Social Research
Reading Towards the Third Modernity: How Ordinary People are Transforming the World rekindled an interest in producing On Q. The book is a compelling insight into the lives of ordinary people, the culmination of 60 years of research into what we believe; what we fear; what we like; who we are; how we are changing the world - and what we are going to do next.
Most of us struggle to make sense of the social, political and cultural changes that go on around us. For instance:
- Why have our attitudes to work changed so radically?
- Why did people so suddenly stop respecting the police, the church and other authority figures?
- When and why did parents start dressing, talking and behaving like their children, rather than the other way round?
- Why do advertisements from even 10 years ago seem so ridiculous now?
- Why has there been a mounting apathy of the electorate and a loss of trust in politicians?
- What drives teenage drinking, knife crime and all kinds of anti-social behaviour...
Drawing on a mass of interviews, field research, life histories, opinion polls, surveys and social observation conducted across Western Europe and North America since the early 1950s, the author plots the passage of what he calls the First and Second Modernities. On page after page, his observations help us understand changes we have all seen in our lifetimes.
On Q is a form of 'live' social research. We can talk to each other and share those differences across the generations, across cultures and races, with our families and in the community and, without sitting in judgement, we can ponder about why and how it was 'then' and why and how it is now.
As you read this book, pieces of the social jigsaw drop into place and trends and changes that you had noticed are suddenly named and explained in the most convincing and satisfactory way. And, in the final chapters, the author examines the trends and changes that are just now being detected by social observers, not only in the West but around the world. What do they herald for the next decade? Chaos or world government? Increasing social harmony or increasing fragmentation, isolation and despair?
The author Alain de Vulpian is an internationally renowned social anthropologist, sociologist and political scientist with a lifetime's experience in the research and analysis of social change. It is a mark of the extraordinary breadth and scope of this book that the original French edition was seized upon by academics, social commentators, business leaders, historians, politicians, planners, teachers, social anthropologists and the 'ordinary people' of the title alike.
