all developments into account in our diagnosis, and the entire matrix must
be analyzed systematically. The matrix is too large, however, for a direct reading to
be possible. We must reduce and simplify, while attempting to lose the least amount
of information.
1 The Quebec matrix was constructed from the list of trends chosen by the International Research Group
for the Comparative Charting of Social Change, (Caplow et al., 1991). The English-language version of
the work on France, (Forse et al., 1992), also contains the 75 trends used by the group for comparison
purposes.
273
As we mentioned above, one way of doing this is to group trends together that
form a network the internal density of which is superior to the density of their
relations with the exterior. Such a group of trends comprises a block that we call a
macrotrend. Forse (1991) has given a detailed explanation of the logic of this
approach; here, we will give a summary description of the broad outlines.
We effect a hierarchical descending classification by partitioning the entire
matrix into the most dense submatrices. By permuting rows and columns, we gather
in one submatrix the trends that have the most interrelationships and the fewest
relationships with trends belonging to the other submatrix. In other words, we change
the order between the trends so that we bring together the ones that are most closely
linked, resulting in two groups containing components with a maximum number of
relationships among them and a minimum number of relationships with the
components of the other group. Each submatrix can then be divided into new
subgroups, which are increasingly dense and homogeneous as the number of their
components diminishes. This sorting operation is used for block-model analysis - that
is, a partition into blocks after permuting lines and columns. This sorting changes
none of the data in the matrix; it simply groups them differently to reveal the
underlying structure. The CONCOR programme is used to perform this analysis.
Second, we investigate the causal relationships between these blocks. We
count the number of elementary links in each block and between blocks, which
enables us to compare and evaluate the meaning of these relationships. If we retain
only the numbers above a certain threshold, we arrive at a simplified representation
of the causative relationships between groups of trends. This simplification, however,
calls on important methodological reserves. The final model, which has an important
heuristic value, will serve in the formulation of new research hypotheses for which
verification will be undertaken through sociology.
By exposing and simplifying the relationships, we create a graph that should
reveal a partial hierarchy of causalities. Certain groups will be more causal, while
others will be more caused. The groups themselves, then their relationships,
culminate in a representation of the underlying causative structure of the matrix that
will be the object of comparison. In total, 12 macrotrends in France and 14 in
Quebec were discerned. We will describe them briefly before comparing them.
MACROTRENDS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS

France
The first segmentation results in two blocks (1 and 2) with densities of 22% and
20%, respectively. (The numbers in parentheses refer to figure 2, which shows the
descending segmentation of the matrix.) The first one groups together trends
274
Figure 1
Number of Antecedents and Consequences of Trends,
France and Quebec
275
describing the evolution of social structures and institutions, while the second is more
concerned with behaviours and their models, and with ways of living.
Each block can in turn be separated into two others, with densities of 31%,
32%, 37%, and 25%, respectively. On one side are structures, social forces, changes
in the work market, and politics (11) and large institutions (12). On the other side are
cultural models (21) and ways of living (22). The advantage of this model, which
presents just four large macrotrends, is its high degree of simplification; on the other
hand, at this level each block still covers fairly heterogeneous phenomena. The only
way to obtain more precision is to increase the number of groupings. This is done
by performing the operation described above for each macrotrend that is considered
in isolation. This process is illustrated by descending the tree in figure 2.
Structures, social forces, and their institutionalization (111) are then
differentiated from changes regarding work (112). Institutions are divided into those
concerning qualifications and work (121) and those that represent local or societal
interests (122). Among the models, on one side are those in which transformation is
linked to change in the status and role of women (212); on the other are those that
tend to reduce authority and diminish the power of the church (211). Ways of life are
divided into diversification and relocation of use of free time and consumption (221)
versus certain characteristics of households (222) (sociability, household wealth or
purchasing power).
Thus, for the moment we are dealing with eight groups in which overall
relationship densities grow as classification level rises. However, the groups do not
all have the same propensity for being further subdivided. Block 111 is divided into
1111, grouping together political trends, and 1112, representing social forces and
their institutionalization. Block 112 (work) is divided into 1121, comprising trends
that reflect tensions on the labour market, and 1122, in which organization and
management of work are described.
By segmenting block 121, we isolate the health and "computerization" trends,
but we lose density. Likewise, for block 122, we can isolate association and
decentralization with a loss of density. Block 212 comprises only four trends, and its
division enables us only to distinguish the trend "army" from trends describing the
place of women in society. Therefore, we have left these blocks undivided.
Dividing block 211 permits us to distinguish between an "anomic" group and
in "immigrant" group. There is no loss of density here, and we can consider that this
division reveals additional information. However, we will remain at the previous level
because it is obvious that diversification of codes of conduct, the decline in authority,
religious practice, and influence of the church and of marriage, and the ethical
problems posed by biotechnologies are all evolutionary factors that translate into the
disorganization of models that were once dominant. The development of certain signs
276
of anomie can thus be interpreted as the manifestation of malaise engendered by this

disorganization. Difficulties with integration of immigrants are becoming so great that
society has lost some of its major traditional points of reference. All of this seems
able to fit perfectly and, even without partition, sheds a new light on the prenomena
of anomie and integration of immigrants.
Block 221 is also composed of eight trends, which are divided into 2211,
describing consumption, and 2212, concerning the social conditions or the
consumption framework.
The final block, 222, is divided into 2221, which groups together trends
describing household sociability, exhanges, and economic choices, and 2222, in
which the link between the trends "youth" and "purchasing power" is explored,
accompanied by the trends "poverty" and "delinquency"; in particular, the position
occupied by the trend "youth" is quite surprising here. The proximity with
"purchasing power" seems to indicate that the increasing independence of young
people over the last 30 years should be intepreted, over all, as an economic
phenomenon. In this case, all trends for this group reflect the processes of rising
wealth and increases in inequalities that have occurred since the 1960s.
Finally, from all of this we can distinguish twelve groups of trends, each of
which is sufficiently coherent that we can relatively easily name the macrotrend at
work:
1 Transformations of political and ideological behaviours (1111)
2 Growing middle class (1112)
3 Tensions on the labour market (1121)
4 Reorganization of businesses (1122)
5 Occupational and educational structure (121)
6 Intermediate regulation (122)
7 Disintegration of old models (211)
8 New women's roles and status (212)
9 Consumption framework (2211)
10 Household consumption (2212)
11 Household exchanges and sociability (2221)
12 Increase in wealth and inequalities (2222)
This classification in its entirety is shown in figure 2. (The circled numbers
are those where we have decided to stop.) The two following tables (1 and 2)
summarize this analysis by presenting the trends and how they are grouped, along
with the titles they have been given.
Each block is an important loop in the maze of causative links described by
the model. It is thus of interest to construct a simplified graph of causalities between
macrotrends based on an examination of the interrelationships between the trends that
comprise them. The fact that the classification is descending enables us to start from
277
Figure 2
Segmentation of the Trends in France
278
Table 1
Trends in France and Their Clustering
Vocational education 15.2

Labour sectors 4.4
Political differ. 11.1 Self-identity 2.1 Educational system 8.1
Consensus 11.2 Occupat. status 6.1 Skills 4.2
Political parties 9.4 Mobility 6.2
Social movements 10.3 Health system 8.2
Computerization 4.5
Types of Associations 2.5

employment 4.3 Work
organization 5.1 Local autonomy 2.4
Unemployment 4.1 Personnel
Negotiation 7.2 administration 5.2 Public opinion 7.5
Dispute settlem. 10.1 Enterprises 5.3 Welfare system 8.3
Conflicts 7.1 Interest groups 10.4 Institutionalization
Labour unions 9.1 of labour unions 10.2
Matrimonial models 3.3

Religious beliefs 11.4
Norms of conduct 7.3 Economic
Religious institutions 9.2 orientations 11.3 Market goods 13.1
Reproductive tecbnol. 3.5 Information 13.2 Beauty 13.3
Authority 7.4 Community 2.3 Free time 14.1
Sports 14.3 Culture 14.4
Immigration 16.1
Disorders 16.3
Elders 1.2
Women employ 3.4 Family wealth 12.3
General education 15.1 Vacation 14.2 Youth 1.1
Females roles 3.1 Sociability 2.6 Crime 16.2
Kinship 2.2 Family income 12.1
Childbearing 3.2 Household Poverty 16.4
The military 9.3 production!3.4
Informal econ. 12.2
279
Table 2
Macrotrends that Characterize French Society
280
Figure 3
Causal Structure between Macrotrends - France
Exogenous Relay Endogenous

4 Businesses 2 Middle class 1 Political behaviour
5 Occupational 7 Old models 3 Labour market
& educational 8 Women's roles 6 Intermediate
structures 9 Consumption regulations
12 Wealth & framework 10 Household
inequalities 11 Sociability consumption
281
a very abbreviated graph, describing the relationships between the four major
groups, to make it more complex, and to extend it thereafter to a representation of
the main links between the twelve macrotrends we have retained (figure 3). The
causal structure is not, properly speaking, the result of a classic quantitative analysis.
It must be seen, rather, as an attempt at a global diagnosis made from a qualitative
examination of the relationships between trends, and be used to develop hypotheses
and paths of interpretation rather than to make firm conclusions. We must keep in
mind that these are macrolinks obtained thanks to a drastic simplification of the
initial complete graph. In reality, links exist in all directions and between all of the
vertices, and only the most important flows are presented above.
This graph shows the globally causative role of institutional transformations.
Behavioural models change under the influence of institutions, but keep a relatively
causative position and a relatively high ranking in the hierarchy. Institutionalized
structures and social forces, politics, and changes in work and employment are in an
intermediate position, contradicting a number of theories that have accorded them the
position that institutions occupy here. Household life styles are at the end of the
chart, signifying that household behaviour is explained by cultural and structural
transformations, rather than the reverse.
The interest of this model lies in its relatively atypical shape, which
corresponds to no major theory. Neither production nor structural or infrastructural
relations are primary. Cultural transformations are decisive with regard to behaviours,
which implies a certain culturalism, but they do not occupy a primary position either.
One could talk of a tempered culturalism, since the large institutions seem to enjoy
sufficient autonomy to cause cultural changes. This is even more interesting because
it is not the institutions that have or had a powerful symbolic role (such as the army
or the church) that comprise this group, but those from the national or territorial
"social sector" (the welfare state, health, training). All of these institutions are the
first affected by decentralization. In this motivating group are also all of the elements
that contribute to structuring the labour market. Examination of the macrolinks
between the 12 groups shows the primary causative role played by the macrotrend
"occupational and educational structure" (5). The institutions exercising intermediate
regulation (6) are in reality more caused than causative. This diagnosis is confirmed
by an examination of the macrolinks between the 12 groups (figure 3, model 2), in
which the "occupational and educational structure" macrotrend (5) plays a very
important causal role.
Two other macrotrends are also more decisive: the destabilizing effect of
growing wealth (12) and the reorganization of businesses (4). The change in
purchasing power is behind a transformation in life styles and has had the effect of
levelling the social structure. Although it is influenced essentially by tensions on the
labour market (unemployment, precariousness, etc.), its global role leads us to suggest
282
that the causative model attributes a rising position to economic factors. This
hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that the two other groups that are in an analogous
position (4 and 5) are themselves tightly linked to productivity, and the job structure
is one way to describe the structure of economic production. However, these latter
two macrotrends are not limited to these aspects alone.
The group concerning employment includes the trend "computerization" and
contains the link between technical and economic factors and the traditionally
motivating role assigned to them. This group also includes everything that deals with
training and qualifications. That this is a key problem is well accepted today. The
model only confirms the eminent role of education (linked to the job structure) in the
explanation of change.
Certain macrotrends are in an intermediate causative position: they are as
much influencing as influenced. This is the case for group 2, which describes changes
in the social structure; group 7, which comprises institutions and behaviour models
in the midst of change; group 8, which describes the transformation of women's
status; group 9, which deals with transformation, and notably a certain relocation,
of household consumption conditions; and group 11, which deals with major changes
in exchanges and sociability among domestic groups. Structures, models, roles, and
status have thus been the agents of change. Themselves in mutation, they both
explain trends and are explained by them.
Finally, four macrotrends are "downstream" in the chart and represent a sort
of endogenous form of the model, which is worth taking a close look at. Group 1
describes a situation of ideological and political sluggishness; group 3 reflects
tensions on the labour market; group 6 deals with intermediate regulation; and
group 10 describes new consumption and life-style orientations. It is not surprising
to find this last group in a position of being globally caused. Consumption itself is
more a result.
The most endogenous macrotrends (groups 1, 3, and 6) describe, each in its
own way, a state of crisis or tension: ideological and political sluggishness due to
growing indifference toward ideologies of the past; tension on the labour market that
results in unemployment and precariousness; and crises in the welfare state
accompanied by the problem, recurrent in France, of intermediate regulation
(associations, unions, etc.) the institutional aspect of which is poorly defined or
recognized; this state of affairs is aggravated by excessive decentralization. The
position of these three crises poses a problem. If they had occupied the intermediate
position of structures and behaviour models, we might have had an idea of the
changes that they could not help but involve. In the endogenous position, they are
explained by other transformations, but it is hard to see where they will lead.
283
Quebec
A preliminary division of the 75 trends observed in Quebec separates them into two
large blocks with a fairly weak density (16% in both cases). These blocks comprise
trends that deal with individual behaviours and ways of life in the broad sense, on
the one hand, and institutions, collective traits, and social norms, on the other. These
two subgroups are themselves too heterogeneous for our purposes, and so they have
been divided into four groups with a higher density (23%, 25%, 22%, and 25%,
respectively). These blocks are more homogeneous and comprise four overarching
dimensions. On one side are elements that specify living conditions - revenue,
inequality, and precariousness - and elements that specify ways and means of
life-women's roles, standards of conduct, and microsociety. On the other side are
institutions, including trends that characterize the emergence of a social consensus
and of public opinion as a controlling element in society, and trends describing work
and social position.
If we continue to divide the matrix into blocks, we ultimately obtain 14 high-
density groups of trends, instead of the 75 individual trends in the original matrix.
Figure 4 presents the results of the hierarchical descending classification we obtained.
Each of the blocks is characterized by or named for the identity of trends it
contains. Thus, block 4 can be designated "social disorganization and anomie,"
because it groups together a number of elementary trends describing the emergence
of social problems: increases in suicide, consumption of mood-altering drugs,
delinquency, and emotional disorders. In some cases, it is more difficult to name a
macrotrend that groups together heterogeneous trends, so we must search for
coherence or attempt to reveal a hidden meaning. For instance, we can take as a point
of departure the trend that has the greatest number of links to others within the
group. Below is a brief description of the content of the 14 macrotrends retained for
analysis.
1. Growing precariousness
This block groups together six trends characterizing growing precariousness in
employment, rising unemployment, an increase of jobs in the tertiary sector, the
development of the informal economy, and the rising level of education. All of these
trends show that integration into employment and, more broadly, into society are
tending to become more difficult, and a growing number of people must be content
with a precarious status in society, in spite of more education and a greater amount
of training acquired by young graduates.
284
Figure 4
Hierarchical Descending Classification of Trends - Quebec
285
2. Increasing wealth
This block contains three trends: an increase in real income, a rise in salaried
work among women, and accumulation of household wealth. Since 1960, Quebec
society has grown wealthier; the real revenue of individuals rose quickly until 1975,
then underwent a serious slowdown between 1975 and 1990. Salaried work by
women in families has either compensated for this slowdown or contributed to taking
the family to a clearly higher income level.
3. Rise in inequalities
Social, cultural, and economic inequalities tended to diminish at the beginning
of the period analyzed, but they were accentuated in the second half - that is, since
1975. Although society was wealthier in 1990, it also appeared to be more unequal.
The 1980s thus marked a turning-point in the evolution of inequalities. Individuals
and families in the top revenue quintile are capturing a growing share of disposable
income, while individuals and families in the lowest quintile have seen their relative
position deteriorate in this regard. The numerous changes in life styles also generate
new types of inequality and emphasize, others, such as those between women and
between the generations. Aside from trends characterizing economic and social
inequalities and poverty, we find in this block the trend specifying a rise in standard
of living for the elderly. In Quebec, we have observed the appearance of an important
generational effect in the second half of the period studied, marked by a deterioration
in the relative position of young people and a relative improvement in that of the
aged. Finally, two trends characterizing social representations - a rise in satisfaction
and confidence in the future - are in this second group. A seventh trend, the
lengthening of annual vacations, is not linked a priori to the others.
4. Social disorganization and anomie

