Showing papers on "Modernization theory published in 1981"

Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India

Abstract: Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history.The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority. Its study should help to reveal the nature of the forces involved in the struggle and to suggest the implications for social development of the way in which, at any one time, their struggle was resolved. The condition of the law may be seen to crystallize the condition of society. This, of course, could be said of any governing institution. But where the law becomes uniquely valuable is in that, because of its social function, the struggle around it is necessarily expressed in terms of general statements of principle rather than particular statements of private and discrete interest. At the most fundamental level, these principles demarcate the rules on which the contending parties seek to build their versions of society and provide useful clues to their wider, often undisclosed, positions.

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

Abstract: Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

Legitimacy in the modern state

Abstract: This analysis of the concept of authority in Western society constitutes a central work in political sociology and a fundamental critique of the process of modernization Schaar proposes that legitimate authority is declining in the modern state Law and order, in a very real sense, is the basic political issue of our time -- one that conservatives have understood with greater clarity than their liberal adversaries Schaar sees what were once authoritative institutions and ideas yielding to technological and bureaucratic orders The later brings physical comfort and a sense of collective power, but does not provide political liberty or moral autonomy As a result, he argues, all modern states exhibiting this transformation of authority into technology are well advanced along the path of a crisis of legitimacy

The capitalist world-economy : essays

Abstract: Some reflections on history, the social sciences, and politics Acknowledgments Part I. The Inequalities of Core and Periphery: 1. The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis 2. Three paths of national development in sixteenth-century Europe 3. The present state of the debate on world inequality 4. Dependence in an interdependent world: the limited possibilities of transformation within the capitalist world-economy 5. Semiperipheral countries and the contemporary world crisis 6. The rural economy in modern world society 7. Modernization: requiescat in pace 8. From feudalism to capitalism: transition or transitions? 9. A world-system perspective on the social sciences Part II. The Inequalities of Class, Race and Ethnicity: 10. Social conflict in post-independence Black Africa: the concepts of race and status group reconsidered 11. The two modes of ethnic consciousness: Soviet Central Asia in transition 12. Class and class conflict in contemporary Africa 13. American slavery and the capitalist world-economy 14. Class formation in the capitalist world-economy Part III. Political Strategies: 15. Old problems and new syntheses: the relation of revolutionary ideas and practices 16. Fanon and the revolutionary class 17. An historical perspective on the emergence of the new international order: economic, political, cultural aspects Concluding essay 18. Class conflict in the capitalist world-economy Index.

Changing Modes of Production and the Sexual Division of Labor among the Yoruba

Abstract: Analysts of the sexual division of labor have recently begun to acknowledge that modernization theory in studies of women and development provides only a limited explanation of sexual inequality, in part because of its assumptions about the basis of the sexual division of labor. Underlying modernization theory are two basic notions: (1) that capitalist accumulation and expansion determine the sexual division of labor in all societies and (2) that historical process and the direction of change are the same throughout human history. The first assumption has given rise to the tradition of explaining women's status chiefly in terms of the degree to which females participate in production roles outside the home. However, recent comparisons of development patterns in advanced industrial nations and in Third World countries have revised this explanation of female subordination. In examining divergent patterns of development, these studies have made conceptual and methodological refinements that distinguish between the sexual division of labor as the cause of female subordination and the sexual division of labor as the effect of female subordination. These revisions have generated a new set of assumptions: that analysts must identify more than one "causative" factor of change; that a universal theory of change must be based on an understanding of autonomous historical processes; and that gender relations in both production and reproduction must be examined, because change in one sphere signals change in the other. In their reappraisal of Ester Boserup's work, Lourdes Benerfa and Gita Sen argue that Boserup ignores the significance of women's role in biological and social reproduction by concentrating on the sphere of

Modernization of agriculture in developing countries: Resources, potentials, and problems

Abstract: The Necessity to Transform Traditional Agriculture Natural Resources - Land and Water Land-Use in Subsistence Agriculture and Potentials for Development The Deterioration of Natural Resources Human Resources Generation of New Technology The 'Green Revolution' Human Labour, Animal Traction and Mechanization Provision of Essential Conditions for Modernization Development Planning and Strategy.

