A Sociological Study on the 'Affluent Society'

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The aim of this study is to clarify what it means to possess and to use the many goods and things that have become necessary in daily life in industrialized societies. The present study, then, centers on the following basic questions. (1) What is the significance of goods for the people of advanced industrialized societies. And what are the characteristics of such societies that we say to be "affluent", because of the abundance of things and goods? (2) What kind of relationships arise between goods and people? There is a double relationship. We observe that things can be humanized (humanization of things). As can be seen in the case of robots, but, on the other hand, human beings may be treated as things or possibly like slaves (thing-treatment of human beings). (3) How does the structure of a society change in connection with the overflow of goods? Because of different economic development and industrial growth. A considerable divergence arises between so called affluent and poor nations in terms of cultural lag and social stratification. (4) What kind of sociological approaches are necessitated by this specific subject matter? A distinction has to be made between various levels of research. (a) There is the micro-level to which action theory applies. (b) Relations concerning production, distribution and consumption of goods can be described at a middle level, for which the theory of organization and communities can be invoked. (c) The macro-level concerns the relations at the national and international level, for which we need a theory of the nation and of international relations. (5) A still different line of inquiry concerns the sociological problems of technology and values. Technology is the basic factor behind production and distribution of goods while values play an indispensable role in the signification and evaluation of things.