Cultural Transition of Human Values—A Longitudinal Study on East–West Migration in Germany

Eric Holdack (), Rico Bornschein () and Silko Pfeil ()
Additional contact information
Eric Holdack: HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management
Rico Bornschein: HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management
Silko Pfeil: HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management

A chapter in Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being, 2021, pp 77-94 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Individuals born within one generation are assumed to share a common identity resulting in similar personal values throughout their impressionable pre-adult years. Specific political, economic, social, technological, ecological, and legal conditions leading to common experiences characterize these pre-adult years. The resulting beliefs and values are perceived to remain relatively stable throughout human lifetimes. Simultaneously, social and technical changes in the last decades turned out to be exponentially proportional to the rate at which humans exchange information. Humans increasingly experience rapidly changing living conditions, which holds for regions with a high net inward migration. This confrontation raises the question of the extent to which personal values are changed by experiencing rapid modernization after the impressionable pre-adult years. Our results are the first longitudinal evidence for an accelerated shift towards post-materialism associated with migration from East to West Germany. The duration until a transition to post-materialism is shorter for East–West Movers compared to East Stayers. We find the confrontation with more available social capital and related social norms to result in leaps in post-materialism on an individual level. Consequently, drastic changes in living conditions can be assumed to alter an individual’s value orientation.

Keywords: East–West migration; Personal value change; Post-materialism; Social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:socchp:978-3-030-75813-4_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030758134

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-75813-4_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Societies and Political Orders in Transition from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().