The Sociology of Modernization and Development

David Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134898060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"David Harrison writes very well, and presents a good, well-balanced and perceptive appraisal of current perspectives."--"Times Higher Education Supplement"
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1
Early Modernization Theory

Introduction

There is no one modernization theory. Rather, this term is shorthand for a variety of perspectives that were applied by non-Marxists to the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. The dominant themes of such perspectives arose from established sociological traditions and involved the reinterpretation, often conscious, of the concerns of classical sociology. Evolutionism (with its focus on increasing differentiation), diffusionism, structural functionalism, systems theory and interactionism all combined to help form the mish-mash of ideas that came to be known as modernization theory. There were inputs from other disciplines, for example, political science, anthropology, psychology, economics and geography, and in the two decades after the Second World War such perspectives were increasingly applied to the Third World.

In many respects, the beginnings of modernization theory can be traced to antiquity, when the notion of evolution was first used with reference to human society. Certainly, the idea of progress is a continuing theme in Western intellectual thought. However, it was not until the eighteenth century that the evolution of societies was studied in a systematic way. As Bock remarks,

a long, gradual process of social and cultural change considered as differentiation, a movement through defined stages from the simple to the complex, has marked Western social thought throughout and dominated the great eighteenth-century program to establish a science of man and society (1979, p. 70).

Social evolutionism reached well into the nineteenth century, where it was reinforced by Darwin’s work on biological evolution, and none of the early sociologists were free from this. In Western Europe, the nineteenth century was a time when people were aware that they were living through massive social changes which were radically altering the structures of society. As Bock has pointed out elsewhere (1964) nineteenth century theories of evolution were characterized by an emphasis on the naturalness and inevitability of such changes. It was the ‘blockages’ in evolution that required explanation, rather than the process itself. Change was seen to be continuous, slow, and manifest to all who possessed the necessary social scientific ‘key’ to understanding it. In so far as change occurred, it was deemed to follow the same pattern, and societies were distinguished from one another in that they occupied different positions on the evolutionary scale. The higher they moved up the scale the closer they became in type to Western industrial societies, and it should be noted that such societies were regarded by most writers (themselves of Western origin) as the highest known forms of civilization. Marx, for instance, spoke of ‘laws’, of ‘tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable results’, and suggested that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx, 1954, p. 19).

Although there was considerable admiration for the achievements of Western industry and technology, the admiration was tinged with fear. The old order was being swept away and, with it, the security and predictability that seemed to characterize pre-industrial society. Indeed,

the fundamental ideas of European sociology are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime under the blows of industrialism and revolutionary democracy (Nisbet, 1966, p. 21).

Some of the main elements of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory can be seen in the work of Durkheim, especially in The Division of Labour in Society (1964, first published 1893). For him, pre-industrial societies, in particular, simple, unsegmented societies based on the horde or the clan, were typified by mechanical solidarity. In such societies, rules were based on an unstated but dominant consensus, the ‘collective conscience’, and individuals were similar to one another in crucial behavioural and moral respects. Social solidarity was borne out of likeness, resemblance and the unity of individual consciences, and it was mechanical because of the absolute domination of the collective conscience, which was based primarily on religious beliefs and sentiments. Durkheim viewed with considerable misgiving the rise of Western industrial society and the corresponding decline in the influence of the common conscience, and noted the increased heterogeneity, individualism and interdependence that arose from the division of labour. He considered that there were, in these developments, the seeds of a new moral order, and a social solidarity that was organic rather than mechanical. That said, he was also aware that evolution from one kind of social solidarity to another was not automatic; indeed, he felt that at the end of the nineteenth century, Western European societies evidenced an abnormal form of the division of labour. Lacking consensus, they were characterized by ‘anomie’, that is, rootlessness and a lack of regulation, and the moral order needed to be based on occupational associations which would provide individuals with moral discipline, with a sense of belonging, and which would encourage social solidarity and mutual assistance. In this way, the division of labour would be able to take over from the common conscience: ‘It is the principal bond of social aggregates of higher types’ (Durkheim, 1964, p. 173).

