Free Web Hosting Provider - Web Hosting - E-commerce - High Speed Internet - Free Web Page
Search the Web

MSc. DEVELOPMENT STUDIES: STRATEGIES FOR INDUSTRIALISATION
Lectures 1-3(3); The Advent of Capitalism NOTES

MODERNISATION and INDUSTRIALISATION: Theoretical Framework For The Transition To Industrial Capitalism

With the notable exception of LA countries which mostly gained independent in the 19th century, the notion of Economic Development in the LDCs (often regarded as synonymous with Industrialisation) is a post-WW2 phenomenon.

The Strategy which advocated and promoted Economic Development and modernisation the in the

Newly-emergent nation-states of the Africa/Asia/LA (i.e. those within the Western sphere of influence) was formalised in the body of Modernization Theory

As such therefore, Modernization Theory is a historical phenomenon and the product of three main events in the post-World War Two era:

1) the rise of the United States as a superpower to contain the growth of the international communist movement. For this, the United States financed the industrialization of Wester Europe (Marshall plan), the industrialization of South Korea and Taiwan, and the reconstruction of Japan.

2) the growth of a world-wide Communist movement led from Moscow and later on also from Beijing (with Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, Vietnam and Cuba as hot points).

3) the process of de-colonisation in Africa and Asia as the outcome of the disintegration of the former European colonial empires.

Some Background Notes….

By and large, including LA states which decolonised themselves between 1804 and 1844, the new nation-states were in a search for a model of development.

Thus, (in the main) the United States establishment encouraged influential economists, historians and social scientist to study the new nation-states, to devise ways of promoting capitalist economic development and political stability and "SOCIAL ORDER", in order to prevent /discourage the rise of ultra-nationalistic and procommunist sympathies in newly independent countries.

Conceptually, Modernization Theory was predicated on two distinctive and yet interrelated disciplines:

A.- The Classical Evolutionary Theory
B.- Functionalist Theory

A.- THE CLASSICAL EVOLUTIONARY THEORY ( see Comte et al) assumed the following:

  1. social change is unidirectional, from a primitive to an advanced state, thus the fate of human evolution is predetermined.
  2. the movement toward the final phase is GOOD because it represents PROGRESS, HUMANITY, and CIVILIZATION, the latter three concepts defined in accordance with Western European cultural parameters.
  3. it assumed that the rate of SOCIAL CHANGE is slow, gradual and piecemeal. Most importantly, social change, in accordance with Charles Darwin approach to biological development, was EOLUTIONARY, not REVOLUTIONARY.
  4. from above, the process (from primitive to complex. modern societies) will take centuries to complete.

B.- FUNCTIONALIST THEORY, as outlined by Talcott Parsons, 1951, had the following tenets:

  1. human society is like a biological organism, with different parts corresponding to the different institutions that makeup a society;
  2. each institution performs a specific function for the good of the whole, thus there are FOUR CRUCIAL FUNCTIONS that every institution must perform to maintain the social fabric:

2.1 adaptation to the environment - performed by the economy, but not any economic system, only capitalism can adapt to the environment.

2.2 goal attainment - performed by the government, pursuing liberal alms as defined by English and French thinkers.

2.3 integration - (linking the institutions together) - performed by the legal institutions and religion. But not any religion. Branches of the Judeo-Christian religions were the right ones.

2.4 latency - the maintenance and transmission of values from generation to generation - performed by the family as an ahistorical basic human organization, and education.

Functionalist theory stated that societies tend towards harmony, stability, equilibrium and the status quo. Any behaviour jeopardizing these conditions will be considered anti-social and therefore punishable, etc.

Modernization theory characterised societies as follows:

TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES:

social relationships tend to be based on personal, familial, emotional, and face-to-face, which is a constraint in the process of developing efficient relations of production via a market.

MODERN SOCIETIES:

social relationships are NEUTRAL -impersonal, detached and indirect, which make possible efficient market relationships, etc.

Functionalism, or its related theories of Structural-Functionalism and systems theory, has been one of the most influential of all social science theories, not only in political science and sociology, but in anthropology. Like we saw, much of its origins depends on analogies with biological systems, and in just the way that a biologist might study the role of some physiological aspect, some set of cells, in the maintenance of life, functionalists have tried to understand what are the necessary "functions" that must be carried out in any political system if it is to cope with its environment and achieve its goals, and to locate the "structures" (political parties, socializing agencies like churches, family, etc.) which facilitate the functioning.

One very important structure for modernization theory, the family institution, has been conceptualized as follows:

THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY is multifunctional and extended: is responsible for:

* -reproduction

*emotional support

*..production (the family farm)

*.education (informal parental socialization)

*..welfare (care of the elderly)

*..religion (traditional worship patterns)

THE MODERN FAMILY is small and nuclear, the state takes over the education, welfare and religion functions and the individual takes over production. Reproduction becomes ambiguous, etc.

SOCIAL DISTURBANCES appear when one or more sectors in the "balancing chain", i.e. family-civil society-the state etc. fails to fulfil its functions. The social disturbances are the

result of lack of integration among what were thought by modernization theory followers as "differentiated structures".

The disturbances take the form of:

In general, the pacification and containment of human beings involved in these social disturbances takes the form of "humanitarian actions" to preserve social order and social harmony to maintain the balance between family-civil society-state. (It is interesting to notice that in the bureaucratic socialist state ( equivalent to the crude notion of "Stalinist state" ) first in the former Soviet Union, and then in People’s Republic of China), the same notional framework was at work except that the state enjoyed the multi-status of civil society and family.