Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
By the late 1960s opposition to modernization theory developed because the theory was too general and did not fit all societies in quite the same way. [15] Yet, with the end of the Cold War, a few attempts to revive modernization theory were carried out. Francis Fukuyama argued for the use of modernization theory as universal history. [3]
Modernisation refers to a model of a progressive transition from a "pre-modern" or "traditional" to a "modern" society. [1]The theory particularly focuses on the internal factors of a country while assuming that, with assistance, traditional or pre-modern countries can be brought to development in the same manner which more developed countries have.
Both the Soviet Union and the United States viewed the modernization of the developing world as a way to expand their respective spheres of influence and create new economic markets; however, it was the Soviet Union and other autocratic regimes during this period that adopted high modernism as the optimal vision to bring about modernization.
Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past. [41] Other writers have criticized such definitions as just being a listing of factors.
The theory looks at which aspects of countries are beneficial and which constitute obstacles for economic development. The idea is that development assistance targeted at those particular aspects can lead to modernization of 'traditional' or 'backward' societies. Scientists from various research disciplines have contributed to modernization theory.
The theory of modernization has been subject to some criticism similar to that levied against classical social evolutionism, especially for being too ethnocentric, one-sided and focused on the Western world and its culture.
The modernization theory, growing out of U.S. scholarship, equated modernization with industrialization, development, and progress. One of the most notable contributors to the theory was Walt Whitman Rostow who developed an economic model which outlined five stages of growth for nations to follow in his essay, “The Stages of Economic Growth ...
Reflexive modernization is a process of modernization that is characteristic of risk society whereby progress is achieved through reorganization and "reform". Science and technology as it is used for the purpose of reflexive modernization is less concerned with expanding the resource base , but rather with re-evaluating that which is already ...