Trends in this block describe dysfunctions in the social system and emphasize
certain social problems: increases in delinquency, consumption of mood-altering
drugs, emotional disorders, and suicide rates. In this group are also found the trend
of bipolarization of professional training, indicating a devaluation of this type of
training, which is more marked in the secondary-school system. These deficiencies
in professional training have been criticized often in Quebec. Finally, this block
contains the trend of increased interest in business. This is not linked very closely to
the others, and undoubtedly it constitutes a second misplaced trend.
5. Change in women's roles

Women's roles have changed considerably. Women have acquired increased
economic independence and are more active in spheres outside the home. The
decrease in birthrate is probably one of the most marked trends in this block, which
286
is also characterized by recourse to contraception, an increasing diversity in

matrimonial models, the advent of retail consumption, and changes in values. This
mutation is toward individualization in the feminine condition. The changes observed
in religious beliefs, notably the individualization of beliefs, are closely associated
with changes in the feminine condition.
6. New standards of conduct and transformation of models

This block characterizes the advent of new forms of conduct: the questioning
of traditional authority figures, liberalization of standards of conduct, more attention
to eroticism, and greater sociability between peers. Two other trends are attached to
these: the declining influence of the church and the increased concern with physical
care and health.
7. Transformation of daily life, based on mobility

Daily life has been the theatre for a number of transformations. Domestic work
tends to be increasingly shared between men and women, and mobility has increased
in all spheres of activity. Personal space and individual horizons have widened, as
evidenced in the increase in daily mobility and the marketing of leisure outside the
home. Use of time has changed, and free time seems to be more constrained. The
media have acquired more importance in people's daily lives. They are more
numerous, more diversified, and more present.
8. Microsociety is changing its form

Five trends characterizing the immediate surroundings of individuals are
aggregated to form a macrotrend: identification of the microsociety, dispersion and
diminished density of the family, marked development of associational life, greater
population concentration in urban centres, and increased sports activity. We can
conclude that it is the entire microsociety that is being transformed. The traditional
forms of organization of daily life, based on family and taking place within a small
circle, are being modified: local and sociability networks are becoming more
important.
9. The emergence of the Quebecois identity

The Quebecois identity is in ascendance, to the detriment of the French-
Canadian identity, which now seems split into regional identities. Increased social
mobility is linked, in fact, to the greater presence of government, at both the
provincial and federal levels. Modernization of society and the creation of a number
of state apparatuses have contributed to the establishment of a middle class, mainly
among Francophones. The immigration trend is found in this block, indicating the
willingness of Quebec society to welcome and integrate new arrivals. The linguistic
laws adopted over the years support the desire to integrate immigrants into the
287
Francophone majority, with the consequence of an eventual transformation of

identity. Finally, there is a long anti-militarist tradition in Quebec, which was
expressed during the conscription crisis of the Second World War. The army, under
federal jurisdiction, has long been seen as an institution that is not very open to
Francophones.
10. Increased presence of the state

A number of trends describe the increased intervention of the state, which has
taken charge of a great number of functions, including education, health care, social
security, and promotion of economic development. In Quebec, the existence and
orientations of social movements have been closely connected to government
intervention. Social movements and interest groups have always declared themselves
in favour of broader state intervention, or else they pressure the government to
modify its orientations. The trend of development of small and medium-sized
business also appears in this block, showing the tight link between business and
government.
11. Broader social consensus

Quebec society seems to have become much less conflictual as it approached
the 1990s. Radicalism is in decline, social conflicts are less sharp, mechanisms for
arbitration and negotiation have been institutionalized, and confidence in existing
institutions has risen. The institutionalization of unions is part of the shift to this
broader social consensus. There is also a certain convergence in political behaviours.
12. Increased referral to public opinion

The mass media are playing a more important role as a mechanism of social
control. We also see more marked and more frequent referral to public opinion, as
evidenced by the multiplication of polls, both by government bodies and by
businesses and associations. This serves as a sort of intermediate social control. There
is greater democratization of political parties, indicated by numerous electoral laws,
notably those regulating financing of parties, at least on the municipal and provincial
levels. Finally, we are witnessing a shift toward concern for social problems,
particularly under the influence of the mass media.
13. New forms of work organization

Union membership increased greatly in the 1960s, but the rate of unionization
hit a ceiling as of the mid-1970s, when there was also a great feminization of union
membership. The role of unions in businesses has changed considerably. Work
organization is tending to become less bureaucratic and more emphasis is placed on
promotion of participation of workers and employees. This movement is still
288
embryonic, but changes in the form of work management are so clear that we can
speak of a macrotrend in this sense. In fact, authority relationships are changing, and
the hierarchical path is no longer as strong as it once was.
14. Growth then relative stability of the middle class

The social structure changed profoundly in the 30-year period from 1960 to
1990. Francophones have considerably increased their status in the social hierarchy,
and the Quiet Revolution has given rise to a middle class that depends on
government apparatuses being more present in the private sphere. The brake on
growth at the end of the 1980s, along with a group of other factors, resulted in a
slowdown in the growth of the middle class, which has an uncertain status as we
enter the 1990s. Bipolarization of professional qualifications seems to accentuate this
crisis. The trend of development of permanent training also appears in this block.
Having established the macrotrends, we constructed, for Quebec, a causal
structure using the same procedure as that for France (figure 5). To begin with, we
shall briefly examine the links between the four major dimensions (figure 3,
model 1). Institutions are an upstream position, transformations in the socio-economic
structure play a relay role, and life styles, like matters regarding work and social
position, are exogenous. It thus seems that institutional changes have played a very
important motivating role in Quebec. But this schema is still very general, and we
should examine the detailed model of relations between the 14 macrotrends before
making a comparison with the French model (figure 4, model 2).
Four macrotrends appear as exogenous to the model, requiring further
changes. The motivating role of the government (10) in the modernization of Quebec
is confirmed; this diagnosis will surprise no one, as many researchers have come to
the same conclusion. The government's role is twofold: it has established a group of
institutions and social measures comprising what is commonly called the welfare
state, and it has been an important actor in the collective promotion of the socio-
economic status of Francophones, who had been in a position of inferiority.
The motivating role of the microsociety, alongside that of the state, is rather
more surprising. This observation led us to hypothesize that the great social changes
that Quebec has known have not come only from above. Changes in the family
system, accelerated urban development, and the increased population concentration
in urban centres, as well as observable changes at the microsociety and local levels,
have all played a part in the changes that have characterized Quebec, in parallel with
the influence exerted by the government. We have often described Quebec as a close-
knit society. Thus, changes observed, notably at the microsociety level, in the family
system, and in traditional work places, appear to be at the source of other social
transformations.
Two other macrotrends, increased wealth on one side and increasing
precariousness on the other, have also played a major, probably diametrically
289
Figure 5
Causal Structure Between Macrotrends - Quebec

Model 1
Model 2
Exogenous Relay Endogenous

10 State 14 Middle class 9 New identity
8 Microsocial 5 Women's roles 11 Consensus
2 Enrichment 12 Public opinion 3 Inequality
1 Precariousness 4 Social disorganization
6 New norms
7 Daily life
290
opposed, role in the process of change, and their effects are no doubt felt at different
times. Increasing wealth was most evident in the 1960s and 1970s, while
precariousness arose strongly during the 1980s.
Three macrotrends emerge as agents of change, playing an intermediary role:
they both are affected by other changes and themselves cause social transformations.
This is the case, above all, with women's roles. The feminine condition has
profoundly changed under the effect of a great number and variety of influences, and
it has, in turn, been the source of other changes. The development of professional
qualifications and the changes observed in the social structure, particularly the
establishment of a more extended middle class, have also been at the centre of the
process of transformation of Quebec society, serving as a relay between changes
undergone above and below. The constitution of a true body of public opinion and
the extension of the mass media have also served as agents in the process of social
change.
Five macrotrends represent changes induced by other macrotrends; they appear
as consequences of the macrotrends analyzed above. The first is the confirmation of
a strong Quebecois identity, to which must be added the appearance of a strong
social consensus. Deep ideological transformations are under way. In parallel to the
split of the French-Canadian identity into regional identities, the Quebecois identity
is strongly affirmed as a national identity. Quebec society has also become less
conflictual; a greater social consensus has emerged as radicalism has waned.
Inequalities diminished after the beginning of the 1960s, in the wake of increased
government intervention. But this narrowing of the gap came to a stop during the
1980s, and a number of indices lead us to believe that it is widening again. New
forms of social inequalities have also appeared, notably between women and between
generations. The transformation that Quebec has undergone has also been
accompanied by the appearance of a number of forms of social disorganization: more
visible and frequent violence and a rise in suicide rates, drug addition, and
homelessness. New social forms have been established, with the questioning of
traditional authority figures. Finally, daily life has been transformed profoundly; it
is based more on mobility and more open to the outside world because of increased
access to the mass media.
291
COMPARISON OF FRANCE AND QUEBEC

Convergent macrotrends on a background of singularities
By dividing the matrix into four large subgroups, we highlight convergences

and singularities. In France, work and social position are associated, though in a
broader sense, with "structuring of social forces," which includes, notably,
transformation of political and ideological behaviours and reorganization of business.
The trends observed in the life-style groups in France and in Quebec are not similar
in all respects, but both models do identify fairly similar groups. Although this is true
for institutions, the "models" dimension in France has no equivalent in Quebec, and
"transformation of socio-economic structures" in Quebec has no strict equivalent in
the French model. However, these groups are still too heterogeneous to lend
themselves to a detailed comparison, which would be conducted, rather, between the
12 and 14 macrotrends of each society, respectively.
The content of the 12 macrotrends isolated for France and the 14 isolated for
Quebec is fairly convergent, although, of course, the trends listed in each block are
not absolutely identical. This is quite normal, since the two societies are very
different with regard to history, geographical situation, and size, to mention just a
few factors; as well, the Quebec matrix includes 15 more trends than the French
matrix. What stands out is that the trends describing a macrotrend in one society are
not scattered randomly in macrotrends that characterize the other society. Many
macrotrends, such as increased social consensus and changes in women's roles, are
almost identical in their general configuration. The trends in the majority of the other
macrotrends are found in at most two different macrotrends in the other society.
Finally, one macrotrend in each society has no clear correspondence in the other, a
remarkable result that deserves special mention.
The macrotrends are not organized by chance, nor only as a function of the
respective historical, geographical, or other constraints within each society. Although
it is predictable that the groupings are not identical, there are consistencies that
provide validity for this coherent exploratory approach, as we can observe in the
principal convergences and divergences illustrated in figure 6. This figure can be read
either from the left, to see which Quebec macrotrends correspond to which French
ones, or from the right, to see which French macrotrends correspond to which
Quebec ones.
Changes in women's roles appear clearly in both societies in the form of
macrotrends with fairly similar content. In the French case, the macrotrend is formed
of trends characterizing changes in the feminine condition in the strict sense -
"women's work," "childbearing," "role models," "education level" - while the
Quebec macrotrend includes, in addition, the trends describing evolution of
consumption and of religious practice . From this, we can speculate that in Quebec,
292
Figure 6
Correspondence Between Macrotrends,
France and Quebec
FRANCE QUEBEC
1 Consensus Consensus 11
3 Tensions on the Precariousness 1
labour market
5 Occupational
and educational Middle class 14
structures
2 Growing middle State 10
class
4 Enterprises Work organization 13
6 Intermediate Public opinion 12

regulation
11 Sociability Microsocial 8
10 Consumption Daily life 7
8 Women's roles Women's roles 5
7 Disintegration New norms 6
of old model
Social
disorganization 4
12 Enrichment Enrichment 2
Inequality 3
9 Consumption New identity 9

