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Modernization theory is a socio-economic theory, sometimes known as (or as being encompassed within) Development theory, which highlights the positive role played by the developed world in modernizing and facilitating sustainable development in underdeveloped nations, often contrasted with Dependency theory. During the 1950s, its initial focus was placed on the mass media as a modernizing force in the Underdeveloped World. Economically, the mass media was viewed as integral to the diffusion of modern forms of social organizations and technology over traditional economies, with literacy playing an especial cultural role in this. Modernization theorists also maintained that this would serve to promote a diffusion of liberal-democratic political ideals within less developed countries.
Several branches of the theory exist today, and it is generally viewed as a model whereby the Third and Second Worlds are seen to benefit (with aid and guidance from the First World) economically, politically, culturally, and demographically through the acculturation of the modern policies and values of the Western world.
A theory antithetical to the Modernization model which emerged largely as a response to it was Dependency theory. One of its earliest, and most critical of Modernization theory, branches was the one developed by Immanuel Wallerstein.
Wallerstein argued that the 'periphery' (the semi-periphery and periphery, both between and within countries) localities are, in fact, exploited and kept in a state of backwardness by the developed core; a core which profits from the peripheries' cheap, unskilled labour and raw materials (i.e. from those nations' lack of a skilled workforce and industries that can process raw materials locally).
References
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- Lerner, Daniel and Schramm, Wilbur L. (Fwd. by Lyndon B. Johnson) Communication and change in the developing countries (East-West Center Press, Honolulu, 1967)
- Schramm, Wilbur L. and Atwood, Erwin. Circulation of news in the Third World: A study of Asia (Chinese University Press, 1981).
- Wallerstein, Immanuel M. The modern world system (Academic Press, 1976).
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- Wallerstein, Immanuel M. The politics of the world-economy: The states, the movements, and the civilizations, essays (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
- Engerman, David C. (ed.) Staging growth: Modernization, development, and the global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
- Latham, Michael E. Modernization as ideology: American social science and "nation building" in the Kennedy era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
- Schelkle, Waltraud. (et al.) Paradigms of social change: Modernization, development, transformation, evolution (St. Martin's Press, 2000).
- Leys, Colin. The rise & fall of development theory (Indiana University Press, 1996).
- Preston, P.W. Development theory: an introduction (Blackwell, Cambridge, 1996.)
- Scott, Catherine V. Gender and development: Rethinking modernization and dependency theory (Rienner Publishers, Boulder, 1995).
- Joas, Hans. (trans. by Rodney Livingstone). War and modernity (Polity Press, Oxford, 2003). See: "Modernization Theory and the Problem of Violence," pp. 43-55.
- Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of innovations (Free Press, NY, 1983).
- Spybey, Tony. Social change, development, and dependency: Modernity, colonialism and the development of the West (Polity Press, Oxford, 1992).
- Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David L. International relations and the problem of difference (Routledge, London, 2004.)
- Simoniia, Nodari A. Synthesis of traditional and modern in the evolution of Third World societies (Greenwood Press, NY, 1992).
