Social Structure and Self-direction

This text presents the results of a major research project on the relationship between social structures and personal values in both capitalist and socialist societies. Based on original empirical work and using new and sophisticated cross-national methodologies, it gives a comparative interpretation of the links between social class and social stratification, working conditions and personality in the US and Poland. Melvin Kohn's earlier work "Class and Conformity" is commonly regarded as a classic in the field, providing an exploration of the causal connection between social stratification and values in terms of the close relationship between social stratification and the conditions of work that facilitate or restrict occupational self-direction. This new work aims to go beyond this, integrating an entire corpus of research and interpretation into a generalized model of the social structure and personality relationship in industrialized societies, demonstrating the key role of social class, and developing an innovative method for cross-rational comparative inquiry.