In academic development economics and related disciplines, and also in actual public policy on development, the word modernization slips and slides, alludes and obtrudes, both as a key or code term as well as a perfectly ordinary word meaning updating, upgrading, renovation, reconstruction or stabilization in the face of adverse social, physical or economic structures. In this ordinary usage, sometimes a particular history, political approach or ideology is intended, sometimes not. Often all that is meant is professionalism, rationality, planning or progress in general. Where no particular history or episode of development is taken to be at issue, probably any implied allusion to, say, the Russian debate about industrialization, or peasant participation in policy, will be sovietized, sanitized, populist perhaps, and certainly depoliticized. Where some particular historical reference is intended, such as to congeries of changes which included economic and demographic developments in western Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, unfortunately there is similarly likely to be much ellipsis and little historiography. As a result, the model matters alluded to tend in this literature to be more misunderstood than understood. For instance, ‘industrialization’ as in ‘western industrial revolution’ will be bandied about as if, for example, English, French and Dutch history in this regard had been the same, as if the Rochdale pioneers in the co-operative movement had not been non-agricultural, not engaged in political protest against a regime from which they felt excluded, not an urban class or class segment with a distinctive religious zeal.
Turning now to its other sense, before modernization as a technical and emotive key or code term or discourse emblem can do for one what it does already for others, some special initiation may be necessary. For example, modernization as a policy remedy for rural or some other backwardness problem may be proposed essentially as an alternative paradigm or option to another policy remedy: self-reliance (understood in a special sense) is the answer for another policy problem, dependency. Modernization theory and dependency theory are constantly pitted in the development studies literature as exclusive and hostile rivals. In development economics since Bretton Woods, this has served indeed as the principal polarization in this literature. Undoubtedly there are some striking contrasts between them with regard, for example, to the consequences for international relations, with each favouring recourse to its own pivotal terms about development problems and solutions. Exponents of modernization will preach dualism, diffusion of innovations, economies of scale, development administration, human resources development, financial and foreign aid. Believers in dependency theory will talk about core and periphery, world-system, unequal exchange, small is beautiful, delinking, or adjustment. Yet there are also some equally important, if seldom identified, similarities. Both schools of thought adopt comparable concepts of what one calls traditional, and the other pre-capitalist society and economy. Both are preoccupied with crises and turning-points and stages of development. Both put a heavy stress on First and Second World determinisms on the Third (and Fourth).
Both tend to prefer structuralist analyses and to look for structural change.
Neo-classical economic studies of growth and development say they are or ought to be unadulterated by sociological, political and other non-economic variables. Is modernization neo-classical in the way in which dependentia often claim it is (and dependency is not)? Much will depend on the degree to which distinctions are drawn in each as regards dogma and actual practice, and one area or sector compared with another. Lack of stated institutional (as in institutional economics, comparative social institutions, and so on) analysis is not necessarily and equally a matter of implicit default as well, at least to the same extent or form. In modernization (and dependency) theory and practice, some institutional analysis goes—erroneously or otherwise—by omission as well as commission. For instance, nothing could be more institutionalist—and attitudinalist—than modernization’s (and again dependency’s) ideas of traditional society and economy (and underdevelopment). There is none the less much useful truth in the complaint that—in its coded sense—modernization ‘crudely foreshortens the historical development of society…is a technocratic model of society, conflict-free and politically neutral [which dissolves] genuine social conflict and issues in the abstractions of “the scientific revolution” [and] “productivity” [presuming] that no group in the society will be called upon to bear the costs of the scientific revolution’.
Modernization (like dependency yet again, so really there is very much similarity indeed) tends to self-correct its policies in the light of its disappointments with the actual development record as it unfolds: that is, it self-adjusts within its own shell of epistemological and other assumptions as further challenges present themselves. Thus, unfortunately, the historical perspectives and changes in the development studies are seldom those of the economies and policies to which they say they are addressed. So, and again as with dependency no less, modernization can often be best understood not as a particular development—or development theory or method for the study of development and development theory—but rather as a recurring pattern of perennial speech about such development, theory and method, and would-be practical action. In many development studies and policies this tends to be discourse about solutions which are more likely to be in search of, than for, problems. Whose discourse is this? On the whole this is the perennial speech of modernizing elites as well as about modernizing elites (neither of which, as most notably in Iran, might on empirical investigation turn out in effect to be modernizing). These are the writers and actors who align their own best efforts with state-building, but in the name of nation-building.
Raymond Apthorpe
Institute of Social Studies, The Hague
Further reading
Adams, A. (1979) ‘Open letter to a young researcher’, African Affairs.
Sunkel, O. (1979) ‘The development of development thinking’, in J.J.Villamil (ed.) Transactional Capitalism and National Development, Hassocks.
Wrigley, E.A. (1972) ‘The process of modernization and the industrial revolution in England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History I.
