Awareness
CCI will work to promote awareness of the significance of culture and of the importance of cultural change in lagging societies:
- We plan to establish and frequently update this CCI website. We will be alert to new books and magazine and newspaper articles that are relevant to the CCI's mission for posting on the website. And as CCI studies are completed, they too will be posted. The website will encourage comments from the public.
- We are also planning a conference on parenting education with the goal of integrating value and attitudes into parenting education syllabi. This project will be led by Prof. Sharon Lynn Kagan of Yale and Columbia Universities, who contributed the chapter on parenting education to Developing Cultures: Essays on Cultural Change. In that essay, she noted that parenting education programs, in which interest is growing around the world, have not addressed those key aspects of child rearing that transmit values. She sees no reason why values can't be integrated into parenting education and sees a lot of potential benefit. The goal of the conference is to facilitate just that. A book may result.
Instruments of Change
CCI will undertake additional studies of the instruments and institutions of cultural transmission and change:
A major initiative is a research project led by Reese Schonfeld, the first CNN president, to study the impact of entertainment media (television, film, music, radio, and games) around the world on values, beliefs, and attitudes. Schonfeld will focus on television. He has spoken with (1) former president of Columbia Pictures Norman Horowitz about taking on movies; (2) Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center and Spoleto music festivals about music; and (3) Walter Sabo, former executive vice president of NBC Radio, about radio. Each will have a researcher working in his area. The researchers will develop data through surveys on the nature--for good or bad--of the impact on values and attitudes, and he extent of impact. They will also study the degree to which entertainment media are aware of the impact of their programs on values and attitudes and the extent to which modifications are politically and economically feasible. The project will conclude with a conference drawing media specialists and policy makers from all over the world, and a book, to be written by Reese Schonfeld.
We also plan three additional studies of religions:
- To examine the forces at work in the "Calvinist Islam" region of Anatolia in Turkey, and Turkey in general, where entrepreneurship is atypically common for an Islamic society. The possibility of replication of the Turkish experience elsewhere in the Islamic world will be a prime object of the study, which will be undertaken by Prof. Yilmaz Esmer of Bogazici University in Istanbul, who did the CMRP paper on Turkey.
- To examine the cases where Buddhism has promoted economic development. The study may be undertaken by Christal Whelan of Boston University who wrote the CMRP essay on Buddhism in which she observes that perhaps the most significant development in Buddhism in recent years is the emergence of a global network of Buddhist business people motivated in part by the possibility that business success will enhance their participation in philanthropic activity. The goal of the study is to assess the extent of "Buddhist capitalism" and its possible replication.
- To analyze the impact of African traditional religions on political, social, and economic development and to assess the feasibility of promoting conversion to more progressive religions. The presumption here is that such religions, of which Voodoo is one, nurture progress-resistant values and attitudes, as in the case of Haiti, where a number of observers attribute Haiti's dismal history in part to the irrational, fatalistic, without-ethical-content influence of Voodoo. The study will be undertaken by Prof. Fabien Eboussi Boulaga of the Catholic Institute of Yaoundé, Cameroon.