China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842–1937

Abstract: The development of modern China's most important export commodity, silk, is traced from the opening of the treaty ports to the 1930s. This study examines the silk industry, one of China's most advanced traditional economic enterprises, as it moved into large-scale trade with the West. And it especially considers whether traditional economic organizations and practices encouraged or inhibited the expansion of the industry and its technological modernization. The silk industry is presented as a microcosm of China's encounter with the modern world market, focusing on such topics as the role of the state, the relationship between treaty ports and rural producers, the domestic market, and the financing and organization of the modern sector. Such important issues as the "sprouts of capitalism" argument and Japan's assumption of first position in the modern world silk market are authoritatively and convincingly illuminated.

Rural Africa: modernization, equity, and long-term development.

Abstract: Prospects for rural development in sub-Saharan Africa appear to be much poorer than in the rest of the developing world, especially since the oil price increases. If present trends continue, African dependence on food imports will increase. Despite the rhetorical acknowledgment of the importance of the agricultural and rural sector, most African countries are not giving that sector the needed priority in their policies and budgets. Indeed, the rural sector is heavily taxed for the support of urban modernization. Large investments by foreign donors in the rural sector have had little overall effect. Donors need to adopt a longer perspective on development and to make greater efforts to promote indigenous capacities for policy, planning, and administration. Their investments need to be geared more to broad-based higher education and training and to transport and communications.

Rural Settlement in an Urban World

Abstract: 1. The Study of Rural Settlement 2. The Village 3. Beyond the Village 4. Patterns 5. Stagnation and Decline 6. Modernization and Change in Agricultural Settlement 7. Residential and Recreational Development 8. Public Policy and the Future of Rural Settlement

Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855–1905

Abstract: This monograph - based largely on memoirs, diaries, archival documents and other primary sources - represents a comprehensive social history of the Moscow merchants in the period between 1855 and 1905. The author first examines the essential aspects of traditional merchant culture in the early nineteenth century. He then discusses the emergence of 'capitalist' manufacturers and traders, a group who implemented modern business techniques in the 1840s without however, adopting the political liberalism of the western bourgeoisie. Committed to economic modernisation as a means of redressing Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War, these merchants cooperated with sympathetic intellectuals in railroad management, banking, journalism and the struggle to gain tariff protection. The study concludes with an analysis of the 'bourgeois' class consciousness that resulted from the Moscow commercial-industrial leaders' conflicts with both the tsarist government and the militant labour movement during the Revolution of 1905. Owen contributes to discussions about the distinctive features of Russian social and economic development in the final years of the Russian Empire.

The silent revolution: The effects of modernization on Australian aboriginal religion

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The Democracy Movement in China, 1978-1979: Opposition Movements, Wall Poster Campaigns, and Underground Journals

Abstract: THE BEIJING SPRING or the Chinese Democracy Movement began as a dazibaol movement in Beijing in November 1978. The movement soon spread all over China and by Christmas engulfed all the major cities of the country. Activists organized into groups and started to publish poorly printed, unofficial journals-underground journals (dixia kanwu), as they have been called. These journals quickly became the principal media of the Democracy Movement. In spite of varying philosophical and political orientations, the different democratic groups formed a kind of loose coalition. Their rallying point was the demand for democracy which Wei Jingsheng, one of the prominent figures of the Democracy Movement, had dubbed "The Fifth Modernization." This demand does not imply opposition to the Four Modernizations, which are designed to change China into a modern, industrial society by the year 2000 through modernization of agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology, but rather suggests that the modernization program is insufficient because it does not embrace that vitally important element without which the others will not or cannot be achieved-the modernization of democratic con-

Modernization and Aging in the Third and Fourth World: Views from the Rural Hinterland in Nepal

Abstract: T HE NUMBER O F AGED PEOPLE in Third World countries is increasing dramatically. In 1970, 190 million people on this planet were 65 years old or more. Fifty-five percent (105 million) resided in developed countries (DCs) and 45% (85 million) in less developed countries (LDCs). By the year 2000, as a result of continued population growth and improvements in health care, this proportion will change. There will then be about 396 million persons 65 years of age or older (a nearly 200% increase), of whom 166 million (42%) will reside in DCs and 230 million (58%) in LDCs. Moreover, by 2000, in the short span of 30 years, South Asia and East Asia will account for about one-fourth (100 million) of the world's aged, and as many elderly people will live there as now exist in the entire developed world (Hauser 1976). This pattern of population increase will affect Nepal as well. Based on current growth rates, by the year 2000, Nepal will contain over I million persons aged 65 or over out of a total population of about 18 million. The prevalent view is that aging in rural, traditional societies is not a problem since the aged in such societies are viewed as possessing high status. The aged are said to become problematic only as modernization disrupts family and community supports and the esteem and respect characteristic of traditional societies. This widely held viewpoint is exemplified by the theory of modernization and aging proposed by Cowgill and Holmes (1972) and Cowgill (1974). This theory defines modernization and its consequences for the elderly in the following terms:

