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Modernization theory is a term applied to several related social science theories that explain the process by which societies change from more traditional to more modern entities. Originating from classical social theory, including the writings of Max Weber and Karl Marx, U.S. social scientists built on the insights of classical social theorists of the 1940s and 1950s to understand the challenge of overcoming poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In its heyday in the 1960s, modernization theory informed government policy in the United States, influencing foreign aid doctrines and the creation of the Peace Corps. Modernization theorists share an optimistic perspective on the prospects for promoting development; early writers of the school expected a convergence in the economic, social, and political characteristics of the world’s many societies. After the failures of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, revelations of misdeeds by transnational corporations, and the emergence in Latin America and Africa of theories that emphasized dependency and neocolonialism, modernization theory came under intense criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, scholars associated with the World Values Survey (WVS), principally Ronald Inglehart, have revived and modified the approach.

Classical Origins Of Modernization Theory

Karl Marx’s historical materialism provoked emulation and reaction from many later writers whose work became the basis of this approach to development. He argued that through structural conditions and change, every country could become modern. Marx’s writing about successive modes of production, each more technologically advanced and materially productive, and his view that economic change shapes political, social, and cultural change, caused some later writers, such as Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to search for cultural or attitudinal bases of economic change and inspired others to link closely the emergence of what they considered more advanced political regimes, such as democracy, with economic change. Internal Marxist critique, such as that of Russian leader Vladimir I. Lenin, recognized that imperialism kept some countries from modernizing.

The strong distinction drawn by modernization theorists between tradition and modernity has its roots in sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s contrast between Gemeinschaft (traditional community in which kinship and other bonds sustain human connections) and Gesellschaft (modern society in which human linkages are mainly instrumental); historian Sir Henry Maine’s contrast between an earlier world of status based on long-established group membership and modern societies in which autonomous individuals associated through contract and individual agency; and sociologist Emile Durkheim’s discussion of change from mechanical solidarity, in which individuals’ attachments are based on their similar, mostly agricultural occupations, to organic solidarity, in which connections are based on a more complex division of labor. American sociologist Talcott Parsons built on these conceptions to formulate a series of “pattern variables” that changed as a society moved from the pole of tradition to the pole of modernity. He expected variables to move from ascription, in which individuals are valued according to the social groups into which they were born, to achievement as the standard to determine social status; from particularism to universalism in political norms; from diffuseness to specificity in terms of social roles; from affectivity, or emotion-based attachments, to instrumentalism, or links based on utility, as the basis of personal relationships; and from a collective to a self-orientation.

Basic Tenets

Modernization theory tends to focus on the movement of whole societies from traditional to modern forms. Hence, writers in the school focused on urbanization, industrialization (with its attendant increase in the scale of investment), and the increasingly complex division of labor (with its consequences for specialization in occupations) as manifestations of development. However, modernization theory simultaneously emphasizes individual attitudinal change as the main driver of modernization. Formal education can serve as an instrument of attitudinal change; it is but the most obvious example of the diffusion of values to areas or social groups in which tradition prevails from regions or groups that have already modernized. The mass media are also effective in spreading modern values.

Diffusion is central to modernization theory. Early modernization theorists in particular accepted with little hesitation that individuals exposed to modern values would prefer them to traditional norms, with the exception of those who obviously benefited materially and politically from the traditional social structure. Modern values included openness to new experiences, independence from traditional authorities, a scientific outlook, ambition, punctuality and careful use of time, desire for civic engagement, and interest in public affairs. Some modernization accounts went so far as to suggest that traditional societies did not embrace modern economic rationality but saw modern values as widely shared in the West. Modernization implied diffusion of Western values and a cultural convergence of the already modernized West and developing countries.

Modernization theorists took as their unit of analysis the nation-state or individual national society. Aggregate individual change within a nation produced societal-level change. Modernization theorists did not heavily emphasize international forces, and to the extent they did consider factors beyond the individual society, they highlighted the positive roles that value diffusion and providing capital and technical know-how played in promoting development.

Although modernization theorists explored different dimensions of development, such as individual attitudinal change, urbanization and industrialization, political change, and economic growth, almost all agreed that modernization was a multifaceted process. Individual attitudinal change is a part of a larger process that includes shifts in social structure, the political order, and the economy. Hence, theorizing about modernization took place at a relatively high level of abstraction to avoid excluding any element of the process.

Two key processes of modernization were frequently identified as central: industrialization, which moved people from a seasonal agricultural existence dependent on weather to the assembly line with its time clock; and secularization, which separated an individual’s spiritual life from his occupational, recreational, and political lives and undermined the authority of institutionalized religion.

