Popular Representations of Development

Insights from Novels, Films, Television and Social Media

David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, Michael Woolcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135902636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Although the academic study of development is well established, as is also its policy implementation, less considered are the broader, more popular understandings of development that often shape agendas and priorities, particularly in representative democracies.

Through its accessible and provocative chapters, Popular Representations of Development introduces the idea that while the issue of 'development' – defined broadly as problems of poverty and social deprivation, and the various agencies and processes seeking to address these – is normally one that is discussed by social scientists and policy makers, it also has a wider 'popular' dimension. Development is something that can be understood through studying literature, films, and other non-conventional forms of representation. It is also a public issue, one that has historically been associated with musical movements such as Live Aid and increasingly features in newer media such as blogs and social networking. The book connects the effort to build a more holistic understanding of development issues with an exploration of the diverse public sphere in which popular engagement with development takes place.

This book gives students of development studies, media studies and geography as well as students in the humanities engaging with global development issues a variety of perspectives from different disciplines to open up this new field for discussion.

Part I

Introduction

1 Introduction

Popular representations of development

David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock

Development is one of the dominant organising ideas of our time, and there are of, course, many ways to approach it. Most people – whether development professionals or ordinary members of the public – learn about development through predominantly economics-focused research studies and policy documents, or from sometimes informative but often unhelpfully simplified news reports. The humanistic side tends to receive less attention, as does the proliferation of different representations of development beyond academic texts and forums. Yet, as John Durham Peters (1997: 79) has observed:

Part of what it means to live in a modern society is to depend on representations of that society. Modern men and women see proximate fragments with their own eyes and global totalities through the diverse media of social description.

Taking our initial cue from a once well-known but now largely forgotten book called Sociology through Literature by Lewis Coser (1963, revised and reissued in 1972), this volume aims to broaden our understandings of development by explicitly promoting a move to include sources beyond the conventional.

Development is an increasingly wide-ranging system of ideas and institutions that take shape in diverse and complex ways. Although the academic study of development is well established, as is also its policy implementation, less considered are the broader, more popular understandings of development that often shape agendas and priorities, particularly in representative democracies. These are arguably critical to comprehend if we are to understand development better, and more importantly, if we are to realise the goals of development more effectively. Partly for this reason, in 2008 we made a case in an article entitled “The Fiction of Development” – published in The Journal of Development Studies, and included in abridged form in this volume – that novels ought to be seen as potentially valuable sources of information about the development process, and their renderings of it taken seriously. We were writing not as scholars of literature but as development researchers who were becoming aware of the far wider forms of representation of development issues that could be drawn upon in debate and discussion.

This book extends this initial exploration of these themes by continuing, but also going beyond, the world of fiction to consider other forms of representation and media that intersect with the worlds of development.¹ We also deploy the idea of representation along both of the lines implied by its two different but nevertheless interconnected meanings. On the one hand, representation can be taken to refer to the way that art, literature and media are transformative, not so much mirroring reality but instead ‘representing’ it according to conscious or unconscious conventions. On the other, the word representation takes us into political territory and revisits older, but still relevant, debates about representative and participatory democracy. When we engage with the issue of public representations of development, the importance of recognising power relations within the public spaces in which representations are constructed and projected, or silenced and ignored, is a central theme.²

We were, of course, not doing anything new by seeking to bring the study of literature into social science research or indeed into public policy debates in our previously published article. This was ground that had been usefully explored previously by Coser (1963: 3), who contended that

Fiction is not a substitute for systematically accumulated, certified knowledge. But it provides the social scientist with a wealth of sociologically relevant material … The creative imagination of the literary artist often has achieved insights into social processes which have remained unexplored in social science.

More recently, Martha Nussbaum’s book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1997) mounted a solid defence of the arts, and the novel in particular, as helping to develop what she calls the “sympathetic imagination”. She suggested that a realist novel with social themes such as Charles Dickens’ Hard Times has useful social effects (see also chapter 3 by John Harriss). Nussbaum (1997: xviii–xix) argues this on the basis of her attempt to develop

a vivid conception of public reasoning that is humanistic and not pseudo-scientific, to show how a certain type of narrative literature expresses and develops such a conception, and to show some of the benefits this conception might have to offer in the public sphere.

