Change and Stability: A Cross-National Analysis of Social Structure and Personality (review)

Change and Stability is the culmination of more than five decades of research conducted by Melvin Kohn, one of the most influential scholars working in the social structure and personality tradition. The overarching theme of the SSP paradigm is that social-structural location – whether one’s social class, national origin or political context – shapes one’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. An explicit goal of SSP scholarship is to identify the pathways linking macro-social structures with micro-level outcomes, including personality, values and attitudes. One of Kohn’s most valuable contributions is explicating the proximate pathways that link the macro and micro: he has demonstrated persuasively that the nature of one’s social and occupational roles, particularly the opportunity to practice self-direction and intellectual flexibility, account for part of the link between social stratification and personality.

In Change and Stability, Kohn and his nine collaborators, including Carmi Schooler and Kazimierz Slomczynski, further explore the ways that social stratification, broadly defined, affects personality in four distinctive political and economic contexts. They evaluate four hypotheses that build directly upon Kohn’s earlier research, based on U.S. samples. First, social class is a relevant and influential concept in both capitalist and non-capitalist societies. Second, social class and social stratification are conceptually and empirically distinct. Third, social class position has similar psychological consequences across different cultural contexts, where persons with the richest socioeconomic resources also are the most intellectually flexible and self-directed in their daily activities. Finally, the psychological effects of “social class” and “social stratification” are identical.

To investigate these hypotheses, Kohn and colleagues contrasted the United States and Japan, examples of stable capitalist social structures, with Poland and Ukraine, exemplars of societies in the midst of political and economic change. The selection of the latter two sites was both purposeful and serendipitous; at the time that Kohn and his collaborators began their work, both nations were transitioning from “socialism to nascent capitalism.” Overall, the analyses reveal remarkable similarities across social and political contexts, although Kohn offers a highly nuanced discussion of differences detected across contexts. For example, while the direction of the relationship between class and occupational self-direction was the same for all four societies studied, the magnitude of the effect was much greater in Poland than in the Ukraine. At the time of their data collection, Poland already had a well-established and flourishing private sector, yet the Ukraine was still in the midst of political and economic instability.

Scholars may quibble with specific analytic decisions within each empirical study and the style of presentation. Some readers may want fewer data-intensive tables showing correlations and regression coefficients, and a richer description of the study populations. These descriptions might include detailed portraits of the workplace settings studied, greater attention to the compositional differences of the populations and subgroups studied, or even open-ended data that reveal the workers’ (and managers’) perceptions and interpretations of their work situations. Methodologists may call for greater attention to non-recursive relationships among attributes of the social structure and personality. Political sociologists may want a fuller discussion of the political and economic contexts characterizing each of the nation-states studied here.

Finally, some may ask what the “value-added” is of the book, given that six of the eight chapters are slightly revised or expanded versions of studies that have previously appeared in academic journals including American Sociological Review. I would argue that the “value-added” reflects two important strengths of the book. First, the whole is clearly greater than the sum of its parts. In presenting multiple cross-national analyses in a single volume, Kohn provides compelling evidence in support of the generality of his thesis: position in the larger social structure affects (and is affected by) personality, and similar proximate conditions, particularly job conditions, affect the outcomes of intellectual flexibility, self-directedness and psychological well-being.

Second, the book’s introduction, concluding chapter (entitled “Reflections”) and...