framework
293
the change have marked the feminine condition are not isolated from changes
observed in other areas.
In recent years, intermediate forms of social control have been developing in
France. Various forces tend to counter or circumvent the centralization so often
observed by analysts. On the one hand, consultation of public opinion via polling is
tending to become more extensive; on the other hand, associative life has developed
and a degree of decentralization has occurred. These two aspects are also found in
Quebec, but they form two separate and stronger macrotrends: "recourse to public
opinion" and "microsociety." This is one example of a French macrotrend
corresponding to two Quebec macrotrends, a configuration that occurs a number of
times.
Since the 1960s, both societies have seen a major increase in overall wealth.
The Quebec matrix is more finely divided than the French matrix in various forms
of inequalities: in France, increasing wealth and a rise in inequalities are grouped in
one macrotrend, while in Quebec, they form two macrotrends.
Both societies have also evolved in parallel with regard to social conflicts.
Three trends, forming a sort of nucleus, characterize the emergence of a social
consensus or, at least, a diminution of discord: "creation of arbitration mechanisms,"
"development of negotiation procedures," and "diminution of social conflicts." These
central trends link up with others that are not the same in the two societies. In
France, they are associated with the trends "rise in unemployment," "more varied
forms of employment," and "reduction in unionization rate"; in Quebec, they are
associated with the trends "reduction in radicalism" and "increased confidence in
institutions."
These differences are explained by the social organization and history of the
respective societies. In France, social and political struggle were led by the
Communist Party, which has been in a state of constant decline; however, this loss
of influence has not prevented a number of conflicts from springing up. Conflicts are
not as generalized as they were in the 1960s; rather, they seem more localized or
miniaturized - restricted to certain places or sectors of activity. In Quebec, the large
unions, which are not affiliated with any one political party, were involved in a
number of major social conflicts during the 1960s and 1970s, and were the main
outlet for the expression of radicalism. Thereafter, they became less radical and were
no longer the motivating force behind conflicts and social tensions, which were
reabsorbed at the end of the eighties as radicalism declined. In spite of a deterioration
in the socio-economic position of many groups, in particular that of young
households, and a very high unemployment rate, social conflicts and tensions are less
acute in a context marked by a clear slowdown in growth than they were in a more
favourable context.
294
The disintegration of old models in France is characterized by the decreasing

influence of the church, a growing diversity of matrimonial models, and changes in
authority roles. This macrotrend also contains signs of anomie: consumption of
alcohol and drugs, suicides, and mental illness. Again, the elements that form a single
macrotrend in France appear in two discrete macrotrends in Quebec: "new standards"
on the one hand, and "social disintegration and anomie" on the other.
As well, the elements that form the French macrotrend "employment and
training structure" are found, yet again, in two macrotrends in Quebec, "growing
precariousness" and "growth of the middle class," which themselves contain other
trends that are listed in the French macrotrends "tension on the labour market" and
"growing middle class." The trends describing training, work, jobs, and business give
rise to the most divergent groupings among the ensemble of macrotrends observed
in the two societies. This is probably due to very different respective institutional
contexts. It is to be noted, however, that each macrotrend in one society corresponds
to only two others in the other society.
Finally, two blocks of trends do not have any exact correspondence in the
other society: in Quebec "the Quebecois identity," and in France "the consumption
framework." The Quebec matrix contained a trend bearing on the emergence of a
new collective identity; this trend was absent in the French matrix, which probably
explains the divergence observed. The case of the French macrotrend "consumption
framework" is more complex; it is more difficult to describe and especially to
interpret, because it is composed of not very homogeneous basic elements.
The differences described above were predictable, since the two societies are
not identical. The surprise is that there are so few divergences. Does it follow that,
with just two exceptions, there is perfect similarity between the two models? The
answer is, of course, no, since the similarities between the macrotrends all lead to a
diagnosis of partial or relative convergence. In other words, similarities are always
accompanied by singularities. Thus, although France and Quebec have had, in the
very large majority of cases, comparable change processes, they are nevertheless not
identical.
Most often, the classic comparative analyses of change conclude, in a more
or less embarrassed way, that there is a certain mixture of convergences and
divergences in the processes studied. The reason for the confusion is that strong
divergences between industrial societies are exceptional, and absolute convergence
is even rarer. Most often, differences mask resemblances or, what comes to the same
thing, similarities mask divergences. This is what we call a singularity. It is possible
to understand this phenomenon only if one systematically resituates each analyzed
element in a substructure - that is, if one takes the measure of that which, beyond
divergences, differs within the similar. One advantage of comparative structural
analysis is precisely that it highlights these singularities.
295
In most of these cases, we have noted that a similar over-all evolution linked
one or two macrotrends (depending on the society), in which the contents were
similar without being exactly the same. In other words, when two macrotrends are
similar, the trends that they contain have, of course, something in common, but also
aspects that are different.
Let us take, for example, the "consensus" macrotrend (numbers 1 in France
and 11 in Quebec). In both societies, there has been a decrease in major ideological
discord, and in both models this was embodied in a macrotrend. From this point of
view, there is convergence; however, upon closer examination, the trends comprising
the respective macrotrends are not identical. The French trends concern only
developments in ideology and politics; in Quebec there are also trends describing the
labour market in a broad sense ("conflicts," "negotiations," "unions," etc.). There has
been an increase in consensus in both societies, but it does not have the same
significance: in France, it is limited to the ideological-political aspect, while it
involves first the business world in Quebec, and then society as a whole. A quick
look at the phenomenon would lead us to believe that both societies had evolved in
the same way; without negating this, the structural analysis shows emphatically that
differences nevertheless persist.
The same reasoning applies on the trend level. In construction, the trends are
quite similar from one country to the other, but we better illuminate their
resemblance by comparing their structural position in each model. When identical
trends are listed in similar macrotrends, the roles played by each with regard to
change are very similar. There is convergence. When, on the contrary, they are listed
in different macrotrends, we must conclude that the same basic evolution does not
have the same structural significance from one society to the other. This situation
reinforces local singularity, without necessarily leading to a global divergence of the
models, since the two macrotrends in question usually have an equivalent in-, the
model of the other country.
For example, in both France and Quebec there has been, according to
trend 10.2, institutionalization of unions. In France, this must be interpreted as a issue
of transformation of intermediate control, since this trend is listed in macrotrend 6,
which groups developments relating to this issue. In Quebec, the same phenomenon
has a more ideological dimension, since it is found in macrotrend 11, describing the
increase in consensus. To take another example, the increase in salaried work among
women is linked in France to changes in the status of women (macrotrend 8), while
in Quebec it is first an economic phenomenon (macrotrend 2, increasing wealth).
On the other hand, evolution of the forms of authority (trend 7.4) in ritualized
situations has a structural significance that is almost identical in France and in
Quebec. In both cases, it is listed in a macrotrend (numbers 6 in Quebec and 7 in
France) describing transformations of old behaviour models. As well, the reduction
296
in political radicalism in Quebec (trend 11.4) plays a role comparable to that of the
fall of the Communist Party in France (trend 9.4), even though the formulations are,
given the local political contexts, different. Both contribute to the diminution of
discord (macrotrends 1 in France and 11 in Quebec).
Here again, structural analysis helps us to understand the divergences and
singularities that are hidden behind the convergences. It shows that the same trends
do not necessarily have the same structural roles, and, on the contrary, that different
trends can play similar roles (the role being only the result of a change of position
in the model).
It is not possible here to analyze in detail each trend in both models. Such an
examination would lead to the same conclusion that we can draw from studying the
macrotrends: absolute convergence does not exist, and since cases of extreme
divergence are rare, most often the change is in an identical global direction that
takes nothing from the singularities of the processes at work in each society.
Similarities and differences in causal models
If, in spite of everything, we can say that convergence dominates divergence, the
over-all diagnosis of the comparison of causal structures presented above (figures 3
and 5) will be more complex.
We shall start by examining the two aggregate models in four dimensions.
The French model has brought to light an atypical explanatory schema with regard
to theories of change. The same atypical schema is revealed in the Quebec model,
where institutions also play an exogenous role. This seems to confirm that they have
enough autonomy to entail other changes in industrial societies. Over the last 20 or
30 years, production relations and the economic infrastructure may not have played
the motivating role that many classic theories have attributed to them (see Mendras
and Forse, 1983). In both models, life style - in a very broad sense - occupies an
endogenous position, which demonstrates its dependence on other transformations.
This position reinforces the overall convergence of the two explanatory schemas,
which start from institutions and culminate in life styles.
"Transformations of socio-economic structures" in Quebec play a role that has
something in common with that of "social structures and forces" in France, but the
comparison here is attenuated by the fact that these two dimensions overlap only
partially. The other macrotrends differ even more in their composition, and it is thus
difficult to compare their positions. The moderate "culturalism" of the French model
is not found clearly in Quebec; conversely, the exogenous role in Quebec of work
relations and matters regarding social position cannot be compared in the French
case, in which trends are grouped differently with regard to this point. To provide
more precision and to work more systematically, it is thus preferable to focus on the
models constructed from the 12 and 14 macrotrends, respectively.
297
The French model attributes a motivating role in social change to the

economic macrotrends "increase in wealth", "reorganization of businesses," and
"occupational and educational structure." While increasing wealth seems to be an
important engine of social transformations and changes in the Quebec model,
increased precariousness, which includes training, is also found in a causative
position. As well, the macrotrend "increased presence of the state," which includes
a trend on business, is situated upstream in the Quebec model, no doubt because the
state is a driving force in economic and social development. The motivating role
traditionally attributed to economic factors is thus confirmed in both societies.
However, in the Quebec case, the central role played by the microsociety is added,
since urbanization, centralization, and changes in parenting seem also to have resulted
in other social transformations. The French equivalent plays only a relay role.
It is in the relay position that the greatest divergences between the two
societies are revealed. Three macrotrends appear in completely different positions,
and only one is in an identical position. We will start with this one. The changes
characterizing women's roles are, in both cases, at once caused and causative, thus
in a central position. These changes .are, first, themselves the product of other
changes, notably economic development and extension of training. The changes in
the feminine condition, without doubt one of the most radical transformations
observed in contemporary societies, thus play an intermediate role in society as a
whole: they are caused, in the wide sense, by economic forces, and they have other
consequences in their turn.
A large middle class has formed in both societies. However, this has had
different consequences: it has probably contributed to a decrease in ideological
opposition and polarization in France, notably accentuating the decline of the
Communist Party, while in Quebec it has been the principal source of the creation
of a stronger national identity and social consensus.
Two other macrotrends are found in a relay position in the French model:
those describing sociability and changes in behavioural models. The basic trends that
comprise these two blocks are found in macrotrends that occupy different positions
in the Quebec model. "Disintegration of old behavioural models," in a central
position in the French model, is found in an endogenous, thus caused, position in the
Quebec model. The elements that define the French macrotrend "tensions on the
labour market" are found in two Quebec macrotrends, "growing precariousness" and
"broader social consensus," downstream in the model.
Analysis of the macrotrends in an endogenous position in both models reveals,
once again, convergences and divergences. The first element of convergence is that
in both societies, transformations observed in consumption, daily life, and life styles
are caused by other social changes. The second is that the changes in each society
have led to a widening of social consensus and a decrease in radicalism.
298
There is, however, an important divergence between the two societies. In

France's case, we can hypothesize the existence of three major crises: one in
employment, one in ideologies, and one in institutions, particularly in the welfare
state. This diagnosis is formulated from identification of endogenous macrotrends in
the model, which tend to put them in the caused position. The situation is quite
different in Quebec, where the state played a motivating role in social
transformations, especially after 1960. The welfare state was established later in
Quebec than in France, and it was much less present and less strong at the beginning
of the period studied. Quebec evolved toward greater centralization during this
period, while in France the existence of a very centralized state was questioned.
Quebec, for its part, had a major social crisis, marked by the emergence of more
acute social problems and a rise in inequalities.
CONCLUSION
Structural consistencies alongside singularities
The comparative analysis we have just sketched out-too briefly, it is true, in the tight
framework imposed here - provides an exemplary illustration of the distinction
between the formal and the empirical formulated by Boudon (1984) to characterize
social change. In our comparative analysis of two causal models, we have found
social processes that reveal consistencies requiring explanation in terms of ideal
models, which might give rise to a general statement, and also singular social
processes, belonging to a given society in a given context. Here we will content
ourselves with describing the advantage of this distinction between the formal and
the empirical, with the understanding that comparison between only two societies
constitutes a fragile and insufficient basis.
First, it seems possible to distinguish structural consistencies at work in
developed societies, at least with regard to these two cases. We must stress the
influence of economic factors, which seem to play a decisive role in social change.
Second, the social processes at work in developed societies seem to lead to a
decrease in discord, and perhaps even to a wider social consensus. Although global
and generalized social tensions and conflicts are fading, this does not imply the
disappearance of all conflict - far from it. Rather, conflicts are becoming more
localized, more limited, more circumscribed, and shorter. What has changed is the
fact that social conflicts no longer involve a questioning of the overall society, in
contrast to the globalizing aims of radical ideologies in the 1960s and 1970s.
A third statement describing another structural consistency will, for the
moment, be formed as a hypothesis. This is the relay role played by the
transformation in women's roles in the process of social change. Contrary to certain
feminist theories, changes in women's roles and, in a wider sense, in the feminine
condition were a motivating force in the social change that has taken place in
299
developed societies. First, the condition of women changed under the impetus of a
good number of other changes, then the new feminine condition itself caused social,
cultural, and economic changes.
The same can be said for transformation of social stratification, which can be
seen as a modification of class relations, considered by many to be a primary cause
of social change. Both societies have seen a large increase in the middle class, but
in both cases this evolution has played only a relay role, and was caused principally
by economic changes and transformation of employment.
The final structural consistency is that changes observed in life styles appear
as endogenous, resulting from a complex group of other changes. Community
enrichment and new women's roles are probably among the forces that have resulted
in a profound redefinition of life styles, which are now characterized by diversity and
mobility of form.
However, our analysis emphasizes, quite strongly, that social change is also
singular. Different history, geography, and, perhaps most importantly, institutions
from one country to another provoke deep divergences in the disposition or
configuration of processes at work. The case of centralization/decentralization
illustrates very well the existence of such singularities. In France, there is a trend
toward a certain degree of decentralization. Although Paris remains undeniably the
centre and the capital city, many other large French cities have become very
important regional centres, themselves turned toward the rest of Europe. Quebec, for
its part, has evolved toward a more marked centralization over the years.
Singularities also emerge from an examination of the macrotrends themselves.
We have seen that absolute similarities do not exist and that extreme divergences are
exceptional. In the great majority of cases, similar macrotrends could have been
formulated, the content of which, in terms of trends, would be only partly identical.
Over all, social changes take common directions that do not prevent local
singularities from persisting. Only a structural comparison of the type we have
undertaken here can show them systematically, since we must resituate each element
in a substructure before comparing them. From this first attempt, we draw the
following conclusions:
. two societies in a comparable stage of development are necessarily characterized
by an ensemble of local singularities;
. a small number of these singularities give rise to divergences in evolution;
. but in the majority of cases they do not prevent convergences, even though these
remain partial since a certain amount of singularity always persists.
This is why social changes can move in the same direction without altering
the identity of each society. It would not have been possible to establish the above
structural consistencies and singularities if we had started from one or a small
number of overarching ideas on social change within industrial or post-industrial
300
societies. Only a hindsight reading of the relationships between trends enables us to