Tradition and the Veil: Female Status in Tunisia and Algeria

Abstract: This discussion examines markedly different government policies toward the status of women in the 2 developing North African states of Tunisia and Algeria. Despite a shared Arabic Islamic and French colonial heritage Tunisias regime has vigorously undermined traditional Islamic constraints on female reproductive freedom and public participation. In contrast Algerias leadership has explicitly rejected the concept of reproductive control and has overtly reaffirmed Islamic traditions restricting women to a subordinate domestic role. These differences cannot be explained by prevailing models of modernization based upon economic rationality demographic necessity or ideological proclivity. Algeria compared to Tunisia is more industrialized under greater population pressure and avowedly more socialist all of which would presumably favor official support for female emancipation yet the Tunisian commitment to gender equality far surpasses that of Algeria. The comparative analysis presented suggests an alternative explanation for these divergent policies towards women. It is argued that the observed differences in the commitment of the 2 governments to gender equality can best be explained as outcomes of the differing political contingencies facing the elites of the 2 countries. These circumstances and their consequences in turn have been shaped by the historical implications of European colonial penetration and subsequent revolution. National variations in the levels of commitment to indigenous cultural traditions such as female status are examined through an extension of the broader perspective of development from the center. The primary thesis of the development from the center perspective is that traditional values modes of action and social organization need not be and often are not fully replaced by "modern" alternatives as new states undergo the complex of social changes commonly termed modernization. The elites in the new states must simultaneously maintain themselves in power while implementing social and economic changes which may engender popular resistance and undermine their political authority. A frequent solution is the selective use of traditional symbols. In the Muslim context the traditional family oriented around the concept of female domesticity and subservience to males serves as a potent symbol of cultural identity. The need for elites to legitimate themselves in traditional terms is variable. In general the more precarious their hold on power and the greater the popular need for traditional anchors the greater will be the likelihood that traditional legitimation will be sought. Given the religious and cultural heritage in North Africa the Algerian elite used traditional Islam as a source of legitimation with particular emphasis upon Islamic rules concerning the family and the role of women.

Modernization and china's urban development*

Abstract: Economic development and modernization programs launched in the past three decades have significantly altered the traditional urban systems in China, which had essentially evolved within physiographic regions through centuries. Construction of railroads, development of energy sources, agricultural transformation, expansion of foreign trade, and a rapid process of demographic transition have all contributed to the emergence of a more integrated national urban system in China with articulated linkages between physiographic regions. In spite of political overtones in China's development policies since 1949, the new patterns of urbanization reflect the need to meet the specific realities of resources, cultural values, and social heritage in the nation building process.

Educational Inquiry as Developmental Research.

Abstract: Over the past two decades, many nations have responded to the challenge of modernization with very substantial efforts at educational reform. Following the lead of the more industrialized countries, nations around the world pressed forward with major efforts to improve schooling as expansion of schooling began to reach its limits. The credo for such efforts was declared emphatically by the Unesco International Commission on the Development of Education (Faure, et al., 1972) about a decade

Statistics and the State: Changing Social thought and the Emergence of a Quantitative Mentality in America, 1790 to 1820

Abstract: A growing predilection and respect for "statisticks" and "authentic facts" marked the public thought of the young American republic. Formerly a matter of interest to a mere handful of colonists-compulsive counters and measurers like Ezra Stiles and Thomas Jeffersonthe compiling of figures and facts became, in the early nineteenth century, a common mode of reportage that both reflected and promoted a novel way of thinking about society and state. This development is evidenced by some two dozen statistical gazetteers and manuals published between the I790s and the i 820s, as well as in repeated efforts to expand the federal census. These undertakings testify to the rising appeal of certain kinds of "authentic facts" to men who sought to comprehend and in a measure to direct the social changes of their time. The sponsors and authors of these efforts to account by counting favored pure empirical description, though their practice in that regard was often less than perfect. They championed an inductive approach intended to eliminate theorizing and speculation. They popularized a new word, "statisticks"-defined as salient facts about state and society-to express their sense of the relationship between factual knowledge and the business of government. To open up an unexplored dimension of the historical problem of modernization, this essay describes this phenomenon and suggests its significance for changing ideas about the character of politics and society in the new republic.' Today the word statistics can refer broadly to any collection of numerical data or to the branch of mathematics that deals with the analysis of