The novel is a form that recognises the importance and diversity of individuals, and Nussbaum sees this as informing a particular conception of public reasoning, and as fostering the sympathetic imagination – the capacity to recognise the inner lives of others – as a social effect.³ Nussbaum’s work aims to contribute to the critique of what she sees as the dominant culture within public policy of utilitarian rational-choice models that are biased towards quantitative analyses of the public good. This dominant culture, she argues, operates in undesirable ways within public policy worlds and tends to generate depersonalised, reductive public policies. At the same time, our aim in our initial article was also to build upon the established tradition of the humanistic method within the social sciences, whose proponents have long argued the need to correct tendencies among researchers to prioritise a narrow search for objective truth that increasingly ignores “the concrete historical yet human experiences out of which societies are invariably composed” (Plummer, 1983: 5). This tradition stands in contrast to positivist social science that prioritises quantification and the search for generalisable laws over gaining a fuller and more holistic understanding of the lived realities of people’s lives. As Nussbaum (1997) argues, such models are limited by their reliance on principles of aggregation and maximising, which tend to assume a qualitative sameness among individuals’ preferences and their desires that is acutely at odds with the real world.

Forms of representation of social reality, of course, reflect wider social and economic changes. Peters (1997: 78) shows how the emergence in the eighteenth century of two new – but very different – forms of narrative in the shape of the novel and the science of statistics was strongly linked to the rise of a middle-class reading public and the establishment of rationalised bureaucratic administrative systems:

The novel and statistics are each a narrative mode answering the problem of how to display a cross section of a quantitative complexity. One uses narrative, one uses aggregation. Both enact – and depend on – a new apprehension of space and time: the possibility of envisioning spatially dispersed events at a single moment in time … The polarity of narrative and data marks the twin limits of modern social description, with many hybrid forms between. Academic battles between number crunchers and tale-spinners are only a local variant on this larger theme.

In the world of development, we suggest that a corrective towards humanistic approaches may be particularly relevant at the present time. Over the past decade, many development agencies and researchers have increasingly considered the definition and scope of knowledge about development to be based on rather narrow orthodoxies of ‘results-based management’ approaches on the one hand, and, on the other, to the supposedly definitive logic of once and for all proving ‘what works’, generally via standardised methodologies such as randomised controlled trials. Certainly, there has been a palpable shift away from interest in issues of substance and process towards preoccupations with management, mechanisms and the measurement of aid, as is perhaps best embodied in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the aid effectiveness agenda that emerged after a landmark Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting in Paris in 2005.

Although there have been various efforts over the years to broaden the range of knowledge and representation, such as the World Bank’s “Voices of the Poor” initiative that was undertaken over a decade ago (see Narayan et al., 1999), these seem to have lost popularity among mainstream donor agencies in recent years. One exception is the Swedish International Development Agency’s (Sida’s) Health and Education Reality Check project that started in Bangladesh in 2006.⁴ For five years, this project has attempted to listen to and document the voices and experiences of people living in poverty using an approach based on annual residential household visits by specially trained field researchers. This work seeks to ‘humanise’, using a methodology that emphasises face-to-face two-way communication, the information that policymakers use to plan and evaluate the two large multi-donor sector-wide reform programmes operating across that country.⁵ However, this remains a rare exception. Even PLA Notes, the practitioner journal that for many years served as a repository for unconventional thinking and practice around alternative development approaches,⁶ is finding it increasingly difficult to secure the comparatively small amount of funding it needs to maintain publication.

Indeed, the new proponents of evidence-based development policy – for example, Banerjee and Duflo (2011: 16) in their influential book Poor Economics – tend to make their case for a new positivism in development research in a confident and unambiguous manner that brooks little argument:

The studies we use have in common a high level of scientific rigor, openness to accepting the verdict of the data, and focus on specific concrete questions of relevance to the lives of the poor.⁷

Yet, as Woolcock (2009) has argued, the appeal of what have increasingly become seen as ‘gold standard’ methodologies for acquiring knowledge do not relieve us of the need to engage with context and process by means of as wide a range as possible of qualitative, quantitative and historical social science tools. Within the approach we take in this book, we favour a more open and diverse view of what constitutes credible evidence akin to that advanced by Jennifer Greene (2009), whose work, in contrast to some current trends, recognises multiple voices, history and complexity and who prefers to see evidence more modestly in terms of “inkling” rather than “proof”.

