The Globalization and Development Reader

Perspectives on Development and Global Change

J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, Nitsan Chorev, J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, Nitsan Chorev

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118735381
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

This revised and updated second edition of The Globalization and Development Reader builds on the considerable success of a first edition that has been used around the world. It combines selected readings and editorial material to provide a coherent text with global coverage, reflecting new theoretical and empirical developments.

• Main text and core reference for students and professionals studying the processes of social change and development in "third world" countries. Carefully excerpted materials facilitate the understanding of classic and contemporary writings
• Second edition includes 33 essential readings, including 21 new selections
• New pieces cover the impact of the recession in the global North, global inequality and uneven development, gender, international migration, the role of cities, agriculture and on the governance of pharmaceuticals and climate change politics
• Increased coverage of China and India help to provide genuinely global coverage, and for a student readership the materials have been subject to a higher degree of editing in the new edition
• Includes a general introduction to the field, and short, insightful section introductions to each reading
• New readings include selections by Alexander Gershenkron, Alice Amsden, Amartya Sen, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Cecile Jackson, Dani Rodrik, David Harvey, Greta Krippner, Kathryn Sikkink, Leslie Sklair, Margaret E. Keck, Michael Burawoy, Nitsan Chorev, Oscar Lewis, Patrick Bond, Peter Evans, Philip McMichael, Pranab Bardhan, Ruth Pearson, Sarah Babb, Saskia Sassen, and Steve Radelet

Part I
Formative Approaches to Development and Social Change

Introduction

What are the forces that drive society to change? Marx and Weber saw ample evidence that capitalism was an enormously powerful, efficient force capable of producing unprecedented wealth; alongside this evidence, however, there was competing evidence of the poverty, social upheaval, inequality, and political crisis it seemed to bring. It was trying to understand these contradictions and consequences of capitalism that drove the theories of the “formative” authors represented in this section. In the interests of expanding the variety of perspectives on globalization in this volume, the selection here is admittedly quite brief. Nonetheless, what follows demonstrates the distinctiveness of both Marx (and Engels) and Weber’s theories, as well as their most notable conceptualizations about the relationship between social and economic change. The latter four selections are North Americans writing almost a century later and expressing views on the relationship between social and economic change, albeit from a very different perspective.

Karl Marx (1818–83), known as a historical materialist, once wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”¹ For Friedrich Engels (1820–95) and Marx, the point in studying history was not just memorizing the details of individuals or their actions, but understanding the evolving structure of things. They saw history as a series of types of production, each type corresponding to ways of organizing and thinking. Economic relationships structured people’s lives; what and how they produce things, relationships among workers, tools, and ownership of inputs can all explain people’s daily actions, choices, feelings, and even beliefs. Moreover, Marx and Engels viewed conflict over these relationships as omnipresent and a primary source of social change: the economy drives the system.

Marx and his long-time colleague Friedrich Engels were especially interested in the latest mode of economic organization, capitalism. In the capitalist system, they saw wage labor and exchange for profit as an overarching, all-encompassing structure that breeds exploitative economic relationships among individuals, classes, and regions. These economic relationships, in turn, determine how people think – they influence prevailing ideologies and behaviors. Marx’s work is essentially a critique of capitalism. This critique stems from one central idea: that the human relationships required by capitalism do not allow people to reach their full, creative potential, or to exercise free will, which he conceives as fundamental parts of human nature. Marx argued that one of the ways capitalist production exploits workers is by making them feel estranged from the products of their own hands. Alienation occurs when social relationships created by a system out of our control come to dominate us. In “Alienated Labor” Marx explains how capitalism’s negative effects extend well beyond the workplace.

Marx’s greatest legacy is probably his contention that all history is a story of struggles between those who own factories and tools to produce goods (the bourgeoisie), and those who own so little that they must sell their labor in order to purchase the goods they need to survive (the proletariat). This separation of society into workers and owners means that in capitalist society there is a constant struggle over the difference between what workers are paid and the final price of what they create. For example, using modern production techniques workers might create 100 pairs of shoes per day, each of which might sell for, say, $75. Yet, each worker might only earn $3 a day. In capitalism, there is a constant struggle between workers and owners over the difference between the cost of production and the price that products command on the market. As long as workers are unable to capture the surplus value of what they produce (the difference between the cost of producing 100 pairs of shoes and the total price the shoes sell for), conflict permeates economic and social relationships. It is conflict in the form of exploitation of labor that both characterizes capitalism as a system and will, according to Marx and Engels, lead to its demise.