make a systematic comparison of the causative structures characterizing change in
each society, and only such a comparison enables us to systematically reveal
consistencies and singularities. Thus, it would be worthwhile to pursue this approach
and extend it to include other societies.
References
Boudon, Raymond
1984 La place du desordre. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, collection Sociologies.
Caplow, Theodore
1988 "The Comparative Charting of Social Change in Advanced Industrial Societies."
European Studies Newsletter, 17, no. 5, April: 1-6.
Caplow, Theodore, Howard Bahr, John Modell, and Bruce Chadwick
1991 Recent Social Trends in the United States 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt: McGill-
Dim, Louis
1985 "Pour un tableau tendanciel de la societe franchise: un parti de recherche." Revue
francaise de sociologie, 3, July-Sept.: 389^108.
Forse, Michel
1991 L'analyse structurelle du changement social. Le modele de Louis Dim. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, Coll. Le sociologue.
1992 "Les theories du changement social." Sciences humaines, Ma.: 27-31.
Forse, Michel, and Yannick Lemel
1990 "Peut-on parler de macrotendances de transformation de la societe francaise? Quelques
elements de reponse apportes par la methode 'Louis Dim'." In M. Brissaud, M. Forse,
and A. Zighed, eds., La modelisation confluent des sciences, 167-187. Paris: Editions du
CNRS.
Dechaux
Glatzer, Wolfgang, Karl-Otto Hondrich, Heinz-Herbert Noll, Karin Stiehr, and Barbara Worndl
1992 Recent Social Trends in West Germany 1960-1990. Montreal and Frankfurt: McGill-
Jean-Pierre Simard
Mendras, Henri
Mendras, Henri, and Michel Forse
1983 Le changement social. Tendances et paradigmes. Paris: Armand Colin.
301
Lexicon
Renata HORNUNG-DRAUSS
1. REMARKS ON A COMMON LANGUAGE
The general introduction to this volume pointed out that one of the main goals of the
Comparative Charting of Social Change project is to arrive at comparative analyses
of social change in the societies studied. The trends in each individual society,
however, have been analyzed on the basis of national data and sociological literature,
and the bibliographical references accompanying each trend report are national socio-
logical publications. Therefore, although the national profile volumes are all
published in English, they invoke the language and sociological concepts peculiar to
each society. In the course of its work, the research group came to the conclusion
that it was necessary, as part of this project, to tackle the problem of the
compatibility of the different languages involved.
The problem of a common language arises on two levels. First of all, it seems
advisable to provide scholars studying this publication with direct mother-tongue
access to the topics taken up in the study. At the same time, scholars studying the
foreign literature referred to in the bibliographical references may wish to have a
translation into their own language of the sociological terms used. It seemed to us
that these problems could best be tackled by a multilingual lexicon combined with
an index (part 3 of this chapter). Starting from the English terms used in the
publication, the lexicon-index-lexicon contains the equivalent terms in French,
German, and Spanish. Each entry makes reference to the trend numbers in which the
term is used, thereby allowing direct access to the different volumes of the individual
society profiles. Of course, each volume contains an alphabetical index, the entries
in which have been taken into account in the multilingual lexicon-index.
The second language problem that arises is that of different sociological
concepts or definitions underlying seemingly equivalent terms in the various
languages. Typical examples of this would be the terms "social class" or
"occupational category." The mere translation of those terms into other languages,
might lead to misunderstandings. We therefore decided to create an annotated
glossary of terms in the lexicon that needed additional explanations as to their precise
meaning in the different contexts of the present work. The glossary is part 2 of this
chapter.
303
Finally, we would like to point out that this lexicon and glossary are by no
means intended to be a comprehensive sociological dictionary or glossary. Their
scope is limited to the pragmatic and modest end of providing some help for scholars
using the research group's publications.
2. COMMENTS ON CERTAIN ENTRIES IN THE LEXICON
authority - autorite - Autoritat - autoridad (7.4)
Authority can be studied from the perspective of the persons or institutions exerting
authority - Max Weber's study of the types of legitimate rule would be a typical
example - or from the perspective of those expected to respect or obey authority. In
the present work, the latter perspective is adopted. On the basis of several empirical
indicators, conclusions are drawn as to how attitudes toward and respect of authority
in its different expressions (family, conventions, state) have evolved over the last
three decades.
church membership - affiliation religieuse - Kirchenmitgliedschaft - afiliacion

religiosa (9.2)
In all societies represented in this study except Germany, church membership is

defined on the basis of subjective claims of individuals. In Germany, the main
churches (Protestant and Catholic) levy church taxes, which are collected by the state
with the income tax. The fiscal data resulting from the levying of the church taxes
is used for determination of church membership: church members are only those
persons who officially pay the church tax. Those who refuse to pay the tax are
considered to be nonbelievers. In America, surveys of subjective claims of individual
attendance tend to miss the growth of televangelism in recent years. In Quebec,
official data on membership come from the census, but are by no means a precise
indicator.
citizens' initiatives - initiatives des citoyens - Biirgerinitiativen - iniciativas

ciudadanas (10.4)
This term is mainly used in German sociological literature. It refers to a new form
of interest group emerging in the late 1970s, largely associated with social
movements (especially the ecological movement). Such groups are based on
spontaneous actions of citizens, their scope is limited to the solution of specific local
problems (such as the construction of highways or nuclear plants), and they generally
cease to exist once the problems have been solved.
304
Lexicon
co-determination - co-gestion - Mitbestimmung - codeterminacion (5.1; 10.2)
The term belongs to the realm of industrial relations and refers to the involvement
of employees in the decision-making process of an enterprise. In some countries, co-
determination rights of employees are based on tradition and/or collective agreements.
In Germany, the country with the most sophisticated system of co-determination, the
term refers to the legally institutionalized participation of trade unions or elected
workers' representatives in firms' decision-making process. Co-determination can
take place at two levels: at the plant level in the workers' council, and at the
company level within the (supervisory) board of the company. Some form of co-
determination may be appearing in the U.S. as a result of Japanese corporations
building and operating large assembly plants there. In Quebec (where the term is co-
gestion), the practice is very limited in scope.
collective bargaining - negociations collectives - Tarifverhandlungen - negociacion

colectiva (7.2)
The term refers to negotiations regarding working conditions and wages between
trade unions and employers' representatives. Depending on the national traditions,
collective bargaining can take place at the company level, the branch and regional
level, and the national level.
corporatism - corporatisme - Korporatismus - corporatismo (10.4)
Historically, the term corporatism has had several meanings. It has referred to a
typical feature of fascism, or to corporations of practitioners of a single occupation.
The term, sometimes labelled "neo-corporatism," also refers to the institutionalized
role interest groups have in shaping politics. A typical example of this would be the
tripartite administration (state, labour unions, employers' associations) of the social-
security system in Germany. In North America, the role of corporate PACs in U.S.
politics should be noted. They are certainly interest-group players in politics, though
they do not get involved in anything resembling tripartite administration.
educational system - systeme d'education - Bildungssystem - sistema educativo (8.1)
In all societies studied, the educational system comprises at least three major stages:
. primary education, from about age 6 to about age 10 (Germany) or 12 (other
societies)
. secondary education, from about age 12 (10 in Germany) to about age 18 (16, 17,
18, or 19 in Germany, depending on the type of school chosen)
305
. post-secondary education, which includes undergraduate and graduate studies at

universities, colleges, technical colleges, grandes ecoles, etc.
In some countries, pre-primary education is highly developed and covers a large

proportion of children, and is consequently also considered to be a part of the
educational system. Compulsory schooling starts with primary school at age 6 and
ends generally at age 16. In the U.S., companies spend almost as much on employee
training as is spent on all of higher education.
industrial relations - relations industrielles - industrielle Beziehungen - relaciones

industrials (7.2)
The term refers to the relations between employers or their representatives and
employees or their representatives, the trade unions. Typically, it includes topics such
as labour law, labour disputes, collective bargaining and agreements, co-
determination, and so on.
informal economy - economic informelle - informelle Qkonomie - economia informal

(12.2)
The informal economy comprises a number of very different activities - some illegal,
others legal - all characterized by the fact that they are not included in the official
economic figures (national product). The major components of the informal economy
are:
. illegal employment - employees who are not declared to the fiscal and social
authorities
. artisans doing parts of their work off the books
. profitable criminal enterprise (e.g., drug dealing)
. barter of goods and services
. assistance to neighbours, friends, and relatives
. household production - do-it-yourself activities, etc.
labour unions - syndicats ouvriers - Gewerkschaften - sindicatos obreros (9.1)
Labour and trade unions are the wage and salary workers' organizations. Their main
object is to negotiate the working conditions and wages of their members with the
employers, but they also act as interest groups in the political arena.
306
Lexicon
occupational categories - categories socio-professionnelles - Berufsgruppen -

categorias occupacionales (4.2)
The term refers to the classification of the labour force according to professional and
sociological criteria. As classifications vary considerably from country to country,
only a rough comparison is possible. In the overview table below, the main
occupational categories of each country are printed in bold; the terms in parentheses
are translations of occupations that do not constitute a category of their own in the
respective society. Terms preceded by an arrow show which category an occupation
belongs to if it does not constitute a category of its own.
part-time employment - travail a temps partiel - Teilzeitbeschaftigung -empleo a

tiempo parcial (4.3)
It is very difficult to compare different national data on part-time work because of

how it is defined - that is, its delimitation from full-time work differs from one
country to another. For example, in theJLJ.S., part-time workers are persons working
less than the normal full weekly shift in their enterprise; in Germany, jobs with a
regular weekly working time of 36 hours or less are considered part-time jobs; in
France, jobs with a regular working time of less than 30 hours per week are
considered part-time jobs.
worker participation - participation des salaries - Arbeitnehmerbeteiligung -

participacion de los trabajadores (5.1)
This term is sometimes used to refer to the information, consultation, and co-
determination rights of employees in the decision-making process of their enterprise.
More specifically, however, it refers to the financial participation of employees in the
company's profits (profit sharing or profit-related pay) or the company's capital
(equity sharing, employee share ownership). The financial participation of U.S.
workers also includes enormous employer-funded pension schemes, some including
workers' contributions. These are, arguably, the largest form of U.S. workers'
financial participation in firms.
307
USA FRANCE GERMANY SPAIN
Owner/Boss Patron(F)/ Selbstandige Patronos

Proprietaire(Q)
Craftsman/tradesman Artisan/commergant
Professional Professions Freie Berufe Profesiones

liberales(F)/ ->Selbstandige liberates
Professionnel(Q)
Manager/top executive Cadre superieur Angestellte Gerantes directives

leitende A.
Middle manager/ Cadre moyen Hohere A. Mandos medias

lower manager mittlere A.
Clerical Employe de bureau Biiropersonal Empleados
Technician Technicien
Civil servant Fonctionnaire Beamte Funcionarios
Artist Artiste
clergy clerge
army, police officer armee, police
Domestic servant Personnel de service Hauspersonal Servicio

->Angestellte domestico
Unpaid family Travailleur Mithelfende Trabaj adores

worker familial Familien- familiares
angehorige
Foreman ContremaTtre
Blue-collar worker Ouvrier Arbeiter Obreros
Skilled worker Ouvrier qualifie Facharbeiter Obiero cualificado
Operator Ouvrier Angelernte Obreros

specialise Arbeiter especialisados
Labourer Manoeuvre Hilfsarbeiter Peones
Farmer Agriculteur Landwirte Agricultores

exploitant(F)/ ->Selbstandige
cultivateur(Q)
Farm labourer Salarie agricole Landwirtschaftliche Obreros agricoles