There is also a further dimension to exploring popular representations of development that we touched on in our earlier article: the reach of sources of information such as novels compared to academic texts and policy papers. There are few sources of information about poverty that have reached as wide an audience as Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance, for example, which has sold over a quarter of a million copies and counting, compared to less than 20,000 for a classic academic study of the phenomenon such as Janice Perlman’s The Myth of Marginality, first published in 1976, for example. This aspect of more popular representations alone justifies taking an interest in them; as Joseph Stalin once put it, “quantity has a quality of its own”.⁸

Building on the debate generated by our earlier article around literary sources, and following the logic of exploring further the diverse media now engaging with development issues, we decided to broaden our interest to other popular representations of development by commissioning researchers to contribute to an edited collection on this theme. Coser drew much of the material in his book from nineteenth and twentieth century literature,⁹ but today the locations and sources of public knowledge relating to development and social change have diversified enormously to include film, television and the Internet. The aim of this volume is thus both to reveal the extent of alternative sources of information about development issues, as well as to explore the ways in which development, as a key idea of our times, is discussed beyond more conventional academic and policy texts. Diversity of representation is therefore a key theme among the contributions included here. At the same time, the book also explores the various ways in which particular development themes have been taken up in non-academic and non-policy contexts, and considers the potential impact and influence that such non-conventional, more popular representations of development may have, both positive and negative.

Representation and the growth of modern media

A discussion of issues of popular representation in any field necessarily leads us to consider the growth of the media, its generation, and exchange of meaning through the institutions of the mass media. The work of Jurgen Habermas – and in particular his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) – provides an important initial reference point for our exploration. In this book, he elaborated his concept of the public sphere, analysing the rise of mass media by documenting the emergence during the eighteenth century of what he terms “publicity” as a new form of political organisation, associated with changes in the way modern states seek to build their legitimacy. In particular, Habermas argued that the state no longer governs through the production of forms of staged display that used to underline the feudal king’s power (such as the spectacle of processions and public executions), but instead now tries to secure its legitimacy by making its deliberations visible to the public (the generation of legitimacy through the reason of public opinion).

Yet Habermas also recognises that this process of change is complex and remains incomplete. The public sphere all too easily becomes “re-feudalised” by market and state. For example, the mass media may continue to keep citizens “in awe” rather than provide them with accurate information, so that informed, rational discussion remains elusive and often illusory within the public sphere. Television, for example, is normally characterised by the tension between its role in informing citizens through news reporting, documentary, or drama, and its presentation of powerful advertising messages that are designed to sell commodities to consumers. These effects may also be seen in the representation of development issues, such as disaster or conflict reporting – part of what Lilie Chouliaraki (2006) has characterised as the “the spectatorship of suffering”.

The impact of technological change on the organisation and projection of knowledge is a theme that also underpins several of the contributions to this volume. Here we also find resonances with the work of Manuel Castells (2000), whose concept of the “network society” is informed by the idea that technological change has in recent decades helped to move capitalism into a new stage of “informational capitalism” after its stagnation during the 1970s. He shows how a new immediacy of constantly circulating financial, technical and cultural information helps to shape economic relations, politics and organisational structures – and peoples’ lives – in new and unpredictable ways, and where crises now arrive regularly and unexpectedly. New forms of work associated with these changes rely on flexibility, connectedness and alertness to opportunity, while to succeed, organisations of all kinds increasingly access new capabilities in the form of media-friendliness, Internet skills and global networking. In the world of development, these trends can be seen in the increasing efforts by international NGOs to boost their communications departments and by donors such as the World Bank’s experimentation with alternative media (see chapter 4 by Davidov).

The field of “informational development” is clearly an area that increasingly demands more attention from researchers. At the same time, however, concern with the ways in which development issues are represented in the media is a long-standing issue, particularly with regard to the way that people who live in poverty are portrayed. In a recent study of the visual language of Briti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Literature and fiction
• PART III Media and television
• PART IV Film
• PART V Public campaigns
• PART VI New media
• PART VII Conclusion
• Index