For Durkheim, then, societies evolve from lower to higher stages, and move from the simple and undifferentiated to the more complex. Western industrial society, with its highly developed division of labour, is ultimately superior to pre-industrial society, but only when it has dealt with the problems of social integration and value consensus. Taken together, these may be seen as the dominant themes of evolutionary theory which were to pass, through Durkheim and other nineteenth-century writers, into modernization theory. They were formulated at a time of rapid social and economic change, when traditional social orders were under attack and when the bases of new societies were yet to be established. They were revived after the Second World War, during a similar period of rapid socio-economic and political change. Then, however, it was the orderly evolution of the ‘new nations’ of the Third World which exercised the minds of the (predominantly Western) social scientists.

Evolutionism was but one of several influences on modernization theory. Indeed, even by the end of the nineteenth century, evolutionism was strongly challenged by the diffusionists, who sought to provide an alternative approach to social and cultural phenomena.

Just as the idea of evolution referred to a genuine core phenomenon of progressive development, which occurred sometime in some places but not at all times in all places, so the idea of diffusion referred to the equally real transmission of cultural artefacts and other ‘traits’ from one region or community to another (Leaf, 1979, p. 164).

In North American anthropology, the notion of diffusion was associated with the rise of the Boas ‘school’ of ethnography. Generally, it came to be felt that evolutionist theories were inadequate in the explanation of social change. Their focus on one path of development was increasingly regarded as simplistic. In addition, the carnage of the First World War, in which millions were killed and wounded, dealt a severe blow to the smug assumption that Western culture and civilization were more advanced than elsewhere, and did little to confirm the view that technological supremacy was necessarily an advantage. The diffusionist perspective is based, in general, on the assumption that a common cultural pattern, or similar cultural artefacts, will have originated from a single source, and that innovation is likely to occur once only, rather than to be repeated by different groups at different times.

Whereas evolutionists focused on the transmission of culture over time, the diffusionists examined the way it was transferred in space via social interaction. Both perspectives encouraged a comparison of different cultures, but both also led to a great deal of unsupported speculation. It was hardly possible to subject the notion of stages of development to any empirical test, given the vast time spans involved, and a similar difficulty arose in discussions about the diffusion of cultural traits. To take a small, but later, example: when M and F Herskovits studied a Trinidadian village in the 1930s, they noted that eating habits were African, and that the men of the family ate meals before and apart from the women and children (1947, p. 289). In their view, this cultural trait clearly had been diffused from Africa. However, it had also been noted, at about that same time, by Arensberg and Kimball in rural Ireland, (1968, pp. 35–8; first published 1940) and thus the source of this particular cultural trait becomes less obvious. On a much larger scale, at the turn of the nineteenth century, it was actually suggested that all civilization had been diffused from ancient Egypt. Given this kind of generalization, it was not surprising that diffusionism became discredited. Isolated cultural traits, abstracted from their social context, were stripped of their significance in the continuing round of social life and forced to become components of highly fanciful explanations.

Despite the problems encountered in diffusionist explanations, diffusionism was to remain an important component in North American social science for some time. For a while, it seemed to have completely eclipsed evolutionism, and the two perspectives were often regarded as incompatible. For White, a committed evolutionist, the Boas school was wrong in contending that theories of cultural evolution had been disproved by the facts of diffusion. In his view, the early evolutionists were fully aware of diffusion, and it was the diffusionists who ‘confused the evolution of culture with the culture history of peoples’ (White, 1945, p. 343). Evolutionists did not insist that every social group had to go through every stage:

The fact that a tribe gets a complex of traits from a foreign source of diffusion has nothing whatever to do with the series of stages in which this culture complex developed. Morgan and Tylor were well aware that tribes can and do take ‘short cuts’ via diffusion (White, 1945, p. 345).

As Evans-Pritchard noted (1962, pp. 17–18), diffusionism had less of an impact in Britain. In itself, this would be irrelevant, except for the fact that Parsons, one of the key figures in modernization theory, was strongly influenced by British social anthropology. Perhaps for this reason, the concept of diffusion did not figure to any large extent in his ‘grand theory’, but it was to become important in empirical studies of modernization, especially in attempts to understand how innovations were diffused.

