A Quarter of a Century of Social Change in the Netherlands

To mark the 25th anniversary of its foundation, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research/SCP collaborated with the publisher SUN on a reworking of the 1998 Social and Cultural Report (SCR). Eight hundred closely printed pages full of analyses and tables were reduced to a manageable overview of developments in the 'State of the Netherlands' during the last quarter of this century.
Among other things, it emerges from this overview that the trends that began in the 1960s have in some respects continued. For example, people increasingly determine the course of their own lives, households have become even smaller and social contacts even more informal. In other domains, there are clear breaks with the past: mass unemployment; the large number of women who have begun working; the rise of part-time working; the explosive increase in crime; the crisis of the welfare state; the rise of a multi-ethnic society.