Social Psychological Approaches

Sociologist Alex Inkeles’s work focused on individual modernity and argued that socialization in schools and industrial workplaces helped “make men modern.” Perhaps the most influential scholar of this approach was psychologist David C. McClelland, who emphasized the achievement motive, arguing that societies are more likely to realize economic development if a large portion of their population has a high “need for achievement,” a specific psychological trait.

Scholars of the social psychological school tend to identify principles such as honor and the quest for glory as relics of traditional society. They regard values such as acquisitiveness, thrift, and ambition as essential to economic development, and attitudes of interpersonal trust, moderation, and egalitarianism as critical to the emergence of democracy.

Economic Approaches

Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) drew the notice of policy makers who hoped to promote development in what by then had come to be called the third world. Rostow laid out five stages of economic development: traditional society, the preconditions for takeoff, takeoff, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption. Rostow’s approach fit modernization theorists’ tendency to identify development as the movement from tradition to modernity, which happened to resemble the course of U.S. and western European societies at the time he was writing. Unlike the social psychological modernization theorists, Rostow stressed the importance of political will to build the “social overhead capital”—for example, human capital development, such as education, and national cohesion—necessary for development. Rostow’s work also highlighted the growth of savings and investment during the take-off stage. Such capital might be gained from many sources, but to many practitioners of development, foreign lenders and foreign assistance became increasingly obvious sources of investment capital. Critics found Rostow’s theory too tightly drawn from the experience of British industrialization and too linear in its prediction of the stages that growth would follow. His “noncommunist manifesto” read very much like Marx’s historical materialism.

While economists in the modernization school saw many opportunities for governments to promote economic growth, they tended to favor the market system. Instead of the state control of the economy exercised by communist countries, they preferred policies that would lead people to take risks and become entrepreneurs. They generally saw the transfer of technology through transnational corporations and foreign assistance as a positive way to provoke traditional societies to modernize. The Point Four Program of U.S. president Harry Truman and the Green Revolution exemplify policy efforts to transfer technology to promote modernization.

Political Development

Modernization theorists approached political development with two different conceptions of what constituted political modernity. According to one view, political development more or less equaled democracy. Political sociologist S. M. Lipset identified economic development as a “social requisite of democracy” in an American Political Science Review article of that title. He suggested that political modernization rested on prior economic modernization and that as societies advanced economically, democracy would follow. His colleagues cited urbanization, industrialization, and the spread of literacy as the sources of social complexity in urban industrial society. Social pluralism, including a literate, often self-employed middle class, promoted political pluralism and participation. Individual writers stressed specific intermediary mechanisms linking economic development to democratic participation. After a comparative study of Middle Eastern countries in the 1950s, sociologist Daniel Lerner charted what he saw as the ideal development sequence: urbanization, spread of literacy, growth of mass media, inclusiveness in economic development, and political participation. Democratic development is the final step in Lerner’s process of modernization.

A second view of political development, advanced by political scientist Samuel Huntington, focused on institutional development, arguing that more developed political systems had institutions more able to withstand the challenges posed by newly mobilized societies. According to this perspective, economic development and the urbanization it spawns lead new social groups to make demands on government for services and distribution of state resources. The participation of new groups will overwhelm the state unless it has created participatory institutions and a bureaucracy able to meet their demands. Huntington thus came to advocate order over participation in most developing countries. He suggested that political decay would result if governments refused to control excessive participation.

Critiques Of Modernization Theory

The most sustained critique of modernization theory came from Latin America’s dependency school and analysts of neocolonialism in the former European empires, many of whom wrote on Africa. By focusing on traditional values and culture as key causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, modernization theorists engaged in a form of blaming the victim, argued dependency writers. This tendency was due in part to modernization theorists’ use of the national territorial state as the unit of analysis. By only focusing on individual national societies, modernization theorists failed to note the imperial relationships—formal colonialism and informal neocolonialism—that had deprived poor countries of capital and their people of the opportunity to make autonomous decisions about their own development. Writers such as economic historian Andre Gunder Frank and historian Walter Rodney argued that European nations underdeveloped the newly independent countries they formerly ruled and that they and the United States similarly underdeveloped Latin America, literally making countries poorer than they were before the imperial relationship.

Dependency theorists placed developing countries in the network of the global economy, noting that the way in which an economy was incorporated into the global division of labor strongly shaped its developmental prospects, in a manner impossible to reverse. Part of the incorporation of peripheral societies into global capitalism involved class relationships across national borders; economic elites in developing countries collaborated with captains of industry and finance in the world’s metropoles to appropriate the surplus value generated by the peasantry and working class on the periphery. All individuals were perfectly capable of acting in economically rational ways; those who failed to engage in entrepreneurship or to save and invest simply lacked the incentives or the capacity to do so. People did not need to be made modern; they needed to be released from exploitative international economic relationships.

Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, originally a student of African development, systematized the insights of dependency theory in his three-volume study, The Modern World-System. Wallerstein rejects modernization theorists’ focus on development at the national level, arguing that since the sixteenth century, the world has had a single economy, the relevant unit of analysis of capitalist development, albeit existing alongside multiple political units. Strong core states exploit politically weak peripheral societies, whether as formal colonies or informal dependencies. World-systems theorists argue that semi peripheral countries like South Korea serve to deflect the revolutionary potential of the exploited periphery by giving the impression that convergence is possible for all while simultaneously providing locations of high investment yield for the core’s capitalists. The convergence predicted by modernization theorists will not occur.

Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell criticized modernization theory’s argument that democracy would closely follow economic growth. O’Donnell observed that the wealthiest countries of South America fell to military regimes in the 1960s and early 1970s and suggested that the particular phase of industrialization through which they were passing demanded that these nations attract foreign capital and technology. However, the popular participation promoted by earlier industrialization threatened South American nations’ capacities to attract foreign investment, with the result that both military and civilian elites preferred to impose harsh exclusionary regimes to quell labor mobilization and populist agitation. O’Donnell shared with dependency writers the view that the timing of economic development is central to the experience of modernization: Early industrializers faced different challenges than late industrializers, with significantly different consequences for modernization. Late industrializers required the state to promote economic development and could tolerate less labor unrest and popular participation. In essence, Rostow’s model is empirically unfounded.

Postmodern scholars, like dependency writers, have criticized modernization theorists for ethnocentrism. By suggesting that development entailed movement from tradition to modernity and equating modernization with the industrial West, modernization theorists committed two errors. First, they implied that the West was somehow better. Second, by suggesting that all nonmodern societies were similarly traditional, they failed to differentiate among societies, which in many cases differed from each other more than they did from those in the West.

Some postmodernists take the argument further, arguing that by defining third world poverty as the problem, modernization theorists and Western policy makers following their lead devalued modes of living that have worked for millions throughout the ages. Problematizing poverty has imposed Western standards on other cultures, making it difficult for them to follow traditional ways even when they prefer them. The stress of conforming to Western constructs, which are the intellectual products of modernization theory, has profoundly disrupted the lives of people who never chose modernization.

Revision Of Modernization Theory

The World Values Survey’s massive collection of attitudinal data about fundamental social values has allowed a reassessment of the conclusions of modernization theorists and their critics. Ingle hart and his collaborators have posed a revised theory of modernization that places technological and economic change at the center and argues that changes in cultural values and political participation have followed economic development. The WVS, which has been administered in more than eighty countries on six continents, has produced comprehensive data.

Inglehart continues to argue, based on WVS evidence, that economic development promotes predictable changes in values, which he places at the center of his analysis and believes eventually lead to democratization. Where he differs from many modernization theorists is in his insistence that so-called traditional societies have distinct cultural attributes that do not disappear when they converge with a Western model of society and culture. Rather, he suggests that cultural differences continue to shape societies’ responses to economic modernization. Change in the material conditions of life may cause change in attitudes toward authority, gender roles, sexual practices, and propensities to participate politically, but the changes take place in the context of preexisting cultures. Economic change will reshape values in Western Judeo-Christian, Confucian, and Islamic societies but will not result in one world culture.

Inglehart proposes that three dimensions of economic development produce cultural and political change. First, the growth of material productivity and the commitment of welfare states to supplement the consumption of the poor create levels of material security that allow individuals to prioritize values beyond those of earning money to buy food and shelter. Second, rising educational levels, the spread of mass media, and work in knowledge-based industries give individuals greater independence and desire for autonomy. Third, increasing social complexity causes individuals to become more socially independent. Inglehart argues that these processes have different impacts on what he calls the industrialization and post industrialization phases of economic development. Under industrialization, these forces undermine the power of religion but often replace religious authority with state and industrial authority. In the postindustrialization phase, the dominance of secular authorities erodes before the demand for individual autonomy in all walks of life.

Based on the massive WVS, Inglehart’s argument returns values to the center of the study of development, as a variable between economic development and changes in social practices and political behavior. Like modernization theorists, he argues that values do change in the process of development; unlike them, he does not assume that people abandon cultural particularities or that cultural zones will eventually disappear. He has built on the contributions of political science and sociology, particularly social psychology and political culture, to advance a sophisticated and empirically supported version of the argument made by Lipset half a century ago.

Bibliography:

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