For a time, evolutionism and diffusionism not only were regarded as mutually exclusive but also were considered to be alternatives to structural functionalism. The main tenets of modern structural functionalism are well known: societies are more or less self-sufficient, adaptive social systems, characterized by varying degrees of differentiation, and with roles and institutions, rather than concrete individuals, as their principal units. The balance, or equilibrium, of the various parts of the whole is maintained for as long as certain functional prerequisites are satisfied and, generally speaking, an institution is ‘explained’ once the functions it fulfils are satisfied. Finally, the entire system, or any part of it, is kept together through the operation of a central value system broadly embodying social consensus. That this kind of perspective need not be incompatible with evolutionism can be seen from Durkheim, who nevertheless was careful to distinguish between historical and functional elements in his explanations of social phenomena. As he puts it:

To demonstrate the utility of a fact does not explain its origins, nor how it is what it is. The uses which it serves presume the specific properties characteristic of it, but do not create it (1982, p. 119–20).

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, evolutionism and diffusionism not only vied with each other for adherents, but also with structural functionalism, which was to become the dominant perspective in sociology and anthropology. Much of its increased influence was due to Malinowski, who was perhaps the first to develop structural functionalism as a specific approach to fieldwork. He insisted that to understand social life it is not enough to indulge in sociological abstraction. Instead, it is necessary to enter fully into the social situation we wish to understand, living with the indigenes, using their language, and not interpreters, joining in their happiness and sharing in their suffering. We had to become a part of their culture, and their culture had to become part of us. While Malinowski’s fame now rests more on his empirical work, especially among the Trobriand islanders, among whom he was, in effect, interned during the First World War, he did try in his analysis to link individual needs to social and cultural needs. Initially, there are individual needs for food, drink, sleep and sex. These are reflected in the needs of all members of society for safety, bodily comfort, health and so on. At a cultural level, there are derived needs for reproduction through kinship and health through the practice of hygiene. This leads to yet another set of needs, in that societies, to survive, require economic systems to produce for and maintain their members, tools for production to occur, and goods for society’s members to consume. In addition, social control is necessary, to regulate individual behaviour, along with education to socialize the young. Finally, political organization is also required to ensure that orders necessary for the continued existence of society are carried out. In this way, Malinowski moved, in fairly obvious stages, from the concept of basic needs of individuals to the derived needs that have to be met for the continued survival of entire societies and cultures.

This venture into Malinowski’s structural functionalism is no mere historical digression, for his work was to have a profound influence on Talcott Parsons, one of the key figures in sociology and in post-1945 modernization theory. Indeed, it was with reference to Malinowski’s four-fold classification of needs that Parsons was to remark that ‘it can be treated as the master classification of functional imperatives of any social system or, indeed, of any system of action’ (1957, p. 65). Many of the ingredients of this ‘master classification’ were embodied in Parsonian structural functionalism. As a result, an approach that arose from one of the earliest empirical studies of any Third World society entered into mainstream sociology of the 1950s and, in the process, contributed to one of the most abstract model of systems of action produced by any sociologist.

By the middle of the twentieth century, structural functionalists had come to dominate sociological theory and, among them, Talcott Parsons was pre-eminent. As Moore points out, a systems perspective has been evident not only

in all explicitly functional analyses, but also in much analytical work that may leave theoretical assumptions mainly unstated, and in some scholarly work that explicitly adopts some form of conflict orientation (1979, p. 322).

In short, functionalism was the order of the day, and it was from the soil of Parsonian sociology that modernization theories sprouted. It is to this crop, in some of its major manifestations, that we now turn.

Modernization Theory

In his inaugural address of 1949, President Truman announced the Point Four Programme of development aid, and subsequently it became

the policy of the United States to aid the efforts of the peoples of economically underdeveloped areas to develop their resources and improve their living conditions (Ohlin, 1970, p. 25).

