Modernization

Modernization refers to a group of approaches popular in the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, which seek to explain the conditions necessary for successful economic, social, and political change in what were then referred to as “Third World” countries. Modernization was superseded in academic circles for a time by more radical theories of change such as dependency theory and World-Systems theory and by a range of postmodern approaches to development. However, it has reemerged recently in debates on, among other things, the relationship between environment and economic development.

[Page 309]Modernization thinking has its roots in 19th- and early-20th-century social theory, particularly in the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, who sought to understand and explain the emergence of modern industrial society, considered as a new and unique societal form. For these theorists, although they did not use the term, modernization meant breaking with the nonindustrial past and adopting the values and institutions of the emerging industrial world based on technological innovation; the harnessing of inanimate or extra somatic sources of energy to serve human needs; scientific and secular ways of explaining society and nature; an increased social, political, and economic division of labor; and the belief in the application of the principle of instrumental rationality to the solving of human problems. Old ties of kinship, clan, ethnicity, and “tribe” were to be replaced by more impersonal, fragmented, and contractually based relations found in the new factories and workplaces of the growing cities of Europe and North America, by national territorial identities, and by new forms of political authority.

During the early Cold War period (1950–1970), Western academics and policymakers drew partly on these early theorists' work to develop modernization approaches. At this time, the United States and its allies competed with the Soviet Union for global political and economic dominance, and modernization approaches helped provide a scientific rationale and legitimacy for Western involvement and intervention into the economic and political affairs of Third World countries. The Soviet Union, its satellites, Communist China, and other aspirant communist societies also held their own notions of socialist modernization, which were considered by Western modernization theorists as aberrant or deviant models of development and change. However, both shared a belief in the importance of linking science and technology to the expansion of material production through rational control of society and nature, though they differed on the appropriate economic and political means to realize such goals. Attention here will be confined to Western approaches to modernization.