Modernization Theory

Modernization has been an important concept in the second half of the twentieth century to grasp and describe the ongoing technological, economical, social, and cultural changes that are associated with industrialization and democratization. The actual term modernization theory refers to an intellectual movement consisting mainly of scholars in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Social scientists were eager to show that the West (especially the United States) had reached a point in history that foreshadows the future history of other states. Embedded within the cold war struggle, Western scientists proposed the United States as a better role model for the developing postcolonial world than that of the USSR. Particularly influential was Walt Rostow's concept of economic growth, which asserted that all countries would sooner or later enter the path to modernization moving from traditional societies through a period of transition to the age of high mass consumption.

In a broader sense, many theoretical accounts of long-term changes that led to a “modern” Western world in North America and Europe from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as modernization theories. The key elements comprise the notions of development and progress on various levels. Here are some of the general contentions of modernization theories: It has been argued that past economies based on rural agriculture were replaced by an urban industrial economy. Nature, in the past endured as vicissitudes of fate, became technologically managed. Economic and technological changes that occurred alongside development and progress are interpreted as influencing social changes. For instance, the size of the household, which once included three generations and often dependent nonfamily members, became increasingly understood as a historical form of dwelling that gave way to the nuclear family as the norm for modern households. Moreover, small scale village life based on kinship and tradition was replaced by urban cosmopolitanism and superstition by scientific knowledge.

Theories of capitalism, industrialization, and production employ the notion of modernization as much as theories of consumption that seek to capture the emergence of consumer societies and mass consumption. Both the modernization theory of the mid-twentieth century and modernization theories in general had and continue to have an impact on the field of consumption studies. The intersection between modernization theories and the studies of consumption cultures is mainly one that occurs where on the one hand, grand theories of social change deal with consumption issues and on the other hand, theories of consumption work within the broader framework of social theory. Most accounts of consumption cultures are based on, work through, or rework grand social theories. To understand what theoretically informed consumption studies argue with and against, it is important to know influential concepts of social theory and change in respect to consumption cultures.