This documents is a summary that I made for the online exam last year. It contains explanations of the concepts and theories that are used in the book 'Theories of Development' (Third edition). It is therefore a structural summary of the chapters that were compulsary previous year.
Book
Development as modernization
Darwinism: survival of the fittest. This applied to human societies was used to legitimize laissez-fair
economics, market systems, the private ownership of productive resources and social inequality.
Social Darwinism can explain the transition to an intensely competitive industrial capitalism.
Spencerian message: rich deserve their wealth for they are the victors in the struggle for existence.
This resulted in environmental determinism. However, there was a realization that humans are quite
different than other natural organisms. Humans are self-conscious and aware of what they are doing.
This does not mean that the environmental determinism was completely dropped, but it did become
more complex: rationalism came into sight. Rationalism focuses on the human capacity to control
the world through thought, logic and calculation.
Structural functionalism: notions of rationalism integrated with earlier ideas about naturalism. How
can societies maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era when such earlier means of
cohesion as shared religious and ethnic backgrounds can no longer be assumed? Not focusing on the
motivations and actions of individual people, but on social facts (Durkheim). Modern societies are
characterized by a complex division of labour that results in organic solidarity. Dependencies that tie
people together.
Gemeinschaft – groups based on family and neighbourhood bonds that engender feelings of
togetherness. Essential will.
Gesellschaft – groups sustained by instrumental goals. Arbitrary will.
Structural functionalism – posits that society is a system of institutions that fulfils naturalistic
functions. Each component of a social system contributes positively to the continued operation of
the whole. There has to be leadership, otherwise society disintegrates. (p131)
Critique: politically conservative, even repressive, social theory in that it stresses the need for the
elites of societies in the process of change. Gouldner: structural functionalism is unsuited to a theory
of social dynamics, like development. Structural functionalism conflated the notions structure and
systems. Structure is like anatomy, while system includes how the anatomy functions.
Parsonian synthesis – humans were goal-seeking beings active in creating their own lives. Actors
made choices within an action system constrained by what Parson termed pattern variables. Culture
keeps differentiating societies and keeps them from disintegrating. Adaption, differentiation and
integration are the themes of evolutionary social development for Parson. Is a critic of structural
functionalism.
Modernization theory – refers to whether societies are similar or not to the model of modern
industrial society. Specialization of economic activities and occupational roles and the growth of
markets. Mainly gesellschaft. Development was as evolutionary process in which human capacity
increased for initiating new structures, coping with problems, adapting to continuous change etc.
Emphasis places on broad social and cultural differences between modern and traditional societies.
See the table of the typology of traditional versus modern man.
Ripple effect of modernization: areas close to the origin of innovation were more susceptible to
change early , while those at a greater distance felt its effects later.
Critique: message from the West that there is an inevitable process leading from tradition to
modernity: ‘follow it and you too can have everything that we Americans posses’. Modernization
theory was criticized for its ahistoricism, Rostow’s concept was too universal and he assumed that
history did not change. Also critique on its ethnocentrism, in which everyone should copy the
Western world. We are not all the same.
, Stages of economic growth, Rostow – traditional societies – preconditions for take-off – take-off –
the drive toward maturity – high mass consumption (p144-145).
Killer applications – imperialism is not a historically sufficient explanation of Western predominance.
Six ideas that distinguished the West from the rest according to Ferguson: competition, science,
property rights, medicine, consumer society, work ethic. These killer apps allowed a minority of
mankind living on the Western edge of Eurasia to dominate the world for the better part of 500
years. The difference between the West and the rest was chiefly institutional in nature.
Sachs – sees poverty simply as the mere lack of sufficient modernization.
Environmental determinism – Europeans were innately superior to people from elsewhere because
their natural environment made them that way.
Marxism, socialism and development
Historical materialism – the real activity of actual women and men is the source of consciousness
rather than God, spirit or some other heavenly force. Consciousness in a materialist understanding
comes from real experience in a material world that preceded thought.
Marx – human nature is actively created under definite natural and social conditions. Social relations
among people occurring through money and commodities rather than directly: alienation of person
from person. Marx conceptualized development as uneven and contradictory (some people got a lot
more from it than others). Development was a process of capital accumulation occurring unevenly in
terms of class and space. Societies are exploitative when uncompensated surplus labour or its
products are taken from the direct producers by elites and their institutions.
Consciousness has to take ideological forms that rationalize and legitimize exploitation.
Marx does not see governments as acting on behalf of everyone equally. Rather, he sees the state as
being made up of rich people who are elected by means controlled by money and then pressured by
big money to act in the interest of corporations. The state is the collective political arm of the
economically dominant class. Different societies that people pass through according to Marx (p179).
Structural Marxism – more structural than naturalistic. Language system important.
Imperialism – In Marx’s terms, mercantilist imperialism enabled the primitive accumulation of stocks
of global wealth that were then invested as capital in the Western European and North American
industrial revolutions. Mercantilism involved massive state control. The consequences of imperialism
for conquered societies were disastrous. Two types of imperialism: resource extraction and settles
imperialism.
Neo-colonialism – control by economic rather than directly political means. Neo means new and
different and imperialism has long meant geopolitical expansion of national power. The aim is control
of spaces, resources and specified people indirectly through multinational corporations, international
financial institutions and other global governance mechanisms and even foreign investments, policy
imposition and charity.
Dependency – an historical condition which shapes a certain structure of the world economy such
that it flavours some countries to the detriment of others and limits the development possibilities of
the subordinate economies. Ultimate solution was to break with capitalist imperialism. Development
of the states at the centre of the capitalist world economy had the effect of under-developing the
states of the periphery.
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