Modernization

Although the broad use of the term modernization refers to the economic and political development of societies all over the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, in a more narrow sense the term stands for the large social transformations that took place in western Europe and its colonies starting in the early modern period. It culminated in the industrial revolution and various political revolutions, especially the American and the French revolutions, and then spread to the rest of the world. For this reason, modernization more broadly refers to an array of processes that may include [Page 1178]industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, expanded educational opportunities, growth in literacy, and even democratization. However, the concept in its narrow sense does not refer to social change or societal evolution in general, but instead to a very short episode in world history. Since its inception, sociology has tended to focus on this short period of social transformation. Often, this focus is only on the most recent developments, as seen in discussions of individualization and postmodernization.

Several definitions and concepts of modernization have been put forward. In the heyday of modernization theory during the 1950s and 1960s, the term was defined as a process in which less developed societies acquire characteristics of more developed societies. This approach used the model of Western society to specify the goal of development, which meant modernization implied moving toward market-driven economic growth, democratic forms of representation, secular-rational culture, increased mobility, and expanding science and education. However, this has been criticized as both ethnocentric and unable to subsume different modernity trajectories (as in Japan or the Soviet Union), as they only partially resemble the Western model.

Talcott Parsons, by focusing on “evolutionary universals,” developed an approach that integrated the process of modernization into a more general model of social evolution. By this, he referred to social innovations that increase the adaptive capabilities of a society in its environment and that are crucial for its further development. Evolutionary universals do not only diffuse from culture to culture but are also frequently developed independently by different societies under different conditions. The basic evolutionary achievements necessary for any human social organization, and that are already present in primitive societies, are communication based on language, a magical-religious interpretation of the world, social organization through kinship, and technologies to deal with the physical environment. The development from primitive societies into archaic civilizations is characterized by social stratification and cultural legitimation. These two evolutionary universals increase a society's ability to mobilize resources for collective goals and to justify both these goals and social inequality. The next step, toward advanced intermediate societies, calls for two further evolutionary universals: bureaucratic organization, which increases the potential of social organizations for goal attainment, and money as medium of economic exchange, which leads to an increase of economic transactions over larger distances and the establishment of markets. The development of universal law (rule of law) and democracy are the two evolutionary universals signaling the breakthrough to a modern society. Parsons's approach, like Daniel Lerner's, implies that modernization consists of a multiplicity of processes that lead a society to come to conform with the Western social model. The criticisms voiced against Lerner's model thus apply to Parsons's evolutionary model as well. Furthermore, as an attempt at a general theory of social evolution, Parsons's approach is crucially incomplete, as it contains no causal explanation for the development of evolutionary universals.

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