From the early twentieth century, the revolutionary message of the Communist Manifesto influenced billions of lives. Marx and Engels penned this “Manifesto” as a program for a new socialist league of German journeymen living in Paris, Brussels, and London. As with all of Marx’s work (and that of Engels as well), the Communist Manifesto is a critique of modern (to him this was “capitalist”) society. According to Marx and Engels, capitalism was merely a historical stage, albeit a crucial one, in which all relationships are mediated by the exchange of things that can be bought and sold. Confronted with what they saw as this dehumanizing and seemingly overwhelming force of capitalism, Marx and Engels were nonetheless hopeful that contradictions within capitalism would ultimately lead to its replacement by a new social order. Notwithstanding the political controversy this manifesto inspired, or its errant predictions on capitalism’s demise and its replacement with a new order, this pamphlet has inspired both revolutionary leaders and social scientists for generations. As with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, in piece after piece in this book, the ideas in the clear, strident, and political Communist Manifesto are incorporated, expanded, refuted, and directly critiqued by social scientists of all stripes that followed.

About a half-century after Marx and Engels, German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) wrote in response to Marx and Engels to demonstrate that social change goes beyond mere economic relationships. In his 1905 excerpt “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Weber proposed that in addition to the economic system driving social change, religious ideas were crucial in the development of capitalism in Europe. In addition to this theoretical disagreement, Weber was less interested in presenting a political agenda and more interested in explaining the underlying forces that allowed the new society around him to develop. Because his project was more academic than polemical, Weber laid out a more complex and less deterministic theory of how societies were changing.

For centuries, sources of traditional authority – the church, the crown, or the landed elite – dominated European society. Virtue was independent of excelling in one’s work, but rather work was not for “proper” people at all; they focused on fineries and “courtly love.” Similarly, the way to properly show God’s glory was through art, poetry, or music. As society urbanized and industrialized, the power of these traditional sources of authority eroded quickly, as an almost scientific pursuit of moneymaking emerged as the dominating force of the era. People were more interested in investing their surplus in productive investments than in merely spending it on luxury goods. Weber noted that this new approach to work and money brought with it profound attitudinal and behavioral changes, a veritable “Spirit of Capitalism.”

In the excerpt of this work reprinted here, Weber traces how the initial development of Protestantism in Europe and North America contributed to the economic arrangements of that specific era. For example, early Protestants advocated devoting one’s life to a calling to demonstrate one’s willingness to serve God’s will. Therefore, hard work in a specific area was a virtue and laziness or idleness considered sinful. This devotion to a calling, coupled with the belief in the sinfulness of an unproductive accumulation of wealth (evidence of a lack of grace), led to vocational specialization and the reinvestment of capital. It was only the Protestant attitude toward wealth, argued Weber, which resulted in capital being viewed as something to reinvest judiciously. Similarly, specialization according to one’s calling infused work with religious meaning and made hard work, efficiency, and asceticism inherently virtuous, since the accumulation of wisely invested wealth demonstrated a state of grace. Ultimately, capitalism was no longer imbued with Protestantism but emerged as an independent force. Specifically, Weber argued that certain Protestant religious practices had become secularized and developed into a new type of authority.

This change following the Protestant Reformation was a profound one. Weber explained how society went from valuing tradition toward being dominated by new, more objective practices and values such as the written contract, merit, expertise, universal standards, and established methods and procedures for completing tasks. In short, he explained that society had come to value rational procedures more than traditional authority. Weber asks: How did written rules, limited jurisdictions, limited powers, record-keeping, separation of public and private life, and the following of documented, comprehensive procedures come almost to replace religion and lineage as a source of authority? His answer is that the ideas accompanying the emergence of Protestantism and rational bureaucratic organization spilled over and even dominated an economic system, modern capitalism. In this sense Weber differs greatly from Marx: where Marx believed economic arrangements determined ideology (ideas) and nearly everything else, Weber believed in the possibility that the ideas of people could lead the process of economic development. In this case, Protestant ideas helped shape the rise of capitalism in its modern form.