Arbeitskrafte
->Arbeiter
308
Lexicon
social class - classe sociale - soziale Schicht - clase social (2.1; 6.1; 6.2; 6.3; 6.4)
There are two main sociological traditions with respect to the concept of social class.
On one hand is the Marxist tradition, which defines the social classes with reference
to the place of the social agents in the production system. The German term Klasse
is generally used in the context of this Marxist concept of social class. The other
notion of social class refers to the more recent theory of social stratification, which
can be traced to Max Weber's sociology and which defines social classes with
reference to several indicators such as status, income, and power. The German term
Schicht is generally used when reference is made to this concept.
social elections - elections professionnelles - Betriebsrats- und Sozial-

versicherungswahlen - elecciones sociales (7.5)
This term is peculiar to France and Germany. It refers to the election of workers'
representatives to workers' councils in enterprises, of the workers' and employers'
representatives to the managing boards of the social-security institutions, and - in
France only - to the election of representatives to the courts of arbitration
(prud'hommes).
strike - greve - Streik - huelga (7.1)
Strike is one of the employees' "weapons" in a labour dispute. It consists of the

refusal to work until an agreement on the disputed issue has been reached. The
employers' counter-measure is the lockout (which is, however, prohibited in some
countries). Statistics on labour disputes generally refer to working days lost per 1,000
employees due to both strikes and lockouts. In France, the data refer to working days
lost per striker. There are important institutional and traditional differences between
the societies: in France, striking is an individual right granted by the constitution. It
can be exercised by any individual worker at any given moment, provided that he or
she gives 48 hours' notice. In Germany, the strike is part of the "ritual" of collective
bargaining and is considered legally as an ultima ratio instrument, to be used by the
trade unions only when negotiation and mediation efforts have failed, whereas strikes
during terms of valid collective agreements and during negotiations are illegal. In the
U.S. and Quebec, legal strikes are organized by officially recognized unions and
decided upon by strike ballots, whereas other strikes ("wildcat strikes") are
considered illegal. Note should be taken of the large differences among the states of
the U.S. in their right-to-work laws, both on paper and in practice. Also, workers who
lack the legal right to strike (a large and growing proportion of union members)
engage in "blue flu" (police), "sick outs" (pilots), and "by-the-book slowdowns"
(aircraft and other high-tech assembly workers).
309
transfer payments - transferts sociaux - staatliche Transferzahlungen - pagos por

transferencias del Estado (6.3)
The term refers to state payments to households - transfers for children, low-income
benefit schemes, and so on. These transfer payments are used most often as an
instrument to influence income distribution toward a higher degree of equality. The
term does not include subsidies to enterprises. A large and increasing proportion of
these payments in the U.S. take the form of tax credits, deductions, and exemptions.
There is even a negative income tax (the EIC) for people with low income and
dependent children. Also, some tax items, such as the mortgage-interest deduction,
are indexed to inflation, but others, such as the exemption for dependent children, are
not.
unemployment - chomage - Arbeitslosigkeit - paro (4.1)
The different national figures on unemployment cannot be compared easily due to

differences in the definition of this term. In the U.S., for instance, the unemployed
are persons out of work and actively seeking work, and people are dropped from the
unemployment count after a set amount of time, even if they are still unemployed
and actively seeking work. Thus, the unemployment rate for the U.S. is actually only
those unemployed who have failed to find work in the first X weeks after job loss.
The value of X changes according to political decisions. Most of the homeless are
almost entirely absent from the unemployment rolls, even if they look for work.
Other complications are the treatment of the 2.1 million uniformed military person-
nel, who are sometimes counted as employed and sometimes not, and variable
treatment and methods for counting the part-time employed and the self-employed.
The unemployed in Germany are those persons below age 65 who are registered at
the federal employment office (Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit) as seeking employment of
at least 18 hours per week and for at least 3 months, and who are immediately
available to the labour market. In France, the official unemployment figure includes
all persons registered at the national labour office (Agence Nationale pour 1'Emploi)
as seeking employment. A second source, the main one, is the annual INSEE
Employment Survey, in which 60,000 persons are investigated on their position in
the labour market and on their life style. In Quebec, persons out of work must also
be actively seeking work to be considered unemployed. Some who have worked for
a period varying with the different region's unemployment rate (between 10 and
20 weeks) and who have contributed to the unemployment-insurance programme will
get payments and be registered as such. There are yet other definitions, so that it is
necessary to specify the definition of unemployment underlying the data used.
310
Lexicon
welfare system - protection sociale - Wohlfahrtssystem (Sozialhilfe und freie

Wohlfahrtspflege) - sistema de bienestar (8.3)
The welfare system includes both the welfare state and private social agencies such
as churches, along with para-religious and other institutions. The concept of the
welfare state, as used in the present studies, refers to the efforts of the state to
influence and control the distribution of welfare in the population by deliberate
political action. Quantitative indicators for development of the welfare state are the
number of civil servants and the state's welfare expenditures. In the U.S., variability
among the states in such funding as Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
Medicaid, and so on, is very large. Thus, the average for the U.S. as a whole can
conceal more localized deprivation than there is in other countries with more uniform
standards of support.
3. LEXICON - INDEX (ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

(English, French, German, Spanish)
(The entries printed in bold are commented on part 2.)
abortion - avortement - Abtreibung - aborto 3.5

addiction - to\icomanie - Sucht - toxicomanfa 16.3
adult education - formation des adultes - Erwachsenenbildung - educacion de adultos 15.3
age at first childbirth - Sge a la premiere naissance - Alter bei Geburt des ersten Kindes -
edad en el primer nacimiento 1.1
age at marriage - age au mariage - Heiratsalter - edad al casarse 3.3
age distribution - repartition selon 1'age - Altersaufbau - distribution de edades 0.1
age-adjusted suicide rate - taux de suicide standardise - altersstandardisierte
Selbstmordrate - tasa estandarizada de suicidio
age-specific first marriage rate - indice de primo-nuptialitdr- altersspezifische
Erst-Heiratsquote - tasa por edad en el primer casamiento 3.3
anti-poverty programmes - programmes de lutte contre la pauvrete - Programme
zur Bekampfung der Armut - programas de lucha contra la pobreza 16.4
arbitration - arbitrage - Schlichtung - arbitraje 10.1
aspirations - aspirations - Aspirationen - aspiraciones 17.2
associations - associations - Vereinigungen - asociaciones 2.5
athletics - athletisme - Leichtathletik - atletismo 14.3
attendance at performances - assistance & des spectacles - Besuch von kulturellen
Veranstaltungen - asistencia a espectaculos 14.4
attitudes - attitudes - Einstellungen - actitudes 17.1; 17.2; 17.3; 17.4; 17.5
authority - autorite - Autoritat - autoridad 7.4
birth rate - taux de natalite - Geburtenrate - tasa de natalidad 3.2

births - naissances - Geburten - nacimientos 3.2
"black economy" - economic souterraine - Schattenwirtschaft - economfa sumergida 12.2
books bought - livres achetes - Biicherkauf - libros comprados 14.4
business failures - faillites - Insolvenzen - quiebras 0.2; 5.3
311
capital formation - formation du capital - Kapitalbildung - formacion de capital 0.2

career development - promotion de carrieres - Karriereforderung -
desarro-llo de las carreras ocupacionales 5.2
career mobility - mobilite professionnelle - berufliche Mobilitat - movilidad profesional 6.2
celibacy - celibat - Ehelosigkeit - celibato 3.3
child care - soins aux enfants - Kinderbetreuung - cuidado de los nifios 3.1
church membership - affiliation religieuse - Kirchenmitgliedschaft -
affiliation religiosa 9.2
church tax - denier du culte - Kirchensteuer - impuesto religioso 9.2
citizens' initiatives - initiatives des citoyens - Biirgerinitiativen
- iniciativas ciudadanas 10.4
civil servants - fonctionnaires - Beamte - funcionarios 4.2
class —> social class - classe sociale - Klasse
clerical worker - employe de bureau - Biiroangestellte(r) - empleado administrative 4.2
co-determination - co-gestion - Mitbestimmung - codeterminacion 5.1; 10.2
cohabitation, types of (other than marriage) - cohabitation,
types de (autres que le mariage) - nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaften
- cohabitaci6n (no marital) 3.3
collective agreement - convention collective - Tarifvertrag - convenio colectivo 9.1; 10.2
collective bargaining - negotiations collectives - Tarifverhandlungen
- negotiation colectiva 7.2
college - premier cycle de 1'universite' - Grundstudium - primer ciclo universitario 8.1
common-law marriage - concubinage - nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaft -
uni6n de hecho 3.3
community leaders - notables - Honoratioren - Ifderes comunitarios 2.5
community types - types de communautes - Gemeindeformen - tipos de comunidad 2.3
commuting - migration pendulaire(F)/faire la navette(Q) - Pendeln - viaje pendular 13.5
computer applications - applications informatiques - Computeranwendung -
aplicaciones del ordenador 4.5
computerization of work - informatisation du travail - Computer!sierung der Arbeit -
informatizacion del trabajo 4.5
confidence in institutions - confiance dans les institutions - Vertrauen in die
Institutionen - confianza en las instituciones 11.2
conscription - service militaire obligatoire - Wehrpflicht - servicio militar obligatorio 9.3
consensual union —> cohabitation, concubinage(F)/union libre(Q)
constraint - contrainte - Zwang - sujecion 7.3
consumer patterns - modeles de consommation - Konsumverhaltensmuster
- modelos de consume 13.1
consumerism - consumerisme - Verbraucherschutzbewegungen - consumismo 10.3
continuing education - formation permanente - Weiterbildung - educaci6n permanente 15.3
contraception - contraception - Empfangnisverhutung - anticoncepcion 3.5
corporation - societ6 anonyme - Aktiengesellschaft - sociedad andnima 5.3
corporatism - corporatisme - Korporatismus - corporatismo 10.4
craftsman (sometimes "skilled worker") - ouvrier qualifie et artisan
- Facharbeiter und Handworker - artesano y obrero cualificado 4.2
crime - crime - Kriminalitat - delito 16.2
criminal-justice administration - administration de la justice
- Strafjustiz, Verwaltung der - administracidn de la justicia penal 16.2
312
Lexicon
daily mobility - defacements quotidiens - Alltagsmobilitat - movilidad cotidiana 13.5

data dissemination - diffusion de 1'information - Dateniibermittlung
- difusi6n de la informacion 4.5
data storage - archivage de 1'information - Datenweitergabe
- almacenamiento de la informacion 4.5
death rate - taux de mortalite - Sterberate - tasa de mortalidad 0.1
de-nesting (leaving home) - decohabitation - Auszug aus dem Elternhaus
- marcha del hogar paterno 1.1
dieting - regimes - Ernahrungsweisen - dieta 13.3
disposable income - revenu disponible - verfiigbares Einkommen - renta disponible 12.1
dispute settlement - arbitrage - Konfliktlosung - arbitraje 10.1
divorce - divorce - Scheidung - divorcio 3.3
durable goods - biens durables - langlebige Gebrauchsgiiter - bienes duraderos 13.1
dwellings - logements - Wohnungen - viviendas 2.3
ecological movements - mouvements ecologiques - Okologiebewegungen

- movimientos ecologicos 10.3
economic inequality - inegalit6s economiques - okonomische Ungleichheit -
desigualdades econ6micas 6.3
economic orientations - orientations economiques - okonomische Orientierungen -
orientaciones economicas 11.3
educational attainment - niveau scolaire - Bildungsniveau - nivel educative 15.1; 15.2; 15.3
educational system - systeme ({'education - Bildungssystem - sistema educative 8.1
elderly, the - personnes agees (troisieme age) - Altere (3. Lebensalter)
- ancianos (tercera edad) 1.2
elected local officials - elus locaux - gewahlte Gemeindevertreter - cargos locales elegidos 2.4
elections - elections - Wahlen - elecciones 7.5
emotional disorders - desordres emotifs - emotionale Storungen - desordenes emocionales 16.3
employee stock-ownership programme - plan d'interessement des salaries
- Mitarbeiter - plan de participacion accionarial de los asalariados
Kapitalbeteiligungsmodell fur asalariados 5.3
employment of women - travail des femmes - Frauenerwerbstatigkeit
- empleo de las mujeres 3.4
employment, types of - emplois, formes d' - Beschaftigung, Formen der
- tipos de empleo 4.3
energy consumption - consommation energetique - Energieverbrauch
- consume energetico 0.2, 0.3
enrolment (educational system) - inscription (systeme d'education) - Einschreibung
(Bildungseinrichtungen) - matricula (sistema educative) 8.1
entrepreneurship - entrepreneurial - Unternehmertum - empresariado 11.3
environment - environnement - Umwelt - medio ambiente 10.3
erotic expression - expression erotique - erotische Ausdrucksformen - expresion erotica 13.7
ethnic minorities - minorites ethniques - ethnische Minderheiten - minorfas etnicas 16.1
T
family income - revenu familial - Haushaltseinkommen - renta familiar 12.1
family wealth - patrimoine familial - Vermogen einer Familie - patrimonio familiar 12,3
farm labourer - salari6 agricole - Landarbeiter - trabajador agricola 4.2
farmer - agriculteur exploitant - Landwirt - agricultor 4.2
female labour-force participation - taux d'activite des femmes - Frauenerwerbsbeteiligung -
tasa de actividad femenina 3.4
female roles - roles feminins - weibliche Rollen - roles femeninos 3.1
fertility - fecondite - Fruchtbarkeit - fecundidad 0.1; 3.2
313
fixed-term contracts - contrats a duree determine'e - befristete Arbeitsverhaltnisse -

contratos a plazo fijo 1.1; 4.3 4.3
flexible schedules - horaires flexibles - flexible Arbeitszeit- horarios flexibles 5.1
flextime --> flexible schedules
foreign trade - commerce exterieur - AuBenhandel - comercio exterior 0.2
free time - temps libre - Freizeit - tiempo libre 14.1
fringe benefits - benefices marginaux - Sozialleistungen, betriebliche
- beneficios marginales 5.2
full-time employment - emploi a plein temps - Vollzeitbeschaftigung
- empleo a tiempo completo 4.3
gainfully employed persons - personnes actives occupees - Erwerbstatige

- personas activas ocupadas 4.1
gardening - jardinage - Gartenarbeit - jardineria 13.6
GDP —> gross domestic product - PIB, produit interieur brut
general education - formation generate - Allgemeinbildung - educaci6n general 15.1
GNP —> gross national product - PNB, produit national brut
goods-producing sector - secteur de la production des biens - giiterproduzierender Sektor -
sector de la produccion de bienes 4.4
graduates - diplomes - Graduierte - graduados 8.1
grievance procedures - procedures de griefs - Beschwerdeverfahren, innerbetriebliche -
procedimientos de queja 5.2
gross domestic product - produit interieur brut - Bruttoinlandsprodukt
- producto interior bruto 0.2
gross national product - produit national brut - Bruttosozialprodukt
- producto nacional bruto 0.2
gross reproduction rate - taux brut de reproduction - Bruttoreproduktionsrate -
tasa bruta de reproduction 3.2
health and beauty practices - soins corporels et de sante - Gesundheits-und

