Promise Of Development

Theories Of Change In Latin America

Peter F Klaren, Thomas J Bossert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977626
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years Latin Americanists have been among the most innovative and productive theorists of the uneven process of development. This collection of substantial selections from some of the most prominent theorists in the field represents a scholarly consolidation and reassessment of the controversies concerning the development of Latin America. Beginning with a historiographic overview, the editors emphasize the origins, evolution, and historical context of the development of each theoretical school (modernization, dependency and Marxism, corporatism, and bureaucratic authoritarianism) and then present key selections drawn from the writings of major theorists, organized by school. Each selection is prefaced with a short editorial introduction that highlights the central themes. A concluding section outlines the main debates surrounding each school and suggests new directions in theoretical development that might arise from criticism of the theories of authoritarianism and the search for democratic processes of development. The book's usefulness as a text is further enhanced by selected bibliographies that contain additional readings on each development theory. Here is a single source for Latin Americanists who hope to interest and instruct their students in the rich theoretical traditions and debates in Latin American studies. This book can also be a strong core volume for courses on other developing areas.

Part 1
Modernization

The authors we have chosen to exemplify the “modernization” perspective are part of a broad tradition in development theory that explicitly followed the concepts of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons. This philosophical perspective envisioned value changes and social mobility in historical processes as more important than the emphasis on economic and class conflict made by Marxist analysts. Some authors, such as Kalman Silvert, openly recognized the “liberal bias” that this perspective entails, as well as its central underlying assumption that modern Western Europe and the United States provide the model not only for what the “less developed countries” would and should become but also for the likely transition they would make from feudal nations to industrialized capitalist economies. The modernization authors searched for those “feudal” values and structures in Latin America that had delayed progress along the path (they implicitly assumed that path to be fairly straight) toward modernity.

Most of the writers saw the middle classes—or as John Johnson calls them, “middle sectors”—as crucial to the process of modernization. The middle classes were most likely to be the bearers of “modern”—more specifically entrepreneurial—values, and, because they made up the greater percentage of the population of modern societies, they were seen as a stabilizing force. Stable and expanding middle classes could provide opportunities of upward social mobility for the lower classes, and eventually could create a democratic polity, historically blocked by the rigid two-class polarity between the few rich and the many poor in feudal societies. A central anomaly for the modernizationists was, as Johnson and Lipset suggest, the enduring adherence of the emerging Latin American middle classes to traditional values coupled with their surprising willingness to expand state economic activities. This willingness was contrary to that of the European middle classes, which sought a liberal laissez-faire economy. As Lipset so clearly shows, for modernizationists, education in modern values and technology was often seen as the crucial factor for actively promoting a move toward modernity. Others authors, such as Jacques Lambert, were more structurally oriented and saw the emergence of a dual society in which the feudal rural areas dominated by the large landed estates—latifundia—were holding back the modernization processes in urban areas. The solution these writers saw was to promote agrarian reform. Most modernizationists thought that foreign investment by the modern world would also hasten the process of development. With considerable optimism the modernizationists thought that the modern countries could help the less developed countries move rapidly toward the type of society and the economic and political systems the modern countries exemplified.

2
Values, Education, and Entrepreneurship

Seymour Martin Lipset

Perhaps the foremost U.S. writer of Latin American modernization theory was Harvard sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. His essay “Values, Education, and Entrepreneurship,” which opens our section on modernization, introduced the widely read and influential work Elites in Latin America. In this essay Lipset argues that contemporary underdeveloped countries “preserve values which foster behavior antithetical to the systematic accumulation of capital.” Drawing from Weber, he contrasts the prevailing value systems of North and South America to explain the lag in Latin American development:

The overseas offspring of Great Britain seemingly had the advantage of values derivative in part from the Protestant Ethic and from the formation of “New Societies” in which feudal ascriptive elements were missing. Since Latin America, on the other hand, is Catholic, it has been dominated for long centuries by ruling elites who created a social structure congruent with feudal social values.

According to Lipset, the origins of this feudal value system are derived from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian values and institutions that were transferred to and took root in Latin America with its conquest and subsequent colonization by the Iberians. Lipset views these values as having worked against the formation of an entrepreneurial spirit. This lack of spirit was, for Lipset, a crucial reason for Latin America’s underdevelopment and lack of progress. In specifying these values Lipset draws on Talcott Parson’s “pattern variables.” Latin Americans were imbued with the values of a traditional social order and followed particularistic and ascriptive patterns of behavior. They learned to emphasize diffuseness and elitism; to profess a weak achievement orientation; and to hold a general scorn for pragmatism, manual labor, materialism, and hard work. These behavioral traits prevented Latin Americans from developing modern, rational business enterprises that engaged in competition, took calculated risks, and developed bureaucratic structures. In this essay Lipset is particularly concerned with showing how the educational system continued to perpetuate such detrimental cultural values.

