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Modernization theory

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


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TL;DR: The relationship between an emerging EU policy on immigration and asylum, and the "modernization" of welfare state regimes is analyzed in this paper, where the authors argue that this new regulatory regime will continue to be challenged by forced migration and by the spontaneous movement of populations.
Abstract: This article analyses the relationship between an emerging EU policy on immigration and asylum, and the 'modernization' of welfare state regimes. The development of new programmes for recruiting skilled and unskilled labour from outside the EU is part of an attempt to make labour markets more flexible and to increase mobility. But it is accompanied by tougher measures to deter asylum seekers and control 'illegal immigration'. The authors argue that this new regulatory regime will continue to be challenged by forced migration and by the spontaneous movement of populations.

53 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Akosombo Dam across the Volta River in Ghana remains at the center of debates and imaginations about nationhood, modernity, and development as mentioned in this paper, and it is an excellent prism to reconstruct how a large dam became not just the engine for the imagined transformation of Ghana during Africa's era of decolonization but also a vehicle for multiple actors with competing agendas within the Cold War context.
Abstract: The Akosombo Dam across the Volta River in Ghana remains at the center of debates and imaginations about nationhood, modernity, and development. Originally designed in the 1920s to serve the British metropole, the Volta River Project was reshaped by the country’s founding leader Kwame Nkrumah in the 1950s. The revised project included a hydroelectric dam, an aluminum smelter to process Ghanaian mined bauxite, new cities, a deep sea harbor, and other infrastructural investments. The project became central to a modernization program that promised rapid industrialization and reducing the country’s dependence on cocoa exports. Public discourses increasingly identified the project with Nkrumah and his dream of development. In the course of its planning and construction, the Akosombo Dam became a manifestation of the personalization of state politics that engaged with international donors, multinational companies, foreign governments, and local expectations. Based on multi-sited archival and oral research, the article explores how public, government, and expert discourses about the Volta project produced different temporalities of an industrialized future that would transform the country’s rural past and create new cities, factories, and infrastructures during the 1950s and 1960s. The Volta scheme is an excellent prism to reconstruct how a large dam became not just the engine for the imagined transformation of Ghana during Africa’s era of decolonization but also a vehicle for multiple actors with competing agendas within the Cold War context. In this article, I unpack these interventions that led to a series of tensions and paradoxes. Analyzing the Volta scheme’s debates and public spectacles provides an account about the interplay between development aspirations and possibility, dreams and reality.

53 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors deal with the subject of socio-environmental injustice in Brazil as a consequence of the country's current development model in the context of globalization and from the perspective of social struggle.
Abstract: The present paper deals with the subject of socio-environmental injustice in Brazil as a consequence of the country's current development model in the context of globalization and from the perspective of social struggle. Over time the realization of the development ideology has introduced profound changes in the country's territory, with severe repercussions for population and ecosystem health that have only recently been included on the social agenda. Efforts to reconcile solutions to the social and environmental crises have converged in the concept of sustainable development, within new discourses in the field of collective health (and whose analysis provides the point of departure for this paper). Territory is explored as a useful tool for analyzing the relationship between health, environment, and development, revealing the paradox between Brazil's great natural and human potential and its poverty, reflecting environmental injustice and disregard for human rights. This expanded concept of territorial organization is important for understanding the context of modernization and the possibility for poor populations to enjoy a better life.

53 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The globalization theory of the present moment as discussed by the authors is based on the idea of the past as constructed, invented, and produced, and it can be seen as a theory of a world always on the brink of newness.
Abstract: owever undisciplined the term globalization might still be, there is increasing agreement as to the kinds of processes that it points to in the world. Whether interpreting alternative modernities, cultural hybridities, commodity circulations, transnational migrations, or identity politics, globalization theory largely looks to the future, attempting to prefigure the new millennium while eschewing notions of linearity, teleology, and predictability. Concomitantly, the notion of modernity has acquired remarkable fluidity, indicating that it has become plural, uneven, contested, and “at large” (Appadurai 1996). Building on ideas of the past as constructed, invented, and produced, globalization presents itself as a theory of the present moment. Powerfully expressing that “we now live in an almost/not yet world” (Thrift 1996, 257), it captures the in-betweenness of a world always on the brink of newness. Modernization theory has also been concerned with process, innovation, and rupture, but it is differently invested in notions of the past. In its earlier, more concrete, more confident era, modernity invented an array of pasts. There is the past as Tradition, a timeless, static past whose value lies not in explanation but in revealing the alter ego either as the anachronistic self or the distant other. A different past is History. In one variant, this focuses on the rise of European hegemony, producing a causal narrative of how, why, and when modernity started.

53 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared environmental behavior, and the factors affecting it, of citizens from five European countries with diverse economic and social status, and found that people's attitudes towards environmental issues and economy-environment trade-offs can be considered reliable predictors, contrary to political attitudes which did not prove to be important determinants of environmental behavior.
Abstract: Countries of Central and East Europe are in a process of economic, social and political transition. This process provides a unique opportunity for cross-national studies in a context of social transformation and radical infrastructural changes. In the present study, we compared environmental behavior, and the factors affecting it, of citizens from five European countries with diverse economic and social status. Outcomes of the present survey suggest that people's attitudes towards environmental issues and economy-environment trade-offs can be considered reliable predictors, contrary to political attitudes which did not prove to be important determinants of environmental behavior. However, one should be aware of the differences in individual factors affecting citizens' environmental behavior, since the latter cannot be considered as a linear function of a country's development and modernization.

52 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
20231,630
20223,824
2021370
2020573
2019604