Culture, Institutions, and Development

New Insights Into an Old Debate

Jean-Philippe Platteau, Robert Peccoud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136912092
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Does culture matter? This question has taken on added significance since fundamentalist revivalism has recently gained ground in different parts of the world. The old controversy between Max Weber and Karl Marx, which centres around the extent to which cultural factors such as social norms and values affect economic growth is of critical importance, particularly because of its policy implications. Indeed, if culture is not an autonomous factor susceptible to influencing economic realities, it should not matter and public authorities can dispense with thinking about cultural interventions. On the other hand, if culture does have a real impact, the question arises as to whether it is conducive or detrimental to economic growth, political liberalization, and the emancipation of individuals among other things.

Culture, Institutions, and Development addresses this debate at a concrete level by looking at five important issues: the role of tradition and its influence on development; the role of religion, with special reference to Middle Eastern countries; the role of family, kinship, and ethnic ties in the process of development; the relationship between culture and entrepreneurship; and the relationship between culture and poverty.

This collection offers a nuanced view that neither denies nor exaggerates the role of cultural factors in explaining relative growth performances across countries. Instead, the contributors focus on the dynamic, two-way relationship between culture and development in a way that stresses policy stakes and the value of multidisciplinary collaboration between economists, historians and other social scientists. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers in all the social sciences, as well as to professionals working in national development agencies, international organisations, and Non-Governmental Organisations.

Part I
Overview of issues

1
The role of culture in development

An overview

Jean-Philippe Platteau

A short retrospective view

The study of the role of culture has long been the almost exclusive province of sociology and cultural anthropology. Not surprisingly, development economists have lent relatively little attention to it. Yet, it is interesting to notice that, during the 1950s and 1960s, the most prominent among them have usually discussed cultural and social aspects of development, albeit briefly, and expressed (sometimes crude) opinions about whether traditional institutions, attitudes and values are likely to block or to promote economic growth. Some of them, eager to identify determinants or prerequisites of modern economic growth, have made statements very close to the modernization view originated in the field of sociology (see Chapter 2). This applies to Walter Rostow (1960, 1963), Stephen Enke (1963), Simon Kuznets (1966, 1968), Henry Bruton (1965) and Benjamin Higgins (1968) who tended to look at development as the result of a ‘Big Push’ driving traditional societies out of secular stagnation into the era of self-sustaining growth. What characterizes their writings is a good amount of optimism concerning the pace at which traditional culture and institutions, which are ill-suited to the new system of growth, can adjust to its requirements.

Other contemporary development economists, however, envisioned institutional and sociocultural change in pre-modern societies as a much less radical step (Meier and Baldwin 1957; Bauer and Yamey 1957; Hirschman 1958). For example, Gerald Meier and Robert Baldwin adopted a resolutely gradual approach to sociocultural change:

Not only must economic organization be transformed, but social organization … must also be modified so that the basic complex of values and motivations may be more favourable for development. … To avoid human discontent, [however], changes should be introduced in ways that will disrupt the existing culture as little as possible: the cultural change should be selective … more rapid progress will come by utilizing as much as possible existing attitudes and institutions rather than by attempting a frontal breakdown of the culture.

(Meier and Baldwin 1957: 356, 359)

In addition, they explicitly warned against the danger of ethnocentrism in discussions of sociocultural problems: ‘In considering the social and cultural requirements for development, a Western student should not make the mistake of ethnocentrism, that is, assuming that, because the West is developed, Western values and institutions are therefore necessary for development’ (ibid.: 355).

