Outline # 9 - Detailed

Three Development Paradigms

Dominant Paradigm : Modernization Model
Dependency Paradigm : Dependency Critique
Alternative Paradigm : Development/Participatory Model

The Modernization Model

Modernization Perspective:

- the human society progresses in a linear fashion from traditional societies to modern systems of social organization
- will continue to do so in an evolutionary manner

Traditional Societies:

- predominantly rural
- providing limited social and geographic mobility
- subscribing to cultural practices à don’t support materialism or capitalism as a form of wealth.

Modernization theory about traditional societies:

- oriented in maintaining a status quo dominated by ascribed status
- Fatalism: lack of self-efficacy à attribute of traditional society

Modern Societies (according to Weinstein):

- characterized by:

* materialism
* the dominance of capital as a form of wealth
* consumerism
* rational-legal authority
* sub-cultural diversity
* positive evaluation of change

Modern society à to get a modern society fast, new ideas and practices should be introduced.

Talcott Parsons’ Functionalist Theory:

* “human society is like a biological organism” where:

- economy
- government
- law
- religion
- family
- education

play a role in maintaining social stability that is needed for the development of a society.

- Advanced Modern Societies are characterized by the high consumption of material goods; people can by these goods because they make more money and have a high standard of living.

Walt Rostow

Four Stages to move from a Traditional to a Modern Society, and which must go through these stages to become a modern society:

- The pre-takeoff stage
- The takeoff stage
- The road to maturity
- The mass-consumption society

David McCLelland

- In order for a society to become modernized, the population should be motivated to make changes; a way to do this is to encourage individual achievement.

- Other scholars (Lerner, Schramm, Rogers) state that mass communication/broadcasting is an important feature that accelerate the behavioral and structural changes required for modernization.
- Communism/Socialism

Soviet Union

- achieve progress through revolutionary socialism.
- true progress could only occur in a socialist society.
- socialist transformation à replace unequal economic practices, and give everyone equity in access to education, health, and nutrition.

Communication

- Important in the development of a scientific look by individuals.
- Help in the understanding of diverse phenomena and processes that take part in a society.
- Increase their level of culture and their general education
- Assimilating and carrying out laws and general principles
- Overcoming bourgeois and revisionist ideologies that are foreign to socialist norms.