Schonheitspflege - cuidados corporales y de la salud 13.3
health system - systeme de sante - Gesundheitswesen - sistema sanitario 8.2
hidden poverty - pauvrete cachee - versteckte Armut - pobreza oculta 16.4
high-school graduates - bacheliers - Abiturienten - bachilleres 8.1; 15.1
homelessness - sans domicile fixe - Obdachlosigkeit - vagabundaje 16.4
household expenditure - depenses des manages - Ausgaben der privaten Haushalte -
gastos de los hogares 13.1
household production - production domestique - Haushaltsproduktion
- produccion domestica 13.6
housework - taches domestiques - Hausarbeit - tareas domesticas 3.1
illegal employment - travail au noir - Schwarzarbeit - empleo ilegal 4.1

illegitimacy —> out-of-wedlock births
illicit drugs - drogues illicites - verbotene Drogen - drogas ilfcitas 16.3
immigrants - immigrants - Einwanderer - inmigrantes 16.1
income - revenu - Einkommen - renta 6.3; 12.1
income distribution - repartition des revenus - Einkommensverteilung
- distribution de la renta 6.3; 12.1
independent trade union - syndivat autonome(F)/syndicat non-affilie(Q)
- unabhangige Gewerkschaft - sindicato independiente 9.1
individual income —> personal income
314
Lexicon
industrial relations - relations industrielles - industrielle Beziehungen

- relaciones industriales 7.2
inequality, economic —> economic inequality
infant mortality - mortalite infantile - Sauglingssterblichkeit - mortalidad infantil 0.1
informal economy - economic informelle - informelle Okonomie
- econonua informal 12.2
institutional authority - autorite institutionnelle - institutionelle Autoritat -
autoridad institucional 7.4
institutionalization of labour unions - institutionnalisation des syndicats -
Institutionalisierung der Gewerkschaften
* - institucionalizacidn de los sindicatos 10.2
institutionalization of social forces - institutionnalisation des forces sociales -
Institutionalisierung der gesellschaftlichen Krafte - institucionalizacion
de la's fuerzas sociales 10.1; 10.2; 10.3; 10.4
intangible commodities - biens (services) immateriels - intangible Outer - bienes intangibles 4.4
inter-generational mobility - mobilite inter-generationnelle - intergenerationale Mobilitat -
movilidad intergeneracional 6.2
interest groups - groupes d'interet - Interessengruppen - grupos de intereses 10.4
inventions - inventions - Erfindungen - inventos 0.3
irregular employment —> precarious employment - emplois precaires
job enlargement - enrichissement des laches - Erweiterung der Arbeitsinhalte -

enriquecimiento de las tareas 5.1
job sharing - partage du travail - job sharing - reparto del trabajo 5.1
kinship networks - reseaux de parente - Verwandtschaftsnetzwerke - red de parentesco 2.2
labour agreements - conventions de travail - Tarifvereinbarungen - acuerdos labourales 7.2

labour contracts - contrats de travail - Artbeitsvertrage - contratos de trabajo 7.2
labour force - population active - Erwerbspersonen - poblacion activa 4.1
labour-force participation of women —> female labour-force participation
labour-force participation rate - taux d'activite - Erwerbsquote - tasa de actividad 4.1
labour market - marche du travail - Arbeitsmarkt - mercado de trabajo 4.1 - 4.5
labour-union membership rate - taux de syndicalisation - gewerkschaftlicher
Organisationsgrad - tasa de sindicalizacion 9.1
labour unions - syndicats ouvriers - Gewerkschaften - sindicatos obreros 9.1
labour unions, institutionalization of —> Institutionalization of labour unions
labourer - manoeuvre - Arbeiter (ungelernter) - trabajador 4.2
leisure - loisir - Freizeit - ocio 14.1; 14.2; 14.3; 14.4
level of general qualification - degre de qualification generale
- allgemeines Qualifikationsniveau - nivel de cualificacidn general 15.1
level of professional qualification - degre de qualification professionnelle -
berufliches Qualifikationsniveau - nivel de cualificacion profesional 15.2
life expectancy - esperance de vie - Lebenserwartung - esperanza de vida 0.1; 1.2; 13.3
life styles - modes de vie - Lebensstile - estilo de vida 13.1; 13.2; 13.4; 13.5; 13.6; 13.7; 13.8
limited partnership - societe en commandite simple - Kommanditgesellschaft
- sociedad en comandita 5.3
litigation - judiciarisation - Rechtsstreit - judicializacion 10.1
local autonomy - autonomie locale kommunale Selbstverwaltung - autonomia local 2.4
locality, identification by - localite, identification par - lokale Identifikation -
identification por localidad 2.1
lockout - lockout - Aussperrung - lockout 7.1
315
macro-economic trends - tendances macro-economiques - gesamtwirtschaftliche

(makrookonomische) Trends - tendencias macroeconomicas 0.2
magazine, readership - lecture de periodiques - Zeitschriftenleser - lectura de periodicos 13.2
majority rule - systeme majoritaire - Mehrheitswahlrecht - sistema mayoritario 11.1
managers - cadres - hohere und leitende Angestellte - directives 4.2
mandatory retirement - retraite obligatoire - Zwangspensionierung - jubilacion obligatoria 4.1
market goods and services - biens et services marchands - Marktgiiter
und Dienstleistungen - bienes y servicios mercantiles 13.1
marriage - mariage - Ehe - matrimonio 3.3
mass media - mass media - Massenmedien - medios de comunicacion de masas 9.5
matrimonial models - modeles matrimoniaux - Familienformen - modelos matrimoniales 3.3
mediation - mediation - Vermittlung - mediation 10.1
mental illnesses - maladies mentales - psychische Erkrankungen - enfermedades mentales 16.3
metropolitan areas - regions metropolitaines - Ballungsgebiete - areas metropolitanas 2.3
microsocial evolution - evolution microsociale - mikrosoziale Entwicklung -
evolution microsocial 2.1; 2.3; 2.4; 2.5; 2.6
middle classes - classes moyennes - Mittelschicht - clases medias 6.1;6.2;6.3;6.4
migration - migration - Migration - migration 0.1
military forces - forces militaires - Streitkrafte - fuerzas armadas 9.3
mobility, daily —> daily mobility
mobility, inter-generational —> inter-generational mobility
mobility, social —> social mobility
mood-altering substances - psychotropes - Rauschmittel - sustancias toxicas 13.8
mortality - mortalite - Sterblichkeit - mortalidad 0.1
mother tongue - langue maternelle - Muttersprache - lengua materna 0.1
multi-cultural society - multiculturalisme - multikulturelle Gesellschaft -
sociedad multicultural 16.1; 17.5
multiple employment - cumul d'emplois - Mehrfachbeschaftigung - pluriempleo 4.3
narcotics - narcotiques - Narkotikum - narcoticos 13.8

natality - natalite - Geburtenrate - natalidad 0.1
national identity - identite nationale - nationale Identitat - identidad nacional 17.5
negotiation - negotiation - Verhandlung - negotiation 7.2
neighbourhood - voisinage - Nachbarschaft - vecindad , 2.3
net reproduction rate - taux net de reproduction - Nettoreproduktionsrate
- tasa neta de reproduction 3.2
newspapers, readership - lecture de journaux - Zeitungsleser - lectura de periodicos 13.2
nonpecuniary benefits - avantages non-monetaires - Sachbeziige - beneficios no monetarios 12.1
norms of conduct - normes de conduite - Verhaltensnormen - normas de conducta 7.3
obedience - obeissance - Gehorsam - obediencia 7.4

occupational categories - categories socio-professionnelles - Berufsgruppen -
categorias ocupacionales 4.2
occupational status - statut socio-professionnel - berufliche Stellung T
(Berufsstatus) - status ocupacional 6.1
operatives - ouvriers specialises - Arbeiter - obreros especializados 4.2
opinion polls - sondages d'opinion - Meinungsumfragen - encuestas de opinion 7.5
orientations to the future - perceptions de 1'avenir - Zukunftsorientierungen -
orientaciones hacia el futuro 17.3
out-of-wedlock births - naissances hors mariage - nichteheliche Geburten -
nacimientos fuera del matrimonio 3.2
316
Lexicon
parades - defile's - festliche Umziige - desfiles 14.4

participation of workers - participation des salaries - Arbeitnehmerbeteiligung -
participation de los trabajadores 5.1
participatory management - gestion participative - partizipativer Fiihrungsstil -
gesti6n participateva 5.2
participatory sports - sports collectifs - Breitensport - ten-deportes de participacion 14.3
partnership - societe en partenariat - offene Handelsgesellschaft - sociedad por acciones 5.3
part-time employment - travail a temps partiel - Teilzeitbeschaftigung
- empleo a tiempo parcial 4.3
patents - brevets - Patente - patentes 0.3
peace movement - pacifisme - Friedensbewegung - pacifismo 10.3
perception of social problems - perception des problemes sociaux - Wahrnehmung
sozialer Probleme - percepci6n de los problemas sociales 17.2
permissiveness - permissivite - Permissivitat - permisividad 7.3
personnel administration - gestion du travail - Personalverwaltung, betriebliche -
administration de personal 5.2
personnel representative - delegue du personnel - Personalbeauftragter
- representante del personal 10.2
petty crime - petite delinquance - Bagatellekriminalitat - pequefia delincuencia 16.2
phonograph production - production de disques - Schallplattenproduktion
- production discogrdfica 14.4
physical exercise - exercices physiques - Fitnesstraining - ejercicios fisicos 13.3
political differentiation - differentiation politique - politische Differenzierung -
differentiation polftica 11.1
population - population - Bevolkerung - poblacidn 0.1
post-educational unemployment - chomage d'insertion - Arbeitslosigkeit beim Ubergang
von der Ausbildung in den Beruf - paro de insertion 4.1; 15.1
post-secondary education - enseignement superieur - Hochschulbildung
- ensenanza superior 8.1
poverty - pauvrete - Armut - pobreza 16.4
poverty line - seuil de pauvrete - Armutsgrenze - dintel de la pobreza 16.4
precarious employment - prdcarite - prekare BeschaTtigungsverhaltnisse
- empleo precario 1.1; 4.1; 4.3
pre-school education - 6cole maternelle - Vorschulerziehung - educacion preescolar 8.1
pressure groups - groupes de pression - Interessengruppe - grupos de presion 2.5; 10.2
prestige, occupational —> occupational prestige
primary education - education primaire - Grundschulbildung - educacion primaria 8.1
primary sector - secteur primaire - primarer Sektor - sector primario 4.4
private limited company (closed corporation) - societe a responsabilit6 limite'e -
Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung - sociedad limitada 5.3
private social agencies - assistance sociale - private Institutionen der Wohlfahrtspflege -
instituciones privadas de beneficencia 8.3
professionals - professions liberales(F)/professionnels(Q) - Freiberufler - profesionales 4.2
profit sharing - participation aux benefices - Gewinnbeteiligung - participacion en beneficios 5.2
property crime - crimes contre la propriete - Eigentumskriminalitat
- delitos contra la propiedad 16.2
proportional representation - systeme proportionnel - Verhaltniswahlrecht -
representation proporcional 11.1
public debt - dette publique - offentliche Schulden - deuda publica 0.2
public deficit - deficit budgetaire - Staatsverschuldung - deficit piiblico 0.2
public opinion - opinion publique - offentliche Meinung - opinion publica 7.5
publications - publications - Veroffentlichungen - publicaciones 0.3
purchasing power - pouvoir d'achat - Kaufkraft - poder de compra 12.1
317
qualifications (labour market) - qualifications (marche du travail)

- (berufliche) Qualification - cualificaciones labourales 4.2
R&D —> research and development - recherche et developpement

radicalism - extremisme - Radikalismus - radicalismo 11.4
radio listenership - ecoute de la radio - Radiohorerschaft - audiencia radiofonica 13.2
real property - propriete immobiliere - Immobilienvermogen - propiedad inmobiliaria 12.3
recurrent unemployment - chomage recurrent - periodisch wiederkehrende Arbeitslosigkeit -
paro recurrente 4.1; 15.1
regional movements - mouvements regionaux - regionale Bewegungen
- movimientos regionales 10.3
religious beliefs - croyances religieuses - religiose Uberzeugungen - creencias religiosas 11.5
religious institutions - institutions religieuses - religiose Institutionen -
en-instituciones religiosas 9.2
religious sects - sectes religieuses - religiose Sekten - sectas religiosas 11.5
reproductive technologies - technologies de la reproduction -
Technologien zur kiinstlichen Befruchtung und Empfa'ngnisverhutung -
tecnologfas de la reproduction 3.5
research and development - recherche et developpement - Forschung und Entwicklung -
investigation y desarrollo 0.3
retail prices - prix de detail - Einzelhandelspreise - precios al por menor 0.2
re-urbanization - reurbanisation - Reurbanisierung - reurbanizacion 2.3
rurbanization - rurbanisation - Stadtflucht - rurbanizacion 2.3
satisfaction - satisfaction - Zufriedenheit - satisfaction 17.1