Urban Dynamics in Black Africa: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract: Urban Dynamics in Black Africa presents a succession of worlds where we can study the development and the crystallization of major social change. The authors trace the development of former villages, towns, and colonial outposts into major cities within the international community. Open-air markets continue their trading beside modern department stores as individual Africans create contemporary lives from old and new. William J. and Judith L. Hanna, in this unique work, introduce new data and the methods of dependency theory, class and gender analysis; they offer connections between Africa's internal dynamics, its legacy of imperialism, and the international political and economic arena. At the same time, the book provides a model for studying the evolution of political institutions. Urban Dynamics in Black Africa illustrates how social classes modify and are modified by existing cultural forms. The book examines Africa in its independence by contrasting development and dependency, role adaptability and conflict, in a powerful conceptual matrix. Detailing the urban conditions that exist throughout Africa as well as their costs and benefits, this work shows how contemporary political conflict in urban Africa is based upon both ethnic and non-ethnic ties; and how these ethnic and non-ethnic ties serve as the bases of a system of political integration unique to poly-ethnic communities. As a synthesis of the relevant available knowledge on African towns and town-dwellers, this book is concerned primarily with the effects of external intervention and socioeconomic modernization upon the birth and development of Africa's new towns and the rapid expansion of its old ones. It considers the impact of migration and town life upon Africans.

Modernization and the Status of the Aged in China: Decline or Equalization?*

Abstract: Most models of modernization propose that the status of the aged declines with technological and economic development. These models usually conceptualize the lowered status of the aged as a residual or latent consequence of modernization. Rarely do they address age stratification as a political issue, and they fail to differentiate between subgroups of the aged. We compare accounts of the cultural and structural context of the aged before and after China's socialist revolution, giving particular attention to the role of the family, the state, and technological factors in social change. Technological development and urbanization have not been extensive, and a decline in the traditional authority of the aged has paralleled educational advances and a demographic transition. Government family policies and China's labor-intensive economy facilitate the interdependence of age groups and sex roles. These observations suggest current models of the status of the aged should be revised to incorporate conceptualizations of age and sexual stratification and the role of governmental policies in directing social change. The transformations occurring in many societies today are frequently attributed to processes of modernization. The aged is one social category thought to be particularly affected by these changes. The social status of older people refers both to their relative control over interpersonal and institutional rewards and to the compliance and deference associated with participation in social life (Dowd, 1975). The status of the aged is commonly considered high in "pre-modern" societies, but usually reversed with the occurrence of modernization (Palmore and Whittington, 1971; Press and McKool, 1972). This paper explores what we term the "modernization model" and its central proposition, that there is an inverse relationship between modernization and the status of the aged. Our purpose is to determine whether qualifications may be warranted in the face of existing historical and contemporary descriptions of Chinese life. Given the paucity of data on different age groups in China, we cannot "test" the model in any strict sense, and we will not compare China rigorously with other cultures. We propose, however, that the case of China can expand our understanding of the relationship between the aged and society. Although the directions of Chinese modernization are by no means certain (Whyte et al., 1977), an examination of the aged in a country whose ideology and social structure differ considerably from the West can be fruitful.

