Revision summary
Modernisation theory pictured a Western path of social change. Frank and Wallerstein made underdevelopment a product of the world-system. Sen shifted the end from growth to capabilities. Sustainable and movement perspectives pluralised the good. Indian planning, 1991, and SHGs illustrate successive recipes.
Model answer
Introduction
Development perspectives on social change have moved from a single Western path, through critiques of dependency, to human development and alternative ecological paths. Each stage renamed who changes, and toward what.
Body
Modernisation
- After 1945, W. W. Rostow’s stages and Daniel Lerner’s passing of traditional society treated the West as the future.
- Talcott Parsons’s pattern variables supplied a social-system story of achievement and universalism.
- M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation and Westernisation were Indian cousins of a modernisation idiom.
Dependency and world-system
- Andre Gunder Frank argued that underdevelopment is produced by the core, not by missing modernity.
- Immanuel Wallerstein mapped core, semi-periphery, and periphery as a single capitalist world-system.
- Social change is then polarising, not catching up.
Later turns
- Basic needs, then Amartya Sen’s capabilities, shifted the goal from growth to what people can do.
- Sustainable and post-development critiques, and new social movements, questioned industrial change as the only good.
- Indian planning, liberalisation after 1991, and SHG-led micro-inclusion sit on this trajectory as state, market, and community recipes.
Thread
- From evolutionist optimism, to structured inequality, to plurality of ends.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD M[Modernisation Rostow Parsons] --> D[Dependency Frank] D --> W[Wallerstein world-system] W --> H[Human development Sen] H --> A[Alternative ecological]
Conclusion
The trajectory runs modernisation, dependency and world-system, then human and alternative development. Frank and Wallerstein broke the one-path story. Sen and ecological movements changed the meaning of a good change.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Next question on this syllabus topic (2022 · Q8(a)). View answer →
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Did dependency replace modernisation in policy?
In theory, partly. In policy, growth and FDI often returned. The critique still explains unequal change.
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Is Sanskritisation a development theory?
It is a theory of cultural mobility. It was used inside a modernisation reading of Indian change.
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