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Introduction:

Social Values are underlying attitudes to behaviours and beliefs in a socieity at a given time and place. Here are explanations for terms you should be aware of:

Social Values:

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Social Values

Social Values are underlying atttitudes that a society hold at a give place and time.

Social Values may remain static over a long period of time or they may change in relatively short periods.

Social Values are NOT things like gender, race, justice, mateship, relationships (marriage), war, education; Social Values are ATTITUDES towards those things.

Social Values are generally discussed in five main terms - some of these value types can overlap:

Dominant - the majority of people believe in the value at a given time.

Traditional - Social Values that the majority of people have held over a very long period of time.

Emerging - Social Values thet are begining to become dominant. A large percentage of the population may believe in the value but there is some opposition in certain section of the community.

Alternative - Social Values that only a small number people belive in, These values might be new and over time they may become emerging or dominant.

Oppositional - Social Values that only a small number of people hold and they are in direct opposition to the values that a reasonable person might hold.

Examples

Dominant -

Mateship or Friendship. This is a partucularly strong SV in Australian society with men in particular openly expressing there feels towards each other. It is expressed through things like male team sports and attending games with friends, going to the pub after work with fellow workers, gathering arround a BBQ with friends after helping friends move house. Friendship between women is usually less overt, but women may go shopping together in groups, or join a mothers group when they have children.

Race. Australians currently live in one of the most tollerant societies in regards to first generation people from other countries. (Canada is anohter.) In general we ain to treat these people as our equals and have laws that perotect these people until they become established. (The United States uses Mexicans and others as cheap labor as there are few laws to protect them.)

Justice. Justice in law, one of the fundamentals of our criminal law system is that you are innocent until proven guillty. Justice in Australian society means equal rights for everyone and the ability to recieve welfare payments when you are in difficult situations - although this has been severly undermined during the Howard goverments time in office.

Gender. Although the attitude towards women in the home as mothers has softened and women have been accepted into the work place, women are still expected to take lower status jobs and return to the home for some period of time when they become mothers.

Education. Overt the past 30 years there has been an expectation that we are more educated prior to leaving formal eduation. The majority of society would agree that this benefits society as a whole. This has co-encided with jobs becoming more technologically driven and the reduction in unskilled manufacturing jobs.

Traditional -

Mateship or Friendship. See above. This SV has been an underlying value in Australia for over 150 years. It was seen on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s and is often the most talked about aspect of Australia's invlovement in the First World War.

Realtionships (Marriage) This SV remains dominant and, men and women living in pairs has a history of many thousands of years. The notion of men and women formally marrying in a church is nolonger dominant, nor is living together unmarried an emerging or alterantive value. This is a change that has happen very rapidly over the past 30 years. See also gender.

Emerging -

Again this may be centered on gender and relationships. These is nolonger a stigma that is attached to single mothers, and similar attitudes are developing towards homosexual men and women.

Alternative -

Alternative SVs may have come through such movements as the hippy movement of the late 1960s. While it might seem that the whole of Ausatralia took on these attitudes, in fact it was a realtively small number of people that where pure Hippy.

Nometheless, we have embraced some of the values that they suggested, such as respect for the environment.

Oppositional -

Some examples may be the Social Values that came through the policies(!) of Pauline Hansons Australia First party in Queensland. These values were considered racist and backward looking.

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Page updated 24 July 2008