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Seen in modern perspective, the concept of national character poses fundamental problems for social science theory and research: To what extent do conditions of life in a particular society give rise to certain patterns in the personalities of its members? What are the consequences? Alex Inkeles surveys various definitions of national character, tracing developments through the twentieth century. His approach is to examine the regularity of specific personality patterns among individuals in a society. He argues that modal personality may be extremely important in determining which new cultural elements are accepted and which institutional forms persist in a society. Reviewing previous studies, Inkeles canvasses the attitudes and psychological states of different nations in an effort to discover a set of values in the United States. He concludes that, despite recent advances in the field, there is much to be done before we can have a clear picture of the degree of differentiation in the personality structure of modern nations. Until now, there were few formal definitions and discussions on national character and the limits of this field of study. This book will be of great interest to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists.

In recent years there has been a great deal of public concern that our youth are "at risk" - of drug addiction, falling into criminal behavior, teen-age pregnancy, dropping out of school, and of drunk or otherwise careless driving which leads to serious accidents. (National Research Council, 1993; Hamburg, 1992; Heckinger, 1994). The popular press also expresses these concerns, which are widespread in the population at large, often referring to contemporary youth as "a lost generation" which is "armed, young and dangerous."(1) Despite the hyperbole, only a modest proportion of young people run the more dramatic risks noted in the press. There is another risk to which a great many adolescents, including a significant proportion of those in the "mainstream," are exposed. That risk, as we see it, is the risk of failure to develop in adolescence the qualities which will make it possible for the youth to function adequately in the roles which, inevitably, they will be obliged to play when they move from adolescence into adult status. The adolescent developmental phase is particularly critical for study because it provides not only a base-line summary of the child's and youth's previous experience, but also permits insight into the adaptive psychological and social capacities involved in the transition to adult status and mature functioning. Among the various developmental tasks involved in the transition from adolescence to adulthood are the acquisition of adaptive social and psychological capacities, skills, values and habits which facilitate the adolescent's movement into, and adequate performance in, culturally appropriate adult roles. We have set as our research agenda to conceptualize what some of these adaptive qualities might be; to develop measures of the extent to which they are manifested in different individuals and groups approached cross-culturally and cross-nationally; to identify the socio-psychological antecendents and the behavioral consequences of more and less adaptive "transitions to adulthood;" and ultimately to suggest interventions at the individual and group level which might facilitate more rapid and effective maturity in adolescents. Of these goals, only the first two, of conceptualization and initial measurement are addressed in this article. One of the first challenges any such effort must expect to meet is that which comes from the idea that social roles are so diverse, and so specific to particular ethnic, social, class, and national groups and contexts that no meaningful specification of role demands in general can meaningfully be made. We did not accept this judgement, and our research may be interpreted as an empirical test of the soundness of the argument that generalization of adaptive qualities across a set of roles is not possible. Even if one assumes that there are common elements in the demands on the individual made by certain roles, there remains a choice of approaches to identifying what those common elements might be. One way to identify them is to make a list of specific roles and the behaviors associated with them. For example, in modem nations each adult is expected to develop some occupational identity, train to attain it, and meet the standards of performance which are characteristic of it. Keeping this aspect of being adult in mind, we might then study how far adolescents were beginning to think of an occupation, and whether they were in any way systematically preparing themselves to meet its formal requirements. A different way of approaching the problem would be to abstract certain qualities which are assumed to be important across a set of roles, and then to test for the extent to which a given adolescent or group of adolescents were developing these more general dispositions. It was this latter approach we adopted, deciding to measure the extent to which certain adolescents showed strong or weak development of six qualities. These are: Cooperativeness: the ability to work jointly with others in advancing group goals in a relatively impersonal organizational framework. …

The authors' research explores the applicability of Inkeles and Smith's individual modernity paradigm to women and men in the People's Republic of China. The authors' analysis of questionnaire data demonstrates that, for the Chinese male respondents, individ ual modernity scales can be constructed that are highly reliable and that are essentially the same in structure and content as the overall modernity scales created for the (exclusively male) respondents in the six nonsocialist developing countries included in the original study. Also, despite some minor variations, there is a very high degree of similarity in the structure, content, and reliability of scales constructed independently for the male and female respondents. Finally, on the basis of these results, the authors construct gender- neutral individual modernity scales based on the entire sample.

We here report the results of a content analysis focussed on the due process rights or guarantees which were provided to citizens under all the national constitutions extant in the world at 20 year intervals during the period from 1870 to 1970. Our study had three objectives. First, we sought to test the assumption that the granting of procedural guarantees by national constitutions was. over time, both being expanded within countries and being diffused worldwide across all countries, thus providing additional examples of the tendency for institutional forms to diffuse around the world and consequently for nation states to converge in their institutional structures and practices, tendencies already observed and documented in other realms such as the family, education, and retirement.

What effects does political democracy have on such development outcomes as economic growth and socioeconomic equality? Competing theoretical models have been proposed that represent each of the possibilities: democracy as facilitating development, democracy as a hindrance to development, and democracy as bearing no independent relationship to development outcomes. Each of these theoretical models is explicated and, then, the evidence from quantitative, cross-national tests of the effects is reviewed. Overall, the evidence provided by the approximately dozen studies for each outcome yields few robust conclusions with respect to the theoretical models. To guide in the evaluation of the evidence, the studies are in turn distinguished by such design characteristics as sample, period observed, measures used, and form of relationship specified. This procedure, while it does not produce definitive support for any of the models, does assist in interpreting the results of past research as well as generating fertile guidelines for future research.

In « Continuity and Change in the American National Character », I described the striking degree of continuity in the core values held by Americans since the early days of the nation, despite massive changes in the size and composition of the U.S. population, its level of education, its patterns of residence and its forms of work. (Inkeles, 1979). Subsequently, when I was invited by the Tocqueville Society to write on modernization and the family, it occurred to me that the same sort of continuity might have been manifested in the case of the American family.

An assessment of the forms in which, and tlie extent to which, the population of the entire world may be coming to participate in a coherent global social system may be made by crude measurement of variations in the degree of autarky, interconnectedness, dependence, interdependence, integration, hegemony, and convergence. In the recent modern era, we can show that interconnectedness has been rising at an exponential rate across numerous dimensions ranging from the exchange of students to world trade. Interdependence is also increasing, but less dramatically. The greater dependence of less developed countries is unmistakable, but integration has advanced very little in the period after World War II. In studying convergence we must differentiate among modes of production, institutional forms, patterns of social relations, the content of popular values, and systems of political and economic control, each of which may change at different speeds and even move in different directions. The argument that there is substantial convergence in political and economic forms at the national level may be seriously challenged. Marked convergence is widely prevalent, however, in the utilization of science, technology, and bureaucratic procedures, and in the consequent incorporation of whole populations into new social roles. These in turn induce new attitudes and values forming a widespread complex or syndrome identified as modern and postmodern. Countervailing tendencies are, however, evident and should be weighed.