Modernization theory

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

Italian Culture in the Industrial Era 1880-1980: Cultural Industries, Politics and the Public

Abstract: This book aims to be both a cultural history of 20-th century Italy and a case study of cultural modernisation. Focusing on the development of the modern cultural industries such as publishing, cinema and broadcasting, it looks at their impact upon a society which remained predominantly agrarian until around 1950. Starting with an overview of Italy since 1990, the book traces the effects of industrialization and commercialization on popular culture and the arts. It then deals with the cultural policies of the Fascists and the post-1945 reconstruction. It ends with a discussion of the impact of television in the 1960s and 1970s and on trends towards multimedia conglomerates and deregulated broadcasting in the 1980s. The author draws on archive and newspaper sources as well as published materials, and questions established assumptions about the relationship between culture and politics, particularly in the Fascist period, and about the forms and meanings of modernization since the Second World War. The book is written in a way that is accessible to the non-specialist reader. It may also be of interest to students of Italian history and culture, cultural and media studies, European history and politics.

Modernizing Institutions, Mobilization, and Third World Development: A Cross-National Study

Abstract: Following the implications of modernization theory, we test via panel regression analysis several hypotheses relating modernizing institutions to the economic development of poor countries. Controlling for the economic constraints imposed by initial poverty and world-system position, we find that the school furthers economic development while exposure to the cinema hinders it. Further analysis shows that these effects vary by political context: in countries with mobilizing regimes, the positive contributions of the school are strong, while in countries with nonmobilizing regimes the adverse effects of the cinemaare strong. Following Portes, we argue that the cinema impedes economic growth by transmitting and promoting Western values incompatible with the social ethos that must accompany programs of national economic development. We discuss the relevance of our findings to the problem of social mobilization in poor countries.

Late industrialisers, late democratisers: Developmental states in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract: A sound generalisation in the social sciences is that theories pronounced dead will continue to haunt the discipline long thereafter. A case in point is so-called modernisation theory. This is the claim that economic growth first leads to social mobilisation-urbanisation, mass communication, growth in literacy and the degree of formal education, the creation of new social classes (particularly the working, middle and business classes), etc-which in turn results in new forms of political activity.' This political transformation involves the organisation of new groups and strata into political bodies-including labour unions, student groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce, etc. Such changes create conditions highly favourable to the existence of democratic government. Seymour Martin Lipset's classic statement specified socioeconomic 'requisites' of democracy.2 Empirical verification of the correlation between economic advancement and democracy poured in.3 By the late 1960s, however, modernisation theory appeared to have been buried under collapsing democracies in many developing countries, including some of the most economically advanced. The theoretical interment quickly followed. In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington showed modernisation was not producing a political culture congenial to democracy in most developing countries; on the contrary, in weakly institutionalised political systems economic development and the resulting social mobilisation produced what Huntington called praetorianism, which favoured the rise of authoritarianism.4 In an influential book about South America, Guillermo O'Donnell claimed that higher levels of modernisation in that region were correlated with dictatorship not democracy.5 O'Donnell ventured that 'it is a disquieting possibility that authoritarianism might be a more likely outcome than political democracy as other countries achieve or approach high modernization '.6 Several dozen redemocratisations later-many in South America, O'Donnell co-authored a book in which countries in this and other regions were (at least implicitly) shown to be ripe for democratic transition after all.7 Huntington's turnaround was more explicit. Huntington argued that when countries began to develop-reaching a middle level income of GNP per capita, between US$1000 and $3000 (1976 dollars)-they entered the 'zone of transition' in which most of the recent democratic transitions had in fact occurred.8 Not that these political

Nation-States and State-Nations

Abstract: Nationalism takes a variety of forms and carries with it a variety of political consequences. A major variable distinguishing one pattern of nationalism from another has been the interplay between "nation" and "state." At bottom, this is a relationship between national identity and political autonomy, between national integration and political sovereignty. In many of the developed countries of the post-World War II world the sense of national identity evolved prior to the crystallization of the structures of political authority. By contrast, in most of the currently underdeveloped, newly independent countries this sequence is reversed: authority and sovereignty have run ahead of self-conscious national identity and cultural integration. To this extent it can be said that Europe produced nation-states, whereas Asia and Africa have produced state-nations. These two broad patterns of relationships have never been as clear-cut as has been traditionally supposed. Their implications are particularly pertinent for understanding the role of nationalism in political stabilization and economic modernization, as well as its possible role in reshaping the patterns of political control and consolidation. What is called for is an appreciation of the mobilization character of nationalism-specifically, nationalism as the embodiment of at least two types of mobilization that may outstrip one another.