Books like Cultural Backlash by Pippa Norris

Samuel P. Huntington’s seminal work explores how rising international tensions after the Cold War may be driven by clash among cultural civilizations, offering a detailed theoretical framework beyond his 1993 Foreign Affairs article.

Since its original publication in 1976, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism has been hailed as an intellectual tour de force that redefines how we think about the relationship among econmomics, culture, and social change. Daniel Bell, the author of such other modern classics as The End of Ideology and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, argues that the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original Protestant ethic that ushered in capitalism itself. In a major new afterword, Bell offers a bracing perspective on contemporary Western society, from the end of the Cold War to the rise and fall of postmodernism, revealing the crucial cultural fault lines we face as the twenty-first century approaches.

Ronald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others - and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrialization, for example, a whole syndrome of related changes - from mass mobilization to diminishing differences in gender roles - is likely to appear. But industrialization is not the end of history. Advanced industrial society embraces yet another set of values, de-emphasizing the instrumental rationality that characterized industrial society. Postmodern values then bring new societal changes, including democratic politic institutions and the decline of state socialist regimes. To demonstrate the powerful links between belief systems and political and socioeconomic variables, this book draws on the World Values Surveys, a unique database that looks at the impact of mass publics on political and social life. It provides information from societies representing 70 percent of the world's population - from societies with per capita income as low as $300 per year to those with per capita incomes one hundred times greater and from long-established democracies with market economics to authoritarian states.