The influence of Weber’s observations cannot be overstated: “modernization theorists” writing on developing nations many decades later held the implicit assumption that there is something inherently morally superior in the investment of wealth, harder work, efficiency, and strict bureaucratic structures. They called these traits in a society “modern” and “rational,” labeling the others as leftovers of previous social structures, as “irrational,” “backward,” or as impediments to progress. These ideas continue to hold sway in national and multilateral agency centers: billions of dollars in foreign assistance are currently being allotted based on whether nations fit this vision of what a “modern” society is. Many other ideas have been carried forward from Weber’s work. For example, some authors included in the final sections of this volume take up Weber’s assertion that power is based not just on relations of production (i.e., on money), but on factors like access to information, cultural identification, and organizational potential. And his attention to social status and the role of the state (the government) has informed a new generation of “neo-Weberian” scholarship on social change and development.

Following the examples of Marx and Weber’s theories about capitalism and social change are samples of “modernization theory,” an approach outlined briefly in the introductory chapter to the book. To understand the gap between wealthier and poorer nations, modernization theorists explored the process of development and offered a composite portrait of what it means to be “modern.” In short, “modernization” involves the adoption of new ways of material life – like how work and community are organized, or how technology or governments are dealt with – and it also changes, or rather “improves,” our education system and our most basic values and attitudes. In modernization theory’s dualistic schema, societies go from being one type of society (traditional or undeveloped) to another type of society (modern, or developed). Samuel Huntington, whose work ends this section of the Reader, explained that modernization is an evolutionary process that changes societies in a revolutionary manner.²

Although different academic disciplines produced their own species of these theories, they all set up dichotomies and perceived development as a process that involved social, psychological, economic, cultural, political, or even biological sequences of changes from point A to point B along a single trajectory. Different theorists saw varied “motors” as the key to movement from traditional to modern. Some modernization theorists, such as W. W. Rostow, thought that an increased accumulation of capital would lead a modernization process that would then affect other elements of a society such as politics and values. Others considered non-economic factors the most important in explaining why poorer countries are poor and why some countries have been unable to generate sufficient capital and technology to “modernize.” Bert Hoselitz, for example, perceived entrepreneurs as key figures in a society’s shift in attitude from traditional to modern.³ In a traditional society, the entrepreneur is a social deviant because he is doing something new and different and individualistic; in a modern society change is routine, innovation is valued, and the entrepreneur esteemed. D. C. McClelland saw the “need for achievement” as a key factor in distinguishing “modern” individuals.⁴ For Daniel Lerner it was “projection” – the individual believing that others are like them – and “introjection” – an enlarged sense of oneself that includes new ideas and habits.⁵ Everett Hagen’s theory was also psychological – he said that what motivates modern individuals was creativity and anxiety, the latter due to an uneasy feeling when they weren’t being productive, a product of their mother’s insatiable demands.⁶

So what does modernization theory suggest nations should do to become more “developed”? Although the major thrust of modernization implied that nations should focus on changing their internal society by rationalizing it, many also believed that “developed” countries could play a pivotal role by assisting and guiding the modernization of later developers. Rostow, for example, argued that investments and the transfer of technology by wealthier countries would allow “backward” societies to become modern at a faster rate than earlier developers. Lerner suggested that the media would act as an accelerator of change because people would be exposed to abstract situations and forced to think beyond their own lives. Gino Germani thought that a process of diffusion and demonstration of innovations would accelerate the development in late modernizers.⁷

For these late modernizers the prescription was the same: borrow, import, imitate, and rationalize. To get investments flowing, to break the nation out of the cycle of poverty and lack of investment, nations should allow large firms from wealthy countries free access to their national markets, labor and resources. Some of this production would be for local and some for export markets, but at least money would finally be flowing where before it was lacking entirely or locked up in the overly cautious an...