CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT WITH AN EMPHASIS ON VALUES

Abstract

After World War II, the development discourses received a higher level of attention. The ineffectiveness of paradigms of dependence and modernization as well as other development theories led theorists to turn to cultural development. In this regard, UNESCO called the nineties “the decade of cultural development” and emphasized the creation and expansion of some values. This development faces several obstacles, the most important of which are fatalism and ethnocentrism. Fatalism is a cultural and collective belief in which all matters and phenomena in the social life of the individual are attributed to the function of supernatural forces and factors and ethnocentrism is the ethnic superiority and haughtiness, which, in this study, are the independent variables which are taken as the obstacles to this type of development. In this study, cultural development as was measured a dependent variable using a set of underlying values such as labor, social trust, democracy, globalization, universalism, rationalism, scientism, social participation, conspicuous consumption, and modernity. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between cultural development and ethnocentrism and fatalism. The study was conducted by using the survey method. The statistical sample included 384 households in Shiraz who were selected using Cochran's formula, among whom a questionnaire was distributed by using the cluster sampling method. Relevant theories have been used in the practical framework of the study. Data analysis using SPSS showed that there is a significant relationship between cultural development (dependent variable) and ethnicity and destiny (independent variable) at the confidence level of above 99% and the hypotheses are confirmed.