As Ohlin and numerous others have pointed out this policy, which was hardly new, was not put forward out of altruism. Politically, the nations of the Third World were coming of age and, as far as the United States was concerned, they were flirting with undesirable elements, that is, the USSR. If modernization theory was planted in Parsonian soil, it was tended in a political climate dominated by the Cold War. And yet, at the time, many were optimistic that development aid was the answer to underdevelopment. It is not surprising, then, that early treatments of development issues were somewhat ambivalent. The underlying fears, as well as much that made good sense, were expressed by several social scientists in The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, edited by Bert F.Hoselitz in 1952. The book itself was a response to the Four Point programme and, although the authors came from a variety of disciplines and shared no specific theory, several themes emerged that were to be important for the following two decades. Their chief concern was the interrelationship of economic and cultural change and, more specifically, with the effects of Western technology on non-industrial societies. It was accepted that change in the economic sphere would lead to other, unanticipated, perhaps untoward, changes in the social, cultural and personality spheres. Innovation, diffusion, the introduction of technology from the outside and the role of traditional culture in ‘blocking’ development were continuing themes and so, too, was the ‘threat’ of Soviet influence if development—American style—were to fail. As social scientists, the general aim appeared to be (to quote a parallel source) ‘to lessen the birth pangs’ of that which had to be done. But it should not be supposed that such writers were blindly following an ideological line; contributors to the Hoselitz volume (1952) were well aware that the history of underdeveloped societies had often been one of colonialism and coercion, and it was commonly recognized that mono-causal theories of social change were inadequate. Nevertheless, the influence of colonialism did not figure as a major factor in this book; rather, it was implied that internal factors were the most crucial in determining whether or not development would take place. Indeed, the emphasis on internal factors, economic, social or cultural, was to characterize most modernization theory.

Like other contributors to the Hoselitz reader, Marion Levy (1952a) was primarily interested in what happened when Western technology was introduced into non-industrialized societies. However, unlike them he attempted to use a Parsonian perspective in his analysis, thus setting a precedent for many later studies. In particular, Levy focused on the pattern variables.

The pattern variables were first developed by Parsons because of his dissatisfaction with earlier studies of the ways in which social relationships had altered in the transition from non-industrial to industrial societies. In his view, such approaches had presented an over-simplified picture of social change, focusing as they did on two major variables. We have already seen, for example, that Durkheim emphasized the shift as one from mechanical to organic solidarity, and Parsons himself singled out the distinction made by Tonnies between relationships based on community (Gemeinschaft) and those based on association (Gessellschaft) (cf. Parsons and Shils, 1962, pp. 8–9). For Parsons and Shils, the pattern variables were basic dichotomies in role orientations. Every actor ‘must make five specific dichotomous choices before any situation will have a determinate meaning’ (1962, p. 76). These five choices, constituting a system, are the only ones possible. They are necessary, habitual, and internalized aspects of the wider value system. Actors have to decide whether to gratify an impulse or practise self-discipline (affect or affective neutrality); private or collective interests will be given priority (self-orientation or collective orientation); social objects, including other actors, will be treated in accord with general principles or according to their standing vis-à-vis the actor (universalism or particularism) and it has to be decided how far the actions of other individuals are to determine our sense of their worth (ascription or achievement). Finally, actors must decide which characteristics of other actors are deemed to be the most important when interacting with them (functional specificity or functional diffuseness).

At one stage, Parsons implied that, depending on how some of the pattern variables were grouped, it was possible to envisage four distinct kinds of social structure (Parsons, 1951, pp. 180–200). First, societies with open stratification systems, where status was closely correlated with occupational roles, where universalistic criteria predominated in a system of free exchange, and where individualism and high levels of consumer choice were found, were characterized as based on a universalistic-achievement pattern, considered to be favourable to Western industrialization. Secondly, and slightly less favourable (for example, pre-Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia), were those societies classified as universalistic-ascriptive. Here, status was based more on group membership and less on individual achievement, and there was a corresponding decline in social mobility. Thirdly, societies based on a particularist-achievement pattern placed little emphasis on generalized ideals. Instead, kinship dominated the occupational system and achievement was reduced to obtaining a position on a status hierarchy....