Still other authors emphasized the co-evolutionary nature of cultural and economic development. Thus, Peter Bauer and B.S. Yamey (1957) did not seem to believe that traditional culture ought to be seriously undermined before growth may become possible. Revealingly, they pointed out that ‘the economic history of Japan demonstrates the compatibility of rapid economic change and growth with the preservation of traditional attitudes and social relationships, recast or re-emphasized as these may be to suit the needs of a new economic order’ (p. 68). In the same vein, Arthur Lewis (1955) was of the opinion that religious beliefs, for example, may evolve and be reinterpreted depending on the economic environment confronting societies. In other words, traditional values and attitudes, whenever they are hostile to economic advancement, will eventually adapt themselves to new economic opportunities (p. 106). As for Alfred Hirschman (1958), he thought that traditional images of change will remain a critical bottleneck of constructive action for economic development until experience modifies them in the appropriate direction.

The diversity of views among development economists mirrored the wide spectrum of opinions and perspectives offered by other social scientists. At one extreme, we encounter the ‘hypermodernist perspective’ (Rao and Walton 2004: 10) exemplified most recently by the works of Lawrence Harrison (2000), Samuel Huntington (2000) and David Landes (2000). Through the lens of this approach, laggard countries appear as societies deeply immersed in traditional cultures that are unsuited to market-oriented development. Without a profound reform of their cultural characteristics, typically initiated from without, no change in their people’s behaviour, norms, habits and collective rules will be possible so that the challenge of modernity will not be met. At the other extreme, are the cultural critics of development for whom economists have shaped modernization perspectives that have had the effect of reifying the distinctions between developed and developing countries originating in the colonial era (see, for example, Escobar 1995). In short, while the former view tends to see culture as a set of external constraints, the latter considers culture as an endogenous product of neo-colonial conceptions and praxis.

In between these two extremes positions, more nuanced approaches have been proposed by scholars such as Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, Jan Breman, Louis Dumont, James Scott and others. Resting on the holistic methodology that is the landmark of sociology and cultural anthropology, their approach treats culture as ‘one of the realms of everyday life’ (Rao and Walton 2004: 11), and offers the advantage of shedding interesting light on concrete issues that arise in the course of development. For example, Bourdieu (1990), using his deep knowledge of Kabylia (Algeria), has defined a notion of ‘cultural capital’ that is very useful to understand the perpetuation of inequality since it shows that opportunities have a subjective dimension in the sense that they are perceived differently by people occupying different positions in the society. As a matter of fact, perceived opportunities are transformed into individual aspirations or expectations that people then internalize in actions and choices. Since these actions and choices themselves tend to reproduce the objective structure of life chances, inequality is reproduced.

Another illustration is provided by the work of Scott (1976, 1985), who has described in considerable detail how poor people, such as Asian peasants, view themselves in the subtle hierarchies to which they belong, how this worldview shapes their objectives and their perceptions of the constraints they are facing, and how they conceive of possible means of action and forms of resistance against the dominating groups. Far from being passive agents, they try to assess their position in an asymmetric world, and they perform actions in the realistic hope of moderating the authority of their patrons rather than attempting to overturn the system that oppresses them yet allows them to subsist.

As argued by other sociologists/anthropologists (see, for example, Breman 1974; Alexander 1982), ‘small people’ tend to be immersed in a culture that has inculcated in them the values of loyalty, deference, respect and gratitude to the ‘big people’ who provide for their livelihood. Thus, while economists lay stress on the exchange, give- and-take character of the relationship between a patron and his clients – under conditions of highly unequal wealth endowments, the clients need insurance against the risk of hunger (and the patron may need a compliant workforce available at their beck and call) – sociologists/anthropologists draw a lot of attention to the cultural underpinnings of patronage relationships, in particular, to the father-and-son analogy projected as their correct representation.

