Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter L. Berger

A sociologist calling an agenda "relatively simple" is a small act of rhetoric with big consequences. Berger knows he is walking into a minefield of abstraction: "culture" is the kind of word that can mean everything and therefore excuse anything. So he starts with humility and then quietly tightens the screws. The simplicity is strategic, not naive. It frames the institute as empirically grounded rather than ideologically ambitious, a bid for credibility in a field where "culture" can sound like either mysticism or a political cudgel.

The definition that follows - "beliefs, values and lifestyles" - is doing boundary work. Berger is shrinking culture down to measurable human patterns without pretending it's reducible to economics. This is classic Berger: the social world as something built, maintained, and contested through meaning, not just money. The phrase "relationship between socio-economic change and culture" also signals a two-way street. It's a refusal of the crude story that markets move and culture merely reacts; culture is presented as both product and producer, a variable that can accelerate, soften, or reroute modernization.

Then comes the institutional pitch: "broad range", "internationally". In late-20th-century sociology, this is a wink at parochialism. The subtext is that theories built on Western data and treated as universal are intellectually lazy and politically convenient. Berger is positioning the institute as comparative, suspicious of monocultures - academic or otherwise - and attuned to how global change rewires the everyday, not just the GDP.