savings - epargne - Ersparnisse - ahorro 0.2, 12.3
seasonal employment - travail saisonnier - Saisonarbeit - empleo estacional 4.3
second homes - residences secondaires - Zweitwohnungen bzw. hauser -
viviendas secundarias 2.3
secondary education - education secondaire - hohere Bildung - education secundaria 8.1
secondary sector - secteur secondaire - sekundarer Sektor - sector secundario 4.4
sectors of the labour force - secteurs d'emplois - Beschaftigungsbereiche - sectores labourales 4.4
sects --> religious sects
securities - litres - Wertpapiere - valores 12.3
self-identification - auto-identification - Identifikation - autoidentificacion 2.1
self-management - auto gestion - Selbstverwaltung - autogestion 5.1
service-producing sector - secteur des services - Dienstleistungssektor - sector de servicios 4.4
sex ratio - ratio entre les sexes - Geschlechterrelation - razon entre los sexos 0.1
sexual practices - pratiques sexuelles - Sexualpraktiken - practicas sexuales 13.7
single-parent families - families monoparentales - Ein-Eltern-Familie
- familias monoparentales 3.3
skilled worker —> craftsman
skills of workers - qualifications des travailleurs - berufliche Qualifikation -
cualiificaciones de los trabajadores 4.2
small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) - petites et moyennes entreprises (PME) -
kleine und mittlere Unternehmen (KMU) - empresas
medianas y pequenas (PYME) 5.3
sociability - sociabilite - Soziabilitat - sociabilidad 2.6
318
Lexicon
social class - classe sociale - soziale Schicht - clase social 2.1; 6.1; 6.2; 6.3; 6.4
social elections - elections professionnelles - Betriebsrats
- und Sozialversicherungswahlen - elecciones sociales 7.5
social inequality - inegalites sociales - soziale Ungleichheit - desigualdad social 6.4
social mobility - mobilite sociale - soziale Mobilitat - movilidad social 6.2
social movements - mouvements sociaux - soziale Bewegungen - movimientos sociales 10.3
social relations - relations sociales - soziale Beziehungen - relaciones sociales 7.1; 7.2; 7.3;.7.4; 7.5
social stratification - stratification sociale - soziale Schichtung -
estratificacion social 6.1; 6.2; 6.3; 6.4
source of income —> income, source of
specialized press - presse specialised - Fachpresse - prensa especializada 13.2
spectator sports - sports de spectacle - Zuschauersport - deportes espectaculo 14.3
state, presence of in society - presence de 1'Etat dans la societe - Prasenz des Staates in der
Gesellschaft - presencia del Estado en la sociedad 8.4
status groups - groupes sociaux - Statusgruppen - grupos de status 6.4
status, occupational —> occupational status
steady employment - emplois stables - stabile Beschaftigungsverhaltnisse - empleos estables 4.3
sterilization - sterilisation - Sterilisierung - esterilizacion 3.5
stratification.social —> social stratification
strike - greve - Streik - huelga 7.1
structural mobility - mobilite structurelle - strukturelle Mobilitat - movilidad estructural 6.2
subcontracting - soustraitance - Einsatz von Subunternehmern - subcontratacion 5.3
subsidized employment experience - stages d'insertion - ArbeitsbeschaffungsmaKnahmen -
etapas de insercion 4.3
suicide - suicide - Selbsmord (Suizid) - suicidio 16.3
sun bathing - bronzage - Sonnenbaden - bafio de sol 13.3
support network - reseaux d'entraide - Unterstiitzungsnetzwerke (private) - red de apoyo 2.6
teachers - enseignants - Lehrer - maestro 8.1

television viewing - ecoute de la television - Fernsehkonsum - audiencia de la television 13.2
temporary work - travail interimaire - Zeitarbeit - trabajo temporal 4.3
tertiary sector - secteur tertiaire - tertiarer Sektor - sector terciario 4.4
time-and-motion studies - etudes de temps et mouvements - arbeitswissenschaftliche
(Zeit-) Studien - estudios de tiempos y movimientos 5.1
time budget - budget-temps - Zeitbudget - presupuestos de tiempo 13.4
time use - emploi du temps - Zeitverwendung - uso del tiempo 13.4
total fertility rate - indice synthetique de fecondite - Fruchtbarkeitsrate
- tasa total de fecundidad 3.2
tourist travel - voyages touristiques - touristische Reisen - viajes turisticos 14.2
trade balance - balance commerciale - Handelsbilanz - balanza comercial 0.2
trade unions --> labour unions
tranquillizers - tranquillisants - Beruhigungsmittel - tranquilizantes 13.8
transfer income - revenus de transfer! - Transfereinkommen - transferencias de renta 12.1
transfer payments - transferts sociaux - staatliche Transferzahlungen -
pagos por transferencias del Estado 6.3
types of enterprises - types d'entreprises - Unternehmenstypen - tipos de empresas 5.3
unearned income - revenu du patrimoine - Kapitaleinkiinfte - rentas de patrimonio 12.3

unemployment - chomage - Arbeitslosigkeit - paro 4.1
unemployment severity index - indice de gravite de chomage - Index der Belastung durch
Arbeitslosigkeit - fndice de gravedad del paro 4.1
319
vacation patterns - vacances - Urlaubsformen - vacaciones 14.2

values - valeurs - Werte - valores 17.4
violence - violence - Gewalt - violencia 7.1
violent crime - crimes avec violence - Gewaltkriminalitat - delitos violentos 16.2
vocational education - formation professionnelle - berufliche Bildung - formaci6n profesional 15.2
volatile electorate - Electoral volatile - Wechselwahler - electorado volatil 11.1
volunteer work - beneVolat - ehrenamtliche Tatigkeit - trabajo voluntario 2.5; 8.3
wages - salaires - Lohne - salaries 12.1

wealth - patrimoine - Vermogen - patrimonio 12.3
wealth - richesse - Vermogen - riqueza 6.3
welfare state - Etat providence - Wohlfahrtsstaat - Estado de bienestar 8.3
welfare system - protection sociale - Wohlfahrtssystem (Sozialhilfe
und 'freie Wohlfahrtspflege) -sistema de bienestar 8.3
white-collar crime - crimes de cols blancs - weiBe-Kragen-Kriminalitat (white collar crime) -
delitos de cuello bianco 16.2
wholesale prices - prix de gros - GroBhandelspreise - precios al por mayor 0.2
word processing - traitement de textes - Textverarbeitung - tratamiento de textos 4.5
work at home - travail & la maison - Heimarbeit - trabajo en casa 3.4
work organization - organisation du travail - Arbeitsorganisation - organizacion del trabajo 5.1
worfc teams - equipes de travail - Arbeitsgruppen - equipos de trabajo 5.1
years of schooling - dur6e des etudes - Studiendauer - duracion de los estudios 1.1
youth - jeunesse - Jugend - juventud 1.1
320
Author index
Adams, Bert N. 119 Castelain-Meunier, Christine 63

Allan Michaud, Dominique 263 Chadwick, Bruce A. 173
Almond, Gabriel A. 234 Chesnais, Jean-Claude 79
Alvin, Duane 97 Christensen, Bryce J. 160
Cicirelli, Victor G. 143
Ardagh, John 145 Clark, Colin 100
Armingeon, Klaus 202 Clement, Gabriel 176
Atchley, Robert C. 118 Cochran, Moncrieff 149
Augustins, Georges 120 Cohler, Bertram J. 157
Bacot, Jean-Pierre 173 Commaille, Jacques 145
Bahr, Howard M. 173 Coser, Lewis 225
Baillargeon, Jean-Paul 182 Coser, Lewis A. 123
Baldock, John 151, 152 Cowgill, Donald O. 118, 119, 143, 156
Barer, Barbara M. 118 Cribier, Francoise 139, 145, 146
Barker, Paul 155 Crozier, Michel 229
Beland. Fran9ois 154 Cutler, Neal E. 118
Belanger, Andre J. 176 Czarnocki, Bogdan 82
Bellah, Robert N. 195 Dahrendorf, Ralf 244
Bengtson, Vern L. 118,157 Davis, Kingsley 56, 83
Bergeron, Richard 184 Davis, Nathalie Z. 145
Bibby, Reginald W. 181 De Brie, Christian 259
Blood, Robert O. Jr. 118, 120, 122 De Vos, Susan 128
Bluestone, Barry 102 Dechaux, Jean-Hugues 120, 146, 252 ;
Boudon, Raymond 269, 299 Degenne, Alain 146
Bourguignon, Odile 139 Del Campo, Salustiano 71
Bradbury, Katherine L. 102 Delage, Denys 153
Brand, Karl-Werner 248 Demerath, N.J. Ill 194
Brand, Ruth 148 Dershowitz, Alan M. 193
Braun, Michael 97 Diewald, Martin 149
Brody, Elaine M. 129 Dim, Louis 270
Buchtemann, Christoph F. 103 Dobbelaere, Karel 173
Bumpass, Larry 83 Dumont, Fernand 176
Bungener, M. 147 Elias, Norbert 226
Calame, Andre 74 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 160
Caldwell, Gary 82 Esser, Josef 257
Caldwell, John C. 51, 56, 61, 83 Evers, Adalbert 151, 152
Calot, Grand J. 49, 74 Fagnani, Jeanne 63
Cantor, Marjorie H. 120 Falardeau, J.-C. 152
Caplow, Theodore 61, 98, 173, 174, Falwell, Jerry 195
216, 220, 222, 233, 236, 240, 250, 256, 261 Fiedler, Maria 74
321
Forse, Michel 174, 270, 273, 274, 297 Kirk, Dudley 82

Fourastier, Jean 100 Kitschelt, Herbert 250, 251, 256
Franz, Wolfgang 104 Kivett, ViraR. 118, 119
Frechet, Guy 82, 248, 254 Klages, Helmut 65
Freeman, Richard B. 94, 107 Kockeis, E. 137
Fuchs, Dieter 261 Kohli, Martin 97
Gagnon, Nicole 175 Konig, Heinz 104
Galbraith, V.L. 82 Kornblum, William 123
Galtung, Johan 252 Krupp, Hans-Jiirgen 101
Ganzert, Jeanette 148 Lamontagne, Maurice 152
Garigue, Philip 153 Landis, Jean M. 68
Gauthier, Herve 155 Lang, Abigail 129
Gauthier, Madeleine 184 Langlois, Simon 61, 174, 262, 273
Gelfand, Donald E. 151 Lawrence, Robert Z. 98, 102
Gershuny, Jonathan 71, 101 Le Bras, Herve 144
Gitschmann, Peter 150 Lebeaux, Marie-Odile 146
Glatzer, Wolfgang 148, 174, 260 Lebert, Ursula 71
Glotzner, Johannes 201 Lee, Gary R. 135
Gommers, Adriene 117 Leggewie, Claus 252, 256, 257
Gottelmann, Gabrielle 231 Lehmbruch, Gerhard 231
Greeley, Andrew M. 173 Lehr, Ursula 150
Greschat, Martin 201 Leibowitz, Arleen 76
Grignon, Michel 71 Leroy, D. 49, 74
Guillemard, Anne-Marie 97,117 Lesthaeghe, Ron 44, 54, 61, 65, 73, 80, 83
Gunnarsson, Lars 149 Liebman, Robert C. 197
Haller, Archibald O. 155 Lipset, Seymour M. 199
Hamelin, Jean 175,176 Lodh, Francoise 82
Hankenne, Bernadette 117 Loveman, Gary W. 98
Harris, C.C. 121, 123, 135 Lowy, Louis 150
Harris, Louis 119, 156 Luscher, Kurt 132, 147, 148
Harrison, Bennett 102 Maier, Hans 200
Hauschild, W.D. 204 Malinvaud, Edward 103, 106
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 200 Marchand, Olivier 108
Heller, P.L. 120 Mathews, G. 155
Henripin, Jacques 68 McCarthy, John D. 248, 251
Henslin, James M. 124 Medoff, J. 94
Herberg 195 Mendras, Henri 216, 217, 229, 297
Hervieu-Leger, Daniele 173, 192 Miller, S.J. 118
Hill, T.P. 101 Milot, Micheline 177
Hirschman, Albert 228 Modell, John 56, 65
Hoem, Jan M. 83 Montminy, Jean-Paul 184
Hohn, Charlotte 132, 147, 148 Myles, John 102
Hollenstein, Giinther 201 Nave-Herz, Rosemarie 67
Holznagel, Bernd 255 Neidhardt, Friedhelm 148, 151
Hopfinger, Francois 68 Noelle-Neuman, Elisabeth 204
Hunter, James Davison 206 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth 148, 205
Jackson, J.J. 120 Noll, Heinz-Herbert 103
Jacobs, Klaus 97 Oommen, T.K. 248
Joel, M.-E. 147 Ouellet, Aubert 154
Joffe, Carole 75 Palloni, Alberto 128
Johnson, Colleen Leahy 118 Patel, Kent 195
322
Author index
Patterson, Keith 155 Stone, Leroy O. 153

Pfeil, Elisabeth 148 Streib, Gordon F. 156
Phillips, 102 Surkyn, Johan 54, 61, 65, 73, 80, 83
Picot, Garnett 102 Sussman, Marvin B. 118, 122, 142
Piel, Edgar 66, 204 Suzuki, Tatsuzo 206
Piermont, Dorothee 259 Sylvain, Philippe 175
Pilant, Denny 195 Talmon, Yonina 122
Popenoe, David 56, 61 Tarrow, Sidney 248, 250
Quack, Sigrid 103 Taylor, Charles Lewis 228
Quesada, G.M. 120 Taylor, Robert Joseph 119, 120
Rammstedt, O. 248 Thery, Irene 146
Reichley, A. James 193 Thibeault, Normand 82
Rein, Martin 97 Thomas, D.S. 82
Ridler.'Neil B. 155 Thompson, Wayne E. 156
Rioux, Marcel 152 Thornton, Arland 69, 72
Robbins, Thomas 173 Tilly, Chris 98
Roberge, Andree 153 Tocqueville, Alexis de 229
Roberts, Keith A. 173 Tohariz, Jose Juan 67
Robertson, Roland 173 Touraine, Alain 248, 252
Robinson, John P. 71 Townsend, Peter 118
Rocher, Guy 184 Treas, Judith 156
Rochon, Madeleine 49 Troll, Lillian E. 118
Rogowski, Beatrice 117 Unger, Irwin 194
Rose, Gary 195 Vaillancourt, Jean-Guy 249, 254
Rosenmayr, Leopold 137 Van de Kaa, Dirk J. 117, 132, 135, 144, 161
Rosenthal, Carolyn J. 153 Veil, Mechthild 150
Rossi, Alice S. 121, 128, 134, 139 Verba, Sidney 234
Rossi, Peter H. 121, 128, 134, 139 Veroff, Joseph 65, 67, 69
Roth, Roland 248, 253 Voisine, Nive 175
Rouillard, Jacques 177 Waite, Linda J. 76
Roussel, Louis 139, 146 Wannell, Ted 102
Roy, Marie-Andree 178, 179 Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe 134
Rucht, Dieter 248, 249, 251-254, 261 Wilkens, E. 204
Rudolph, Helmut 103 Williams, Rhys H. 194
Sasaki, Masamichi 206 Willmott, Peter 118
Schenk, Harald 201 Wills, Gary 193, 198
Schumacher, Jiirgen 70 Wilson, Bryan 173
Schumann, Jutta 150 Witsberger, Christina 76
Schwarz, Karl 137 Wojtkiewicz, Roger A. 134
Scott, Jacqueline 97 Worndl, Barbara 248, 253
Segalen, Marline 145 Wuthnow, Robert 197
Shanas, Ethel 118-120,142,156 Yanigasako, Sylvia Junko 118
Simmel, Georg 225, 235 Young, Michael 118
Simon, Rita J. 68 Yule, G.U. 82
Smyer, Michael A. 116, 121, 149, 157 Zald, Mayer N. 248, 251
Spence, Michele 156 Zapf, Wolfgang 203
Stearns, Peter N. 144 Zylberberg, Jacques 184
Stoetzel, Jean 67
323
Subject index
Abortion 51, 59, 132, 177, 201 dependency 143

