DEVELOPMENT

The Meanings of Development

The Meanings of Development

Introduction

Development involves innumerable variables, including economic, social, political, gender, cultural, religious, and environmental factors. But though development theory integrates concepts and perspectives from a range of disciplines, it was highly influenced by economic thought from the start (Martinussen, 2007, 69). Early theoretical models of development equated development with economic growth and industrialization, and theorists saw countries that had not yet achieved these as being at an earlier or lower stage of development relative to Europe and North America. The most influential proponent of this view was the American economic historian Walt W. Rostow. His 1960 book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, elaborated a linear-stages-of-growth model that defined development as a sequence of stages through which all societies must pass. This conception of the nature and process of development became the basic blueprint for modernization theory (Hettne, 2005, 33).

There are few areas of sociology where theory is so closely linked to changes in the global landscape than in the sociology of development, which takes as given that the causes of underdevelopment are linked to its “cure.” Development theories have been used to justify a set of policies consistent with the modernization project that support capital accumulation. That use has impelled other sociologists, practitioners, and activists to provide countertheories with different causal models of how to, first, get to the modernization goal, then expand that goal, and ultimately reject it. The study of the organization of development efforts, the degree to which development can be intentional, the very definitions of development, whether it is unidimensional or multidimensional, and the actors involved (global, national, regional, local) make the sociology of development a highly contested and potentially influential realm of sociology (Frank, 2007, 87).

Discussion

To understand this contextual and contrapuntal relationship between competing development theories, we will look at different stages and turning points in the world economy and political situation in relation to the global North's dominant assistance paradigms in relation to industrial and agrarian developments and characterize the South's responses to them. Thus, we will address each time period by looking at the global context, the particular modernization project applied in that context (both industrial and agricultural manifestations), the response of the South, and the alternative development theories used to respond to the modernization project. We will sum up with an assessment regarding future directions of the sociology of development.

Modernization theory emerged following World ...