Social Change and Development

Social Change and Development
Author: Alvin Y. So
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1990-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780803935471

During the past four decades, the field of development has been dominated by three schools of research. The 1950s saw the modernization school, the 1960s experienced the dependency school, the 1970s developed the new world-system school, and the 1980s is a convergence of all three schools. Alvin Y. So examines the dynamic nature of these schools of development--what each of them represents, their contributions, how they have criticized each other, how they have defended themselves, and how they were transformed. He reviews a variety of empirical studies, focusing on the "classical" and the "new" models, to show how each of the perspectives affects the study of development. In addition, this book features a unique emphasis on the research implications of the three perspectives, involving changes in orientation, agenda, methodology, and findings.

Modernization and Postmodernization

Modernization and Postmodernization
Author: Ronald Inglehart
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1997-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691011806

To demonstrate the powerful links between belief systems and political and socioeconomic variables, this book draws on the World Values Surveys, a unique database that looks at the impact of mass publics on political and social life.

Ways of Social Change

Ways of Social Change
Author: Garth Massey
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2015-07-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1506306632

"Ways of Social Change is very readable and has great discussion questions and suggested activities. It is one of the few books where I have had students volunteer praise for the book!" - Connie Robinson, Central Washington University The world is at our fingertips, but understanding what is going on has never been more daunting. Ways of Social Change is a primer for making sense of both rapidly moving events and the cultural and structural forces on which social life is built, while teaching critical thinking skills needed to understand social change. With an approach that is fresh, timely, challenging, and engaging, Ways of Social Change shows students how social change is both a lived experience and the result of our actions in the world. It invites the reader into the realm of social science, where clarification, understanding, and inquiry provide for both informed opinions and a path to effective involvement. The core of the book focuses on five forces that powerfully influence the direction, scope and speed of social change: science and technology, social movements, war and revolution, large corporations, and the state. A concluding chapter encourages students to examine their own perspectives and offers ways to engage in social change, now and in their lifetime.

The Rhythm of Modernization: How Values Change over Time

The Rhythm of Modernization: How Values Change over Time
Author: Raül Tormos
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-11-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004411917

In The Rhythm of Modernization, Raül Tormos analyses the pace at which belief systems change across the developed world during the modernization process. It is often assumed that value change follows the slow rhythm of generational replacement. This book, however, reports trends that contradict this assumption in the field of values. Challenging Inglehart’s modernization theory, the transition from traditional to modern values happens much quicker than predicted. Many “baby-boomers” who were church-going, morally conservative materialists when they were young, become unchurched and morally tolerant postmaterialists in their later years. Using surveys from multiple countries over many years, and applying cutting-edge statistical techniques, this book shows how citizens quickly adapt their belief systems to new circumstances throughout their lives.

Social Acceleration

Social Acceleration
Author: Hartmut Rosa
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231148348

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

Recasting Iranian Modernity

Recasting Iranian Modernity
Author: Kamran Matin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134446691

Critically deploying the idea of uneven and combined development this book provides a novel non-Eurocentric account of Iran’s experience of modernity and revolution. Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that Eurocentrism can be decisively overcome through a social theory that has international relations at its ontological core. This will enable a conception of history in which there is an intrinsic international dimension to social change that prevents historical repetition. This hitherto under-theorized international dimension is, the book argues, manifest in combined patterns of development, which incorporate both foreign and native forms. It is the tension-prone and unstable nature of these hybrid developmental patterns that mark Iranian modernity, and fuelled the socio-political dynamics of the 1979 revolution and the rise of political Islam. Challenging solely comparative approaches to the Iranian Revolution that explain it away as either a deviation from, or a reaction to, modernity on the grounds of its religious form, this book will be valuable to those interested in an alternative theoretical approach to the Iranian Revolution, modern Iran and political Islam, working in the fields of International Relations, Middle East and Islamic Studies, History, Political Science, Political Sociology, Postcolonialism, and Comparative Politics.