Anomie 277, 284, 286, 295 depression 176
Associations 9, 185, 188, 229, 239, 251, 253 development 6, 298
Authority 10, 64, 215, 218, 229, 296 domestic 75, 122
Baby boom 6, 44, 79 market economy 233
Beliefs 181, 188, 198, 203 production 283
Births 14, 56, 132, 240 recession 104
Capitalism 124, 241 tertiarization 89, 97, 100
Centralization 37, 256, 294, 299, 300 Education 51, 61, 216
Child care 16, 72, 76, 240 church influence 186
Church 13, 175, 185, 194, 200 religion 12, 177, 196, 201
Clergy 182, 189, 198, 204, 218 Elders 16, 118, 129, 138, 142, 208, 286
Co-residence 119, 135, 153 Environment 178, 203, 240, 247
Communism 233, 257, 294 Ethnicity 20, 38, 119, 221, 232, 236
Computerization 29, 89, 276 Family 67, 216
Conduct (norms of) 64, 150, 276, 287 model 63, 69, 120
Confidence 37, 199, 233, 286, 288 network 15, 25, 115, 118, 139, 143, 152
Conflict 8, 185, 225, 294 policy 15, 74, 146, 147, 154
ethnic 236 structure 13, 68, 134
gender role 241 Fertility 5, 7, 13, 19, 43, 119, 129, 132
generational 146 French revolution 185
labour 9, 234 Generation 15, 68, 80, 95, 103, 115, 187, 220,
religion 234 286
resolution 228 Gross domestic product 126
Consumption 126, 216, 283, 286, 295 Household work 15, 69, 71, 101, 150, 216
Contraception 51, 59, 177 Identity 13, 18, 232, 287, 291
Criminality 177, 226, 236 Income
Culture 13, 63, 80, 119, 177, 185, family 74, 156, 219, 242, 286
206, 228, 238, 251, 282 personal 7, 286
Decentralization 276, 283, 294, 300 Industrialization 36, 62, 123, 173, 194, 216,
Deindustrialization 7, 17, 98 232, 250
Democracy 186, 200, 216, 225, 233, 245, 288 Inequalities 286, 291
Differentiation 124, 147, 219, 234, 249 between age groups 106
Discrimination 151, 235 between sexes 70, 93, 106, 129, 218
Divorce 57, 78, 132, 201 income 77, 220
Ecological movement 239, 247 Institutionalization 5, 147, 255, 296
Economy Institutions 176, 184, 195, 201, 206, 215, 282
business 239, 263 Intellectual 192, 239
325
Kindergarten 75 Social consensus 19, 233, 288, 296, 299

Kinship 25, 37, 115 Social control 294
Labour Social disorganization 286
labour force 11, 70, 91, 93 Social evolution 23
labour market 16,89,217,295 Social indicators 27
labour-union 177, 187 Social movement 197, 202
Levels of living 242 Socialism 158, 230, 234, 241
Life styles 287, 300 State 200, 288, 289
Life-expectancy 129 conflict resolution 229
Marriage 54, 62, 68, 78, 131, 177 education 176
* fertility 14, 49 governmental aid 149
religion 181, 189, 203 social-insurance 151, 156
Mass media 181, 190, 204, 255, 262, 287, 288 Stratification 8,31,38,219,299
Microsbcial 287, 289 Technology 4, 80, 101, 216, 226, 240, 244,
Mobilization 31,248,251,256,261 251
Modernization 4, 29, 63, 83, 123, 134, 174, Trend
206, 226, 287 definition 270
Mortality 122, 128 list of 41
Mutual aid 118, 141, 145, 148, 153, 156 Unemployment 17, 95, 104, 238, 294
Networks 15, 25, 67, 76, 115, 144, 185, 251, Urbanization 123, 134, 298
287 Values 10, 14, 64, 120, 154, 186, 221, 238,
Nuclear 227 260
arsenal 237 Violence 9, 221, 226, 251, 253, 291
energy 251 Wealth 54, 75, 220, 222, 242, 243, 272, 277,
protest 253 286
Oil-price shock 104 Welfare 149, 177, 196, 201, 238, 283
Parenthood 69 Women
Political change 36 feminism 80, 241
Political parties 202, 233, 238 kinship 121
ecological party 253, 258 roles 68, 150, 160, 179, 240, 286, 292, 298,
Poverty 77, 153, 174, 178, 184, 194, 205, 236, 299
242 Women's employment 57, 70
Power 9, 12, 131, 175, 192, 203, 217, 226, fertility 14, 51
237, 251, 277, 282 participation rate 93, 95
Precariousness 102, 108, 284, 291 Work organization 288
Private life 191 Youth 277
Public opinion 288 education 70
Quiet revolution in Quebec 174, 176, 184, 289 fertility 47
Religion 6, 11, 173 labour 17, 59, 70, 94, 102
Rights 119, 146, 151, 186, 232, 241 marriage 54
minorities 178, 236 movements 7, 254
movements 197 precariousness 103
Secularization 11, 13, 64, 173, 221 religion 179, 186
Social change analysis 1, 24, 269 values 238
Social class 8, 36, 120, 219, 220, 231, 289,
300
326
The Authors
Howard M. Bahr is a professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, Utah. His recent interests
include social change, Native American studies, and urban sociology. He is the co-author of Social
Science Research Methods (1984) and the forthcoming Contemporary Navajo Bibliography.
Gary Caldwell, an independent researcher, is interested in questions of fertility, migration and political
culture in Quebec and Canada. His upcoming publications are Immigration Incorporation in Montreal
in the Seventies and "Social Change in Contemporary Quebec".
Theodore Caplow is the Commonwealth Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He is

the author of Peace Games (1989) and American Social Trends (1991), and the senior author of Recent
Social Trends in the United States, 1960-1990 (1991).
Bruce Chadwick is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Studies of the Family at
Brigham Young University, Utah. He has conducted research on a variety of topics, including
education, family, juvenile delinquency, race relations, religion, and social change. He is the author
of Statistical Handbook on the American Family (1992).
Jean-Hugues Dechaux is an associate professor of sociology at 1'Universite Rene-Descartes, in Paris.

He is interested in family studies, and he has authored many articles.
Salustiano Del Campo is the chairman of the Department of Social Structure at the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid and secretary general of the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences. His most recent book is La nuevafamilia espahola (1992).
Michel Forse is a professor of sociology at the University of Lille. He recently published L'ordre
improbable (1989) and L'analyse structurelle du changement social (1991). Currently, he is working
on social network and social change.
327
Guy Frechet is project manager on social research (Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services)
and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, at Laval University, Quebec. His topics
of interest are social and technological change, sociology of work, and quantitative methods.
Madeleine Gauthier is a researcher and a member of the executive board of the Institut quebecois
de recherche sur la culture. She is the author of books and papers on religion, poverty, and youth, and
recently published Les jeunes chomeurs. She is currently working on a book on youth.
Wolfgang Glatzer is professor of Sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat at

Frankfurt/Main. In the last years he published books on Household Technization and Division of
Labour, Modernization of Modern Societies, Developmental Tendencies of Social Structure, Living
Conditions in Germany, Attitudes and Living Conditions in Europe.
Karl-Otto Hondrich is a professor of sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat at

Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is the author of Lehrmeister Krieg (1992) and Solidartat in de Modern
Gesellsheft (Solidarity in Modern Sociology) (1992), as well as several books on social change,
differentiation, conflicts, and authority.
Renata Hornung-Drauss is a sociologist currently working in Brussels for the European Community
Commission.
Louis Hourmant is a research assistant in the Observatoire franâis de conjoncture economique in

Paris. He is currently working on European values in a comparative perspective.
Simon Langlois is a professor of sociology at Laval University, Quebec, and a research director at
FInstitut quebecois de recherche sur la culture. He is co-editor of a handbook on social problems,
Traite des problemes sociaux (1994). He is presently the secretary of the International Group for
Comparative Charting of Social Change.
Yannick Lemel is the head of the Observatoire Economique de Paris, INSEE, in Paris, and the
director of a research group on households and ways of living at IRESCO, Paris. He has published
Stratification et mobilite sociale (1991).
Henri Mendras is the research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and at the
OFCE (Paris). He also teaches at the Institut de science politique in Paris. He has published numerous
books and papers, including La fin des pay sans (new edition 1992) and La seconde revolution
franfaise (1988).
328
The Authors
John Modell is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He has worked on
the history of youth, and he is the author of Into One's Own (1989). He is currently working on a
comparative historical analysis of education.
Heinz-Herbert Noll is the director of the Social Indicators Department of the Zentrum fur Umfragen,
Methoden und Analysen (ZUMA) at Mannheim, Germany. He is presently engaged in research on
social inequality and indicators of well-being. He is the author of numerous articles and the editor of
books on social indicators and the quality of life.
Karin Stiehr was working as a social researcher at the University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany, when
she joined the CCSC Group. As well, she is a co-owner of the Institut fur Soziale Infrastruktur,
Frankfurt/Main, and specializes on conceptualizing social and labour-market policies. She published
books and articles about modern societal risks as well as the effects of social change on women's
living and working conditions.
Barbara Worndl works as a senior researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of
Frankfurt/Main, Germany. She is currently working on social conflicts about modern environmental
risks and the dynamics of social change. She is the author of articles on these topics.
329
Series
COMPARATIVE CHARTING OF SOCIAL CHANGE
Editor: Simon Langlois

Laval University and IQRC, Canada
Recent Social Trends in the United States 1960-1990.

Theodore Caplow, Howard M. Bahr, John Modell, Bruce A. Chadwick
Recent Social Trends in Quebec 1960-1990.

Simon Langlois, Jean-Paul Baillargeon, Gary Caldwell, Guy Frechet, Madeleine
Gauthier, Jean-Pierre Simard
Recent Social Trends in France 1960-1990.

Michel Forse, Jean-Pierre Jaslin, Yannick Lemel, Henri Mendras, Jean-Hugues
Dechaux
Recent Social Trends in The Federal Republic of Germany 1960-1990.

Wolfgang Glatzer, Karl-Otto Hondrich, Heinz-Herbert Noll, Karin Stiehr, Barbara
Worndl
(In preparation)
Recent Social Trends in Spain 1960-1990.

Salustiano Del Campo et alii.
Recent Social Trends in Italy 1960-1990.

Alberto Martinelli, Antonio Chiesi, Sonia Stefanizzi
(Work in Progress)
Recent Social Trends in Greece 1960-1990.
Recent Social Trends in Russia 1960-1990.

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Convergence or Divergence?

Comparative Charting of Social Change

Campus Verlag • Frankfurt am Main

Main entry under title:

1. Social change. 2. Social evolution.

HN17.S.C66 1995 303.4 C94-900290-9

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Convergence or Divergence? Comparing recent social trends in

The Group received indispensable financial support from many

1 Introduction. Convergence or Divergence? 1

2 Is There a Single Pattern of Social Evolution? 23

3 Differing Levels of Low Fertility 43

4 Employment and Labour-Market Change: 89

5 The Changing Bonds of Kinship: Parents and Adult Children 115

6 Trends in Religion and Secularization 173

7 The Reduction of Personal Authority 215

8 Conflicts and Conflict Regulation 225

9 Institutionalization Tendencies 247

10 Comparative Structural Analysis of Social Change 269

Author Index 321

COMPARATIVE CHARTING OF SOCIAL TRENDS

An understanding of this relationship is essential if we want to interpret social

native-born population is actually declining, and decline is imminent in Quebec. The

CONVERGENCE AND SINGULARITIES

of subordinates is now considered essential. The French, American, and German

Caplow, Theodore, Howard M. Bahr, John Modell, and Bruce A. Chadwick

SYSTEMATIC AND CONTEXTUAL COMPARISON

In Appendix 2, we present the table with which we worked, which we have

to be equivalent to that in another, even though component indicators were likely to

TWO STYLES OF TREND REPORTS: SOCIOLOGICAL ESSAYS

HOW COMMON AN EVOLUTION?

BASIC SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND FORMS OF ENACTMENT

2.2 Kinship Networks

OVERALL DEGREE OF SIMILARITY

HOW ALIKE IS THE CHANGE IN EACH SOCIETY?

Caplow, Theodore, Howard M. Bahr, John Modell, and Bruce A. Chadwick

8.2 Health System

17. Attitudes and Values

1.1 A new transitional phase between school and work + + + +

8.1 Extended education, often together with occasional work + + + +

OVERVIEW OF POSTWAR FERTILITY

Year France Germany Quebec U.S. Spain

1960 2,73 2,36 3,86 3,65 2,90

Fertility evolves, obviously, in a social context. Various dimensions of the context

THE COMPARATIVE EVOLUTION OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS

Year France Germany3 Quebecb U.S.C Spain"

1960 21,0 _ 39,7 _

a Germany: % of school leavers without gr. 9 certification.

disadvantages of various choices become more apparent. Meanwhile, the increase in

9 With regard to this apparent rise, cf. note 4.

further evidence of the existence of a cultural modernization process that affects

VALUE CHANGE AND SOCIETAL SPECIFICITY

Convincing explanations for fertility change on a macrosocial level can be found in

humanistic values, mental-health criteria, or extreme individualism (doing one's

THE CHANGED ROLE OF WOMEN

Women in particular must (consciously or unconsciously) decide to which ties they

the promised compensations for relinquishing motherhood. In all societies compared,

represented the typical three-phase-model, with women interrupting employment in

Av. Age Av. Age Crude % Births to Average Temporal