Chapter 9: Ambivalence When Family Values Change: Development of New Values in the Perspective of Sociocultural Global “Advancement”

The tradition to study social representations is an approach that is meant to understand common collective values, social practices, norms, and beliefs of a society or community. It gives the material and social worlds meaning and order, which makes sense for the community members. The beginnings of the Social Representation Theory can be traced back to the work by Emile Durkheim in the 1890s. In the hands of Serge Moscovici (1973), the focus on collective representations has been turned into Social Representation Theory (SRT) and later on expanded to further areas (Duveen, 2001; Gaskell &Lopes, 2015). The goal of this chapter is to consider examples of ambivalence that take place between two generations, when traditionally shared family values are pressured to change over a relatively short period of time, using examples from my native country (Greenland). With globalization especially, sociocultural changes affect people and their offspring’s views on values.