The Sociology of Education in Developing Countries

Abstract: For the sociologist of education whose work is normally confined to the study of education systems in the industrial west, entry into the sociology of education of developing societies is entry into a strange and troubled intellectual landscape. Perhaps most striking to the new entrant is the sight of the decaying remains of a once great and magnificent civilisation, structural functionalism. But perhaps equally surprising is the number of inhabitants who appear to be living happily and thriving amidst the decay-many of them apparently oblivious to the ruins that surround them; ruins that seem so obvious to the foreigner's eye. But outside of these eerie cities, which still sometimes seem to echo with the sounds of past glories, are the jungles and mountains where the rule of law is barely maintained. It is here where the rival bands of guerillas and partisans (neo-Marxists of various shades and varieties) are to be found. Their banners and slogans announce their common opposition to the dominance of the city dwellers but much time and energy appears to be expended in inter-band rivalries and political infighting. In the higher valleys the provisional government of the main opposition party (advocates of the dependency perspective) have set up their headquarters. And from these lofty peaks the country below looks very different. Up here communications are poor, roads often impassable, and frequent rock falls and the constant erosion of high winds make travelling treacherous and setting up anything but the most temporary campsite is a most hazardous enterprise. I have chosen to review studies which represent the different sociological approaches to the study of education in developing societies. These studies, in different degrees, highlight the existing weaknesses and partiality of sociological work in this field. I shall proceed by identifying the studies reviewed with the major theoretical traditions and recent theoretical progress in the general area of development studies. The major contours of the sociology of education landscape, as far as the developing 'Third World' is concerned, are determined and can only be understood sensibly in terms of the two opposed and entrenched theoretical paradigms of modernisation and dependency. While, as I shall argue, not all work done by sociologists of education can be neatly or realistically subsumed within these two paradigm positions, they do constitute fixed points of reference. But these paradigms do not

Economism and determinism in dependency theory

Abstract: The wide acceptance of dependency theory throughout the Third World constitutes a conceptual revolution in a scientific understanding of large-scale questions of capitalist development. The perspective has succeeded in discrediting the system, legitimating tenents of modernization theory, and in undermining the "developmentalist" approach of reform nationalisms. Yet its intellectual and political weight as a now dominant paradigm for analyzing development and underdevelopment has caused a considerable consternation among some Marxists, especially those inclined toward orthodoxy. Dependency theory is particularly attacked for being excessively based on analyses of exchange and spacial relations rather than production relations; it is criticized as not having an adequate approach to stages of development of the mode of production, as economistic, and as lacking in class analysis. Each of these criticisms has some merit. Yet, in my view, the problem with almost all of the critiques is that, while they specify the problems with dependency theory, they do not offer any serious theoretical development beyond it, much less an alternative to it. I do not think this is at all accidental. The critics have been unable to develop an alternative because neither the classical theory of imperialism nor contemporary strains of orthodox Marxism provide ready answers to the problems of underdevelopment that dependency theory has addressed. Dependency theory developed not just in reaction to conventional modernization theory and the 1950s nationalist and reformist formulations of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and of the ideologues of "developmentalism" but as a so-called "neo-Marxism," because traditional Marxism was inadequate to the task, in both its theoretical manifestations and its political conceptions (e.g., the limitations of Lenin's theory of imperialism; the "feudalism" thesis of backwardness; Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development; the reformist line of the communist parties of the region; the inability of the left generally to develop a coherent alternative to developmentalist reformism). * The author, who teaches sociology at Livingston College (Rutgers University), has adapted this article from his forthcoming book, Social Class and Social Development: Comparative Studies of

La révolution mexicaine : d'abord une révolution minière ?

Abstract: The Mexican revolution : primarily a miner's revolution ? ; ; The Mexican revolution is traditionally explained by reference to the notions of the political revolution of the middle classes and of agrarian revolution. Evidence for the role of the most modern regions and sectors of the economy and the connection between political claims and the agrarian revolution is rarely put forward. An analysis of the revolutionary uprisings of 1910-1911 shows the major role played within the revolution by the pioneering zones of the North, and most particularly by the mining areas. It was these zones, with their mobile and less rooted population, which had experienced the most rapid modernization during the Porfiriate

Changing health policy in the post-Mao era.

Abstract: A shift away from Mao Zedong's concept of equality in the delivery of medical care is now taking place in The People's Republic of China. This change is evident in the emphasis now placed upon high technology, basic research, and hospital care. All of these changes are occurring against the backdrop of extremely scarce medical resources. Medicine seemingly is viewed as one of many material incentives to be provided high productivity and leadership groups; the "modernization" of medicine is seen as one visible manifestation of the success of the broader modernization effort itself. As well, population policy has become more stringent, with rewards being given to one-child families and sanctions being applied against couples having three or more children. Although these policy changes offer bright prospects for Sino-American cooperation in the biomedical field, foreigners must remain sensitive to the controversial nature of these alterations in the Chinese political setting.