Modernization Theory Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Theories of modernization define and position “modern” societies at the positive end of a linear development spectrum. Contemporary modernization theories draw on 19th and early 20th century European and U.S. sociology, including social Darwinism and theories of social order in the shift from community to society associated with urbanization and industrialization. Writing during the optimistic boom of the 1950s and emergent Cold War, economic historian Walter Rostow famously formalized modernization theory as stages of economic growth in a book subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto. The stages span from traditional society through “takeoff” industrialization to a mass consumer society. The change from one stage to the next, in linear succession, was argued to be based on both an inherent societal tendency toward optimal paths of growth and a naturalistic concept of diffusion. Optimal paths would be determined by consumer demand, entrepreneurship, and technical knowledge, while diffusion would take place from high-growth Europe and North America to the global South.

Modernization has been most widely developed and deployed in sociology, rooted in Max Weber’s idea of the rational individual and Talcott Parsons’s concept of structural-functionalism. Parsons constructed a general model of society based on systems theory and biology. He argued that society existed in equilibrium with its environment and should be understood through the ways it adjusted to external pressures. The relative stability of society was achieved through “pattern variables” that created the context for individual rational action, theorized by Weber to be consistent with the reproduction of the “modern” social system. Although put forth as a general theory, Parsons determined the set of phenomena necessary to reproduce society primarily based on his observations of the United States.

In essence, the “blueprint” of modernization is a Euroand U.S.-centric one that pervades contemporary thinking. Widespread use of phrases like “backward societies” (prevalent in the heyday of modernization theory) and “less developed countries” (still in use today) reflect and re-inscribe the West as the model of society. By dividing the world into categories of traditional, transitional, and modern, this way of thinking characterizes widely distinct societies as the same type and inhibits an understanding of relations between societies. By assuming that all societies follow a similar path to the same destination, modernization theory also implies that societies are infinitely pliable and devoid of their own histories and cultures.

Modernization theory has been highly influential in postwar development policy and is a precursor to structural adjustment policies developed in the 1980s. In the 1990s theories of modernization reasserted themselves in environmental terms in the closely related fields of environmental economics and ecological modernization. Theories in these fields were developed in response to environmental movements’ demands for alternatives to the modernization paradigm and the associated process of industrialization. These fields respond by arguing that the solution to environmental damage as a result of modernization is more modernization. In economics, this argument is often tied to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (see Industrialization).

Ecological modernization, a growing literature primarily in sociology, argues that modernization causes industry to be more “ecologically rational,” that is, to take into account environmental damage and to minimize it. According to this school of thought, this process is driven by institutional restructuring, greener technologies, market forces (like consumer demand for green products), and environmental movements. Ecological modernization theories are largely oriented toward responses to environmental pressures in urban contexts in the United States and Europe.

Bibliography:

Roger Lee, “Modernization,” in R.J. Johnston et , The Dictionary of Human Geography (Blackwell, 2000);
Philip W. Porter and Eric Sheppard, A World of Difference: Society, Nature, Development (Guilford Press, 1998);
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (University of California Press, 1982);
Richard York, Eugene A. Rosa, and Thomas Dietz, “Footprints on the Earth: Environmental Consequences of Modernity,” American Sociological Review (v.68, 2003).