The changes from subsistence to the market economy have led to peasants in a society without strong cultural foundation and fixed social stratification to adjust themselves to changing social conditions. Many Phuans in Sao and Bang Kaphi communities have to change their occupations from farmers to traders, state employees, skilled laborers, and politicians. The change is due to a preference for a new lifestyle or for economic reasons in order to raise their social status and increase their incomes. However, the tendency is not necessarily to become westernized, because group behavior could cause changes in members’ values and behavior before accepting modern or western value systems. Furthermore, modern behavior may have existed in a conventional society. Therefore it is not correct to conclude that the modern or western value system is alienated from the conventional value system. The modernization of a country does not necessarily have to be an absorption process of an ethnic group in the way that it has to abandon its existing traditional value systems. On the contrary, it is a process that can bind value systems together to provide benefits to all and be sufficient to result in a comfortable life that comes with modernity.