Discussions of the requisites of economic development have been concerned with the relative importance of the appropriate economic conditions, rather than the presumed effects on varying rates of economic growth of diverse value systems. Much of the analysis which stems from economic thought has tended to see value orientations as derivative from economic factors. Most sociological analysts, on the other hand, following in the tradition of Max Weber, have placed a major independent role on the effect of values in fostering economic development.

Although the evaluation of the causal significance of economic factors and value orientations has often taken the form of a debate pitting one against the other, increasingly more people have come to accept the premise that both sets of variables are relevant. Many economists now discuss the role of “non-economic” factors in economic growth, and some have attempted to include concepts developed in sociology and psychology into their overall frame of analysis. Sociologists, from Weber on, have rarely argued that value analysis could account for economic growth. Rather the thesis suggested by Weber is that, given the economic conditions for the emergence of a system of rational capital accumulation, whether or not such growth occurred in a systematic fashion would be determined by the values present. Structural conditions make development possible; cultural factors determine whether the possibility becomes an actuality. And Weber sought to prove that capitalism and industrialization emerged in Western Europe and North America because value elements inherent in or derivative from the “Protestant Ethic” fostered the necessary kinds of behavior by those who had access to capital; while conversely during other periods in other cultures, the social and religious “ethics” inhibited a systematic rational emphasis on growth.¹

The general Weberian approach has been applied to many of the contemporary underdeveloped countries. It has been argued that these countries not only lack the economic prerequisites for growth, but that many of them preserve values which foster behavior antithetical to the systematic accumulation of capital. The relative failure of Latin American countries to develop on a scale comparable to those of North America or Australasia has been seen as, in some part, a consequence of variations in value systems dominating these two areas. The overseas offspring of Great Britain seemingly had the advantage of values derivative in part from the Protestant Ethic and from the formation of “New Societies” in which feudal ascriptive elements were missing. Since Latin America, on the other hand, is Catholic, it has been dominated for long centuries by ruling elites who created a social structure congruent with feudal social values….

On a theoretical level, the systematic analysis of the relations of value systems to the conditions for economic development requires concepts which permit one to contrast the relative strength of different values. Thus far, the most useful concepts for this purpose are Talcott Parsons’ “pattern-variables.” These refer to basic orientations toward human action and are sufficiently comprehensive to encompass the norms affecting behavior within all social systems, both total societies and their subsystems, such as the family or the university.²

Distinctions which seem particularly useful for analyzing the relation between values and the conditions for development are achievement-ascription, universalism-particularism, specificity-diffuseness, and equalitarianism-elitism. (The latter is not one of Parson’s distinctions, but rather one which I have added.) A society’s value system may emphasize that a person in his orientation to others treats them in terms of their abilities and performances (achievement) or in terms of inherited qualities (ascription); applies a general standard (universalism) or responds to some personal attribute or relationship (particularism); deals with them in terms of the specific positions which they happen to occupy (specificity) or in general terms as individual members of the collectivity (diffuseness).

Concepts such as these are most appropriately used in a comparative context. Thus the claim that the United States is achievement-oriented, or that it is equalitarian, obviously does not refer to these characteristics in any absolute sense. The statement that a national value system is equalitarian clearly does not imply the absence of great differences in power, income, wealth, or status. It means rather that from a comparative perspective nations defined as equalitarian tend to place more emphasis than elitist nations on universalistic criteria in interpersonal judgments, and that they tend to de-emphasize behavior patterns which stress hierarchical differences. No society is equalitarian, ascriptive, or universalistic in any total sense; all systems about which we have knowledge are characterized by values and behavior which reflect both ends of any given polarity, e.g., all systems have some mobility and some inheritance of position.

