'Peripheral Capitalism', Beyond'Dependency'and'Modernisation' (original) (raw)
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A Perspective on the Sociology of Development*
Sociologia Ruralis, 1984
The paper argues chat we have reached an impasse in theorizing about agrarian social change due to the deterministic and centralistic assumptions of existing sociological theories of development, whether they adopt a modernization, dependency or political economy framework. What is needed, it is suggested, is a more serious attempt to analyse the dynamic processes by which individuals and social groups ‐ peasants, workers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and others ‐ interact and develop strategies for dealing with changing circumstances. Space must be found for an actor‐oriented analysis of social process which identifies how ‘ordinary people’ rather than simply abstract ‘social forces’ actively shape the outcomes of development.The argument, which draws upon the author's field research in Zambia and Peru, is developed by considering three analytical issues: a) the significance of differential responses to similar social conditions, b) the problem of relating interactio...
PLGRAVE, 2002
List of Maps List of Illustrations List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements 1 The Sociology of Development 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Aims of the text 1.3 Key sociological questions 2 Measures of Inequality and Development 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The concept of poverty 2.3 The Third World and its poverty 2.4 The basic needs strategy 2.5 The perception of development from below ix X xi Xll xiii 1 1 4 3 Modernisation Theory 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The theoretical origins of modernisation theory 3.3 Modernisation theory 3.4 Summary of modernisation theory and its implications 3.5 The critique of modernisation theory 3.6 Conclusion 4 Theories of Underdevelopment 4.1 Introduction vii VIII Contents 4.2 Marx's theory of capitalism and class conflict 4.3 The exploitation of the Third World: an account of merchant capitalism, colonialism and neo-colonialism 4.4 Explanations for underdevelopment 81 4.5 Conclusion 5 Population, Urbanisation and Education 9 Conclusion It is five years since the publication of the first edition of this text, a period in which the sociology of development has itself experienced change, happily of a generally progressive nature. This new edition tries to capture the flavour of some of these new debates while still retaining its broadly introductory nature. The revision has been helped by sustained debate within the School of Sociology at Cambridge as well as by wider opportunities I have had elsewhere to explore new ideas in the field. To these many colleagues I express my thanks. At the publishers I have received considerable editorial support from Dilys Jones, Victoria Y ogman and Keith Pavey. I have also been lucky enough to receive the continued support and help of my wife, who fortunately is the same as the one who saw me through the first edition.
Peripheral Capitalist Development Revisited
Studies in Political Economy, 1989
I ntroduction The effect of imperialism on the economic development of Third World countries has long been a subject of interest to Marxist scholars. The international expansion of capitalist states, which led to the creation of a world market and the integration of pre-capitalist countries into this market, heralded a new phase of capitalism the implications of which are still being debated. The dominant view of postwar Marxists has been that imperialism created and perpetuated underdevelopment in the Third World. These countries, conceptually located in the periphery of the world capitalist system, have had their development blocked as a result of their economic relations with the imperialist countries. Capitalism, while successfulin developing the productive forces in the countries now at the centre of the capitalist world market, is not capable of performing the same role in the periphery. The solution for the Third World involves 'delinking' from the world economy, self-reliance and socialism.While this has been, and probably still is, the dominant view in postwar Marxist analysis, it has not gone unchallenged. Some scholars, working within the Marxist tradition, have argued that imperialism has, in fact, had a very favourable impact on the Third World in terms of stimulating the development of 'the productive forces. Furthermore, these scholars argue that the end of direct colonial rule in many parts of the world has
Interrogating the Development Discourses: A Sociological Introspection
So far the conception of the word " development " has been highly economized in true sense of its approach and application worldwide. But the problems of development do not inclusively fall in the realm of economics alone. Further, the economic rationality is incomplete without referring to social ethics. Acknowledging this somehow the sociologists and development economists have delimited the economic conceptualization of the term " development " for a sensible comprehension of its retrospective results and future prospects. In this article we have reassessed and recaptured the quintessence of development discourse engaging classical economists, institutional theorists and diffusion theorists on the one hand and the sociologists and dependency theorists, on the other. Our critical overview reveals that while the economists explore the cause and consequences for the development and underdevelopment of a country in term of economic variables the sociologists conceive it in term of a state or state of conditions structured or induced by the economic and non-economic factors for the same. Nevertheless, their views and counterviews on development and underdevelopment largely complement to one another. However, the former gives a coherent theory of development to which the latter explains with a framework of critical thinking. Our study also reflect that the structural-functional assumption of society held by the sociologist and modernists and criticized by dependency theorists could not be the effective substitute against classical and neo-classical theory of economic development in the world. However, our study substantiate that underdevelopment refers to a state of backwardness or conditions of arrested development whereas development refers to a state of advancement or conditions of continuous development. Further, the conception of development has been realized much more than just a socioeconomic endeavour.Interrogating the development discourses certainly proposes a new turn in the article.
Sociology of Development: Towards a Theoretical Option for the Global South
Social Inquiry: Journal of Social Science Research
This article proposes that social analysis should view the idea of global development as a series of actions and practices that seek to fundamentally reconfigure social relations in order to ‘manufacture’ new forms of community in the global South. The emergent social forms exist at the margins of neoliberal economy, where personhood and morality are flexible, fluid, contested and remade through continuous dispossession and changing survival possibilities. In effect the practice of development is a continuation of the process of rule established by the colonial civilizing projects and maintained under postcolonial modernity’s neoliberal capitalism. The article elaborates that as a national and regional process and discourse, development continues to generate and maintain forms (subjectivities) of self-regulation and control (governmentality) that both internalize and externalize the South in relation to the global economy and power structure. The paper suggests that sociology of d...
Dialectical Anthropology, 2017
ONLINE FIRST VIEW, PLEASE USE JOURNAL HOMEPAGE FOR DOWNLOAD https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-017-9450-0 This article discusses anthropology’s current mainstream understandings of development and offers a historical materialist alternative. According to these, development was and is either a discourse-backed anti-politics machine that strengthens the power of postcolonial governments or a category of practice, a universal that generates frictions when it clashes with local historical–cultural formations. The approach proposed here reintegrates the analysis of development into the anthropological analysis of capitalism’s uneven and contested histories and practices. A reassessment of World Bank reporting on Lesotho and an analysis of the Bank’s impact on the wider policies of development in postcolonial Mauritius, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent success stories of capitalist development, underlines that development is best understood as a political economy machinery that maintains and amends contested capitalist practices in an encounter with earlier global, national, and local historical–cultural formations.
The Political Economy of (Under) Development and Space/Time in Development Studies
The Political Economy of (Under) Development and Space/Time in Development Studies, 2012
Abstract: There is no accepted, unified, politico-economic theory of development. In critical development studies, there is a general agreement that two counter-posing theories of political economy, modernization and dependency, were most prominent in the three decades following World War II. Both of these schools of thought fell out of popularity in the mid-1970s, though some of their core temporal and spatial assumptions live on today. In Section One of this paper, I analytically reflect on the modernization/dependency debate to lay a foundation for a discussion in Section Two on the timing of development and of modernity. Timing is an area of debate that goes to the heart of modernization and dependency theories, development practice, and critical development studies. World-systems analysis (WSA) is one of the approaches involved in the space/time debate in critical development studies. In Section Three, the final analytic section, I explore WSA as a school of thought currently in vogue in critical development studies, though not without some controversy. I show that WSA's theory of the subject is Eurocentric.