Modernization theory

About: Modernization theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 14641 publications have been published within this topic receiving 232469 citations.

Suicide: A 15‐Year Review of the Sociological Literature Part II: Modernization and Social Integration Perspectives

Abstract: This article reviews the findings of 84 sociological studies published over a 15-year period. These studies deal with tests of the modernization and/or social integration perspectives on suicide. Research on modernization, religious integration, and political integration often questioned or reformulated the traditional Durkheimian perspective. A major new theoretical development, Pescosolido's religious networks perspective, gained some empirical support in the 15-year period. The strongest support for social integration theory came from research on marital integration, wherein more than three quarters of the research found a significant relationship. Finally, further research on migration, a force lowering social integration, continued to tend to find a positive link to suicide.

The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America

Abstract: This volume seeks to contribute to an interdisci-plinary, comparative, and historical study of Western welfare states. It attempts to link their historical dynamics and contemporary problems in an international perspective. Building on collaboration between European-and American-based research groups, the editors have coordinated contributions by economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians. The developments they analyze cover a time span from the initiation of modern national social policies at the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The experiences of all the presently existing Western European systems except Spain and Por-tugal are systematically encompassed, with com-parisons developed selectively with the experi-ences of the United States and Canada. The devel-opment of the social security systems, of public expenditures!and taxation, of public education and educational opportunities, and of income inequal-ity are described, compared, and analyzed for varying groupings of the Western European and North American nations. This volume addresses itself mainly to two audi-ences. The first includes all students of policy problems of the welfare states who seek to gain a comparative perspective and historical under-standing. A second group may be more interested in the theory and empirical analysis of long-term societal developments. In this context, the growth of the welfare states ranges as a major departure, along with the development of national states and capitalist economies. The welfare state is interpreted as a general phenomenon of modernization, as a product of the increasing differentiation and the growing size of societies on the one hand, and of processes of social and political mobilization on the other. It is an important element of the structural convergence of modern societies -- by its mere weight in all countries -- and at the same time a source of divergence by the variations within its institutional structure.

Beyond the Welfare State?: The New Political Economy of Welfare

Abstract: * CONTENTS * Acknowldgements * Introduction *1 Capitalism, Social Democracy and the Welfare State I: * Industrialism, Modernization and Social Democracy *2Capitalism, Social Democracy and the Welfare State II: Political Economy and the Welfare State *3 Capitalism, Social Democracy and the Welfare State III: New Social Movements and the Welfare State *4Origins and Development of the Welfare State 1880-1975 *5 After the 'Golden Age': From 'Crisis' to 'Containment' *6 Retrenchment and Recalibration *7 Beyond the Welfare State? * Conclusion * Bibliography * Index

Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory Institutional Efficacy, Case Study Evidence, Units of Analysis, and the Pace of Eco-Efficiency

Abstract: We raise four challenges to the claim of ecological modernization theory (EMT) that continued modernization is necessary for ecological sustainability. First, EMT needs to go beyond merely demonstr...

Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of National Societies: A Critical Perspective

Abstract: Use of the term ‘modernization’ in its present connotations is of relatively recent origin, becoming an accepted part of the vocabulary of American, if not international, social science only in the decade of the 1960s. Despite its relatively rapid rise to currency, the popularity of the term does not appear to be matched by any widespread consensus concerning its precise meaning. The proliferation of alternative definitions has been such, in fact, that the ratio of those using the term to alternative definitions would appear to approach unity. The popularity of the notion of modernization must be sought not in its clarity and precision as a vehicle of scholarly communication, but rather in its ability to evoke vague and generalized images which serve to summarize all the various transformations of social life attendant upon the rise of industrialization and the nation-state in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These images have proven so powerful, indeed, that the existence of some phenomenon usefully termed ‘modernization’ has gone virtually unchallenged. While individuals may differ on how precisely this phenomenon should be conceptualized and a number of critics have addressed themselves to the relative merits of alternative conceptualizations, both critics and advocates alike tend to assume the basic utility of the idea of modernization itself, treating only the manner of its conceptualization as problematic.