Outline The Basic Principles Of The Modernisation And Dependency Theories

Outline The Basic Principles Of The Modernisation And Dependency Theories. What Were the Criticisms Made To Both and What Has Been Their Impact in Development Studies?
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Table Contents
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Outline The Basic Principles Of The Modernisation And Dependency Theories. What Were the Criticisms Made To Both and What Has Been Their Impact in Development Studies?  PAGEREF _Toc434252656 \h
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1.0 Introduction  PAGEREF _Toc434252657 \h
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2.0 The Modernization Theory  PAGEREF _Toc434252658 \h
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2.1 Basic Principles  PAGEREF _Toc434252659 \h
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2.2 Criticism to the Modernization Theory  PAGEREF _Toc434252660 \h
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3.0 The Dependency Theory  PAGEREF _Toc434252661 \h
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3.1 Basic Principles  PAGEREF _Toc434252662 \h
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3.2 Criticisms to the Dependency Theory  PAGEREF _Toc434252663 \h
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4.0 Impact of the Modernization and Dependency Theories on Development Studies  PAGEREF _Toc434252664 \h
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5.0 Conclusion  PAGEREF _Toc434252665 \h
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6.0 Bibliography  PAGEREF _Toc434252666 \h
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Outline The Basic Principles Of The Modernisation And Dependency Theories. What Were the Criticisms Made To Both and What Has Been Their Impact in Development Studies?
Introduction
A number of theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain the development of lack of development in the world. The development theories influence the way in which societies address the issue of underdevelopment and poverty. Particularly, the developing nations have a high prevalence of ignorance, disease, and famine. In this paper, development refers to the society’s gradual transition to a strong and powerful socio-economic status. This means that development actually involves an improvement in people’s quality of life. Particularly, high life expectance and low mortality rate are among the various indicators of improved quality of life. Several decades ago, the underdeveloped nations started initiatives catch up with their developed nations immediately after colonization. Among the initiatives by these nations included undertaking national development projects and industrial production of substitute products. Both the economic and political elites in the capitalists and industrialists countries believed that industrialization was central to development. In this regard, development was construed as economic growth and many nations thought of industrialization as the mean of reaching the development standards of the Western countries. This led to the development of the modernization theory. Since its introduction in the 1950s, the modernization theory has been dominating the West’s social sciences (Coetzee, 2001, p. 27). Particularly, countries took the developed nations in North America and Western Europe as a blueprint for development. The modernization theory was focused on the various deficiencies in the “underdeveloped” nations and proposed ways of overcoming such deficiencies. However, the modernization theory received widespread criticisms from social scientists including Germany’s Andre Gunder Frank and this led to the development of the so-called dependency theory. The dependency theory postulates that both development and underdevelopment are aspects of a single process. This means that the development in some parts of the world resulted in the impoverishment of other parts of the world. This paper seeks to examine the basic principles of the modernization and dependency theories, the criticisms made to both theories, and their impact on development.
2.0 The Modernization Theory
2.1 Basic Principles
Evolutionism is among the major principles underlying the modernization theory. This principle postulates that change is irreversible, gradual, liners and progressive. The social scientists and historians have been preoccupied with the concept of social change or transition since the start of systematic writing as well as thinking regarding social change. The modernization theory is a movement that started during the World War II until 1960s. This was deeply rooted in capitalism (Coetzee, 2001, p. 27). The development’s dominant paradigm guided intellectual practice, thinking between the 1940s and the 1960s and this paradigm was greatly influential in development communication practice, and theory (Melkote & Steeves, 2001, p. 33) .The idea of modernization encompasses the drastic transformation as well as transition that a society must undergo to become modern. In this regard, modernization theory speculates that the developing nations have to follow the developmental progress of the Western countries as a blueprint for their development. The underlying concept behind modernization theory was the inevitability of the progress of the traditional societies towards modernity. According to Coetzee(2001, p. 27) modernization is the type of transformation which occurs once a pre-modern or traditional society changes to become an advanced society by adopting new forms of social, organizational, or technological aspects of developed nations. Taking the developed nations, as a roadmap to modernity, this definition of modernization points out that modernization is relative in the sense thatit compares the developing nations with the developed ones.
Modernity and ‘traditionality’ are attributed to disparate characteristics. The transition or progress from the latter to the former is possible through the integration of various variables including secularization, democratization, and industrialization (Schech & Haggis, 2002, p. 81). Modernization is thus the striving of the traditional society towards elevating its level of development to reach other societies’ modern accomplishments. Schramm (1964, p. 79) argues that one of the first indicators of development in a society that has started to modernize is the lengthening out of the society’s communication channels. After World War II, there was an increase in communication practices. Particularly, the mass media was the propulsive force behind modernity. The messages relayed through the mass media encouraged psychological change among the target audience. The modernization theory argues that the mass media played a critical role in conveying persuasive messages and information from governments to people. As such, the media was a direct and powerful force of development. Most theorists reflect on modernization by citing the European history of development regarding the social, political, and economic development. This means that concepts on modernization are linked to the movement of the Western world from feudalism towards capitalism. The concept of modernization originated as a theoretical approach to describing the path that freshly decolonized nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa had to follow so as to attain the development levels similar to that in their Western counterparts. It entails a complete spectrum of the transformation and transition for the newly decolonized nations with various dimensions. These dimensions include the economic dimension (becoming true capitalism), social dimension (vibrant civil society), and the political dimension (becoming democratic nations).
The concepts of progress and change are closely linked to the Western ideologies like equality, justice, and liberalization (Coetzee, 2001, p. 28). Progress refers to the change from the primitive society to the society with greater control. It is often associated with the ability to reduce or eliminate challenges relating to the social and physical environment. Development is associated with the desire to strive towards greater spiritual and material control. The Western world has been striving towards learning and cultivation, science and rationality. While a modern society is capable of handling both external and internal pressures, a traditional society has limited capacity to controlling its physical environment and to solving its social problems (Coetzee, 2001, p. 29). The implication of this is that modernity links to various qualitative characteristics including progress, liberty, and rationality.
2.2 Criticism to the Modernization Theory
As aforementioned, the modernization theory has received widespread criticism from various theorists aligned to the dependency theory. It has also received criticisms from globalization theorists, free-market and social ideologists as well as world-systems theorists. In this regard, Frank (1969, p. 106) argues that it is impossible to adequately formulate the development theory for the underdeveloped societies without considering the contribution of their past social and economic history to their current underdevelopment. According to Coetzee, (2001, p. 103), modernization cannot be fully understood only on the basis ofthe capitalist mode of bureaucratic power, industrial technology and production, but rather on the combination of such factors. The majority of the historians focus on the developed metropolitan nations at the expense of the underdeveloped colonial societies. Some of the then critics of modernization theory contend that then theory fails to recognize the colonial experience of the underdeveloped national. Moreover, the lack of adequate understanding of the history of the underdeveloped nations had a level playing field with the present developed nations. Moreover, most studies regarding underdevelopment and development do not acknowledge the economic relations between the developed nations and their economic coloni...