In his original presentation of the pattern-variables, Parsons linked combinations of two of them—achievement-ascription and universalismparticularism—to different forms of existing societies. Thus the combination of universalism-achievement may be exemplified by the United States. It is the combination most favorable to the emergence of an industrial society since it encourages respect or deference toward others on the basis of merit and places an emphasis on achievement. It is typically linked with a stress on specificity, the judging of individuals and institutions in terms of their individual roles, rather than generally.³ The Soviet system expresses many of the same values as the United States in its ideals. One important difference, of course, is in the position of the Communist party. Membership in the party conveys particularistic rights and obligations. Otherwise both systems resemble each other in “value” terms with reference to the original pattern-variables. Both denigrate extended kinship ties, view ethnic subdivisions as a strain, emphasize individual success, but at the same time insist that inequality should be reduced and that the norms inherent in equalitarianism should govern social relationships. The two systems, North American and Communist, diverge, however, with respect to another key pattern-variable polarity, self-orientation vs. collectivity-orientation—the emphasis that a collectivity has a claim on its individual units to conform to the defined interests of the larger group, as opposed to the legitimacy of actions reflecting the perceived needs of the individual unit.

Conceptualization at such an abstract level is not very useful unless it serves to specify hypotheses about the differences in norms and behavior inherent in different value emphases. Such work would clearly have utility for the effort to understand the varying relationships between levels of economic development and social values.

The Latin-American system has been identified by Parsons as an example of the particularistic-ascriptive pattern. Such a system tends to be focused around kinship and local community and to de-emphasize the need for powerful and legitimate larger centers of authority such as the state. Given a weak achievement orientation, such systems see work as a necessary evil. Morality converges around the traditionalistic acceptance of received standards and arrangements. There is an emphasis on expressive rather than instrumental behvior. There is little concern with the behavior of external authority so long as it does not interfere with expressive freedom. Such systems also tend to emphasize diñuseness and elitism. The status conferred by one position tends to be accorded in all situations. Thus if one plays one elite role, he is respected generally.⁴

Although the various Latin American countries obviously differ considerably—a point which will be elaborated later—it is interesting to note that a recent analysis of the social structure of the most developed nation, Uruguay, describes the contemporary situation there in much the same terms as Parsons does for the area as a whole. Aldo Solari has summed up some of his findings about his own country:

It is clear that particularism is a very important phenomenon in Uruguayan society and it prevails over universalism. A great number of facts support this. It is well known that the prevailing sytem of selection for government employees is based on kinship, on membership in a certain club or political faction, on friendship, etc. These are all particularistic criteria. A similar phenomenon is present in private enterprise where selection of personnel on the basis of particularistic relations is very common. The use of universalistic criteria, such as the use of standardized examinations, is exceptional. Quite frequently when such universalistic criteria seem operative, they are applied to candidates who have been previously selected on the basis of personal relationships.⁵

Ascriptive ties are also quite strong in Uruguay, linked in large part to the importance of the family in the system. Concern with fulfilling family obligations and maintaining family prestige leads propertied Uruguayans to avoid risking the economic base of the family position. The concerns of the middle class which tend to affect the expectations and norms of the whole society are for “security, moderation, lack of risk, and prestige.”⁶

The sources of Latin American values have been generally credited to the institutions and norms of the Iberian nations, as practiced by an Iberian-born elite during the three centuries of colonial rule. Those sent over from Spain or Portugal held the predominant positions, and in the colonies “ostentatiously proclaimed their lack of association with manual, productive labor or any kind of vile employment.”⁷ And Spain and Portugal, prior to colonizing the Americas, had been engaged for eight centuries in conflict with the Moors, resulting in the glorification of the roles of soldier and priest and in the denigation of commercial and banking activities, often in the hands of Jews and Moslems. Iberian values and institutions were transferred to the American continent. To establish them securely, there were constant efforts by the “Church militant” to Christianize heathen population[s], the need to justify morally Spanish and Portuguese rule over “inferior” peoples, Indians, and imported Africans, and the fostering of a “get rich quick mentality” introduced by the conquistadores but reinforced by efforts to locate valuable minerals or mine the land and, most significantly, by the establishment of the latifundia (large-scale plantations) as the predominant form of economic, social, and political organization. Almost everywhere in Latin America, the original upper class was composed of the owners of latifundia, and these set the model for elite behavior to which lesser classes, including the businessmen of the towns, sought to adapt.

And as Ronald Dore points out, in arielismo, the Latin American scorn for pragmatism and materialism now usually identified with the United States, “there is an element that can only be explained by the existence of a traditional, landed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also of Interest
• About the Book and Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 MODERNIZATION
• PART 2 DEPENDENCY AND MARXISM
• PART 3 CORPORATISM
• PART 4 BUREAUCRATIC AUTHORITARIANISM
• CONCLUSION
• Index