Modernization theory

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

Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class

Abstract: A new framework for understanding Chile's cultural and political modernization Highlighting the crucial yet largely overlooked role played by society's middle layers in the historical development of Latin America, Patrick Barr-Melej provides the first comprehensive analysis of the rise of Chile's middle-class reform movement and its profound impact on that country's cultural and political landscapes. He shows how a diverse collection of middle-class intellectuals, writers, politicians, educators, and bureaucrats forged a "progressive" nationalism and advanced an ambitious cultural-political project between the 1890s and 1940s. Together, reformers challenged the power of elite groups and sought to quell working-class revolutionary activism as they endeavored to democratize culture and fortify liberal democracy. Using sources that range from archival documents and newspapers to short stories, novels, and school textbooks, Barr-Melej examines the reform movement's cultural ideas and their political applications, especially as they were articulated in the areas of literature and public education. In the process, he provides a new framework for understanding Chile's cultural and political evolution, as well as the complicated place of the middle class in a society experiencing the swift changes inherent in capitalist modernization.

De-Constructing the Chinese Nation

Abstract: Most Sinologists view the Chinese nation as a relatively recent development, one that made the transition from empire to nation only around the turn of the twentieth century. This contrasts with the view of the Chinese nationalists and the ordinary people of China that their country is an ancient body that has evolved into present times. This split in the understanding of the Chinese nation cannot be easily resolved by Western theories of nationalism, whose assumptions are deeply embedded in modernization theory. In this paper, I propose a few alternative categories, inspired in part by post-modernist theories and in part by a comparative perspective, to understand both the question of the history of the nation as well as the related one about the nature of national identity. In the problematique of modernization theories the nation is a unique and unprecedented form of community which finds its place in the oppositions between empire and nation, tradition and modernity, and centre and periphery. As the new and sovereign subject of history, the nation embodies a moral force that allows it to supersede dynasties and ruling segments, which are seen as merely partial subjects representing only themselves through history. By contrast, the nation is a collective subject whose ideal periphery exists outside itself poised to realize its historical destiny in a modern future. ' To be sure, modernization theory has clarified many aspects of nationalism. But in its effort to see the nation as a collective subject of modernity, it obscures the nature of national identity. I propose instead that we view national identity as founded upon fluid relationships; it thus both resembles and is interchangeable with other political identities. If the dynamics of national identity lie within the same terrain as other political identities, we will need to break with two assumptions of modernization

Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on State-Society Relations

Abstract: T here was a time, not so long ago , when the primary fault line in American studies of Japan lay not between “Japan-bashers” and “Japanapologists,” but between those who presented the history of Japan in terms of an ongoing process of modernization and those who did not. During the 1970s, younger scholars of Japan attacked modernization theory with considerable passion (see Dower 1975), eliciting rather defensive responses from its practitioners. The 1980s saw the emergence of yet another, though somewhat smaller, generation of American scholars, which has been not so much anti-modernizationist as non-modernizationist. Like the critics of the 1970s, historians of this newest generation have dealt with conflict, social problems, and state repression, but most no longer believe it necessary to discuss the problems raised by modernization theory.

The State of the Art in Welfare State Research on Social Spending Efforts in Capitalist Democracies Since 1960

Abstract: In the last generation, social scientists have made great advances in understanding the forces behind the welfare state-or public social spending and provision. Scholars have asked why those aided by the state get what they do in the ways that they do for a number of circumstances affecting income and life chances. Typically, the object of study has been the state's efforts through spending or services to ameliorate routine and foreseeable predicaments that threaten income, such as those caused by old age, unemployment, ill health, disability, and industrial accidents. Often scholars have widened the focus to include programs aiding persons with family obligations and citizens having served in the military. Sometimes housing, nutritional, and educational needs have been included, expanding the definition of the welfare state to encompass almost all domestic public spending. Researchers have explored many empirical settings to derive and appraise arguments about public social provision. Influential early work (e.g., Marshall 1963; Titmuss 1958; Peacock and Wiseman 1961) focused on post-World War II Britain's adoption of comprehensive public social provision and the term the "welfare state." These studies argued that the inevitable expansion of citizen rights or, alternatively, social solidarities forged in war promoted public social provision. Soon, however, social scientists began quantitative, cross-sectional studies of all the countries of the post-World War II world (e.g., Cutright 1965; Wilensky 1975) and typically found that socioeconomic "modernization," notably industrialization and the aging of the population, underlay social spending progress. In addition, U.S. states were used as laboratories to test propositions about social policy-mainly whether economic modernization or