College of Education

School of Continuing and Distance Education2014/2015 – 2016/2017

SOCI 424:

THE CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENT

AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT

Lecturer: Dr. James Dzisah

Email: jdzisah@ug.edu.gh

SESSION 1:

THE CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENT AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT I: THEORY AND REALITY

SESSION OVERVIEW

This is the first part of a two stage introduction to the Context ofDevelopment and Underdevelopment. We begin with how the idea andpractice of development emerged during the colonial era that sociallyengineered non-European societies and then revisit some of thetheoretical underpinnings of development we studied in SOCI 423 as aprelude to contextualizing development and underdevelopment.

Goals and Objectives:By the end of the session, the student will be able to:1. Explain the subject matter of this course – The Context of

Development and Underdevelopment2. Demonstrates how the idea and practice of development emerged

during the colonial era3. Explain how the concept of development was used to socially

engineer non-European societies.

SESSION OUTLINE

1. What is development?

2. European Colonialism

3. Development as Consumption

4. Naturalizing Development

5. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth

6. Global Context: Dependency Theory

7. Global Context: World Systems Theory

8. Agrarian Question

9. Activity

10. References

WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?

• Had its origins in the colonial era

• 19th century, understood philosophically as the

improvement of humankind

• Practically, European elites interpreted

development as the social engineering of

emerging national societies

– Formulating government policies to regulate

capitalism and industrialization’s disruptive impacts

– Balancing technological change and class

formation with social intervention

EUROPEAN COLONIALISM

• Development justify imperial intervention

• Extraction of colonial resources facilitated

European industrialization

• Changed non-European cultures

– Europeans took on the “white man’s burden”

during wrenching social transformations

– Subjects adapted or marginalized through forced

labor, schooling, segregation

– Produced new class inequalities in each society

– Racialized international inequality

DEVELOPMENT AS CONSUMPTION

• Specifying development as consumption privilegesmarket as a vehicle of social change

– Markets maximize individual preferences and allocateresources efficiently

• Derives from an interpretation of Adam Smith’s TheWealth of Nations and formalized in neoclassicaleconomic theory

• Institutionalized in development policies across theworld

NATURALIZING DEVELOPMENT

• Theorizing development as evolutionary naturalizes the

process

• According to Karl Polanyi:

– Modern liberalism rests on a belief in natural propensity for self-

gain that, expressed through the market, becomes the driving

force of the aspiration for improvement, aggregated asdevelopment

– To naturalized market behaviour as a trans-historical (and

competitive) attribute discounts other human attributes, or

values such as co-operation, redistribution and reciprocity

– Economic individualism is specific to 19th century European

developments rather than an innate human characteristics

ROSTOW’S STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

• Western model of free enterprise (vs. state planning);

Based on U.S. experience

• Evolutionary “stages” traverse linear sequence:

– “Traditional Society”

– “Preconditions for Take-off”

– “Take-off”

– “Maturity”

– “Age of High Mass-Consumption”

• Goal to which other (developing) societies should

aspire through membership of “free world”

• Depended on a political context: development state

GLOBAL CONTEXT: DEPENDENCY THEORY

• Unequal economic relations between metropolitan

societies and non-European peripheries develop

former at the expense of “underdeveloping” latter

• Greatly influenced by:

– Hans Singer: “peripheral” countries export more natural

resources to pay for expensive manufactured imports

– Raul Prebisch: Latin American states should industrialize

behind protective tariffs on manufactured imports

– Marxist theories of (exploitative) imperialist relations

• However, “dependency” implies a “development-

centrism” with (idealized western) development as

the term of reference

GLOBAL CONTEXT: WORLD SYSTEMS THEORY

• Advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein

• States: political units competing for, or surrendering, resourceswithin a world division of labour– “Core”: concentrates capital-intensive/intellectual production

– “Periphery”: lower-skilled labor-intensive production

• Geographical hierarchy complicated by Thomas Friedman’s “flatworld” processes (associated with India’s InformationTechnology boom)

• Western development as “lodestar”

• Denied many other collective/social strategies of sustainabilityor improvement in other cultures

AGRARIAN QUESTION

• Urbanization: defining outcome of “stages of growth”metaphor

– Absence of peasantries in First World is a key register fordevelopment theory

• Huntington: “Agriculture declines in importancecompared to commercial, industrial, and othernonagricultural activities, and commercial agriculturereplaces subsistence agriculture”

• How we perceive these changes?

AGRARIAN QUESTION Cont.

• Small farming: development “baselines”

– Extrapolation: peasant cultures as remnants of TraditionalSociety destined to disappear

• Is the change “internally” driven?

– Thus, if subsistence agriculture declines or disappears, is thisbecause it does not belong on a society’s “developmentladder”?

• Or is it because of a deepening exposure ofsmallholders to unequal world market competition byagribusiness?

SESSION SUMMARY

• The Session begins by examining the ecological and social crisesstemming from our current consumer-based practices of globalizationand development and identifies the obstacles and possibilities for globalefforts toward sustainability.

• The session also examines how the idea and practice of developmentemerged during the colonial era that socially engineered non-Europeansocieties by reconstructing labour systems and disorganizing the socialpsychology of subjects.

• We touched on how the exposure to European liberal discourse fueledanti-colonial movements for independence

• Specifying development as consumption privileges market as vehicle ofsocial change.

SESSION SUMMARY Cont.

• Moreover, theorization of development as a series of evolutionarystages, as posited by Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, as ANon-Communist Manifest, naturalizes the process, whether it occurs ona national or an international stage.

• Because of continuing First World dependence on raw materials fromthe Third World, some societies were more equal than others in theircapacity to traverse Rostow’s stages

• A global theoretical context is provided by “Dependency analysis” andWallerstein’s “World-system analysis.”

• Concepts of commodity chains, food miles and ghost acres, which helpilluminate the social and environmental linkages of global production,are then introduced.

ACTIVITY

• What are some of the questions being raised about‘development’ today? Why?

• How do dependency and world systems analysisconceptions of development differ from Rostow’stheory of development (stages of growth)? How dothey illuminate the difference betweenunderstanding development in sequential andrelational terms?

REFERENCES• McMichael, Philip (2012). Development and Social Change: Global

Perspective (Fifth Edition). Los Angeles: Sage Publications, Chapter 1.

• Cohen, Michael and Robert Shenton. 1995. “The Invention of Development.” Pp. 27-43 in Jonathan Crush (ed.), Power of Development. London and New York: Routledge.

• Esteva, Gustavo. 1991. “Development.” Pp. 1-23 in Wolfgang Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary. London: Zed Books.

• Ferguson, James. 1994. “Epilogue.” Pp. 279-288 inThe Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

• Seers, Dudley. 1972. “What are we trying to Measure?” Journal of Development Studies 8(3):21-36. Studies 10(1):19-34.