A last illustration is borrowed from the literature dealing with common property resources. This is a field in which anthropologists have made important contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms of local cooperation and the role of cultural and social norms in particular. Since economists have become interested in producing a theory of collective action on the commons, the insights from other social sciences are especially valuable. More precisely, in order that villagers refrain from excessive extraction of available natural resources, as they would if they were allowed to give free rein to their self-interest, they must face some form of punishment whenever they depart from cooperative practices. One mechanism that has often been stressed in anthropological writings is the operation of what may be called a ‘social exchange game’ in which a member of the community earns social prestige and public respect if he or she conforms with the normative pattern of social cooperation, but experiences social shame and opprobrium if he or she does not. For example, from his work about the Moose society of Burkina Faso, Jean Badini concludes:

Activated by social rebuke and the accompanying public humiliation, the feeling of shame appears as the most formidable weapon in the service of the traditional Moose pedagogy (the moaga). Above the individuals, indeed, this feeling asserts the supremacy of social judgment and constitutes a powerful regulating mechanism to which everybody submits. … Since a person can exist only through collective opinion, it is collective opinion that rates people and rare are those who are willing to incur the risk to defy it. The point is that its verdict is merciless and without appeal.

(Badini 1994: 146–7)

Looking more precisely at water-access rules in the lagoon fishery of Bahia, Brazil, John Cordell and Margaret McKean find that they are essentially enforced through a decentralized mechanism based on an ethical code of honour and social respect:

It is impossible to fish for long in a given community without receiving and showing respeito. People honor each other’s claims because of respeito, which is created, bestowed, and reaffirmed through sometimes trivial and sometimes substantial acts of benevolence bordering on self-sacrifice. … Failure to cooperate in these practices can be much more devastating for a fisherman than would be breaking a government law. Respeito is a cognitive reference point to the community conscience. It influences how fishermen evaluate each other’s actions on and off the fishing grounds. It is a yardstick for measuring the justice of individual acts, especially in conflicts. Collective social pressure to conform to the ethics of fishing is reflected in the ôlho do povo (watchfulness of the community’s eye, or sense of justice), reminiscent of the forceful moral and ethical standard in Palauan fishing, ‘words of the lagoon’. Reputations rise and fall in terms of the ôlho do povo. The ôlho do povo determines whether territorial competition in fishing is deliberate or accidental, and whether it is antagonistic enough to require counteraction.

(Cordell and McKean 1986: 94, 98)

The above contributions, which are often anchored in considerable amounts of fieldwork, are a far cry from the works of academic anthropologists and sociologists who have chosen to remain confined to a critical perspective and to deconstruct development concepts in very general and abstract terms, thus carefully avoiding becoming involved constructively in any development policy debate. This perspective has led their proponents to argue for a ‘post-development’ discourse that emphasizes cultural specificities so much that any generalization across societies becomes impossible. Diversity is extolled because an intrinsic worth is attributed to anything ‘local’, partly seen as a move of resistance against the hegemonic West. Since any general statement becomes invalid, the post-development approach places itself outside the scope of science: inquiries into societies can only consist of highly specific case studies that verge on the anecdotal. The absence of theoretical underpinnings that is implied in this way of approaching the study of culture is radically different from recent evolutions that have occurred in the field of economics, and therefore creates an unbridgeable gap of misunderstanding between adherents of post-modernism and economists. In economics, indeed, the search is for patterns in economic and social life ‘that, while not universal, are widely generalizable’ (Bardhan and Ray 2008b: 16).

Recent contributions by economists

If the relationship between culture and development stopped being a concern of economists during most of the 1970s and 1980s, it is interesting to note that, when a surge of renewed interest occurred in the subsequent decades, the response was much more systematic and articulated than it was in the immediate post-war period. In those times, indeed, as witnessed by the above citations, expressions of opinions by leading development economists on the theme of culture remain confined to general thoughts. The reason why the economic perspective on this theme has drastically changed is evident: thanks to the progress of game theory, economists acquired an analytic framework within which to conceptualize culture in a way understandable by them. This does not mean that they had found a magical key to comprehend all the main aspects of cultural life in societies, but rather that they had reached a better grasp of why culture is an indispensable component of modern market economies and obtained a more precise idea of what econ...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in development economics
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Overview of issues
• Part II Religion, family and ethnicity
• Part III Culture and entrepreneurship
• Part IV Culture and poverty reduction
• Part V Conclusion
• Index