SOCI 424:

THE CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENT AND

UNDERDEVELOPMENT

SESSION 1:
THE CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENT AND
UNDERDEVELOPMENT I: THEORY AND REALITY

Lecturer: Dr. James Dzisah

Email: jdzisah@ug.edu.gh

College of Education
School of Continuing and Distance Education
2014/2015 – 2016/2017
 SESSION OVERVIEW
This is the first part of a two stage introduction to the Context of Development and
Underdevelopment. We begin with how the idea and practice of development
emerged during the colonial era that socially engineered non-European societies
and then revisit some of the theoretical underpinnings of development we studied
in SOCI 423 as a prelude to contextualizing development and underdevelopment.

Goals and Objectives:

By the end of the session, the student will be able to:
1. Explain the subject matter of this course – The Context of Development and
Underdevelopment
2. Demonstrates how the idea and practice of development emerged during the
colonial era
3. Explain how the concept of development was used to socially engineer non-
European societies.
 SESSION OUTLINE
1. What is development?
2. European Colonialism
3. Development as Consumption
4. Naturalizing Development
5. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth
6. Global Context: Dependency Theory
7. Global Context: World Systems Theory
8. Agrarian Question
9. Activity
10. References
 WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?
• Had its origins in the colonial era
• 19th century, understood philosophically as the
improvement of humankind
• Practically, European elites interpreted development as
the social engineering of emerging national societies
– Formulating government policies to regulate capitalism and
industrialization’s disruptive impacts
– Balancing technological change and class formation with
social intervention
 EUROPEAN COLONIALISM
• Development justify imperial intervention
• Extraction of colonial resources facilitated European
industrialization
• Changed non-European cultures
– Europeans took on the “white man’s burden” during
wrenching social transformations
– Subjects adapted or marginalized through forced labor,
schooling, segregation
– Produced new class inequalities in each society
– Racialized international inequality
 DEVELOPMENT AS CONSUMPTION
• Specifying development as consumption privileges
market as a vehicle of social change
– Markets maximize individual preferences and allocate
resources efficiently
• Derives from an interpretation of Adam Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations and formalized in neoclassical
economic theory
• Institutionalized in development policies across the
world
 NATURALIZING DEVELOPMENT
• Theorizing development as evolutionary naturalizes the process
• According to Karl Polanyi:
– Modern liberalism rests on a belief in natural propensity for self-gain that,
expressed through the market, becomes the driving force of the aspiration
for improvement, aggregated as development
– To naturalized market behaviour as a trans-historical (and competitive)
attribute discounts other human attributes, or values such as co-operation,
redistribution and reciprocity
– Economic individualism is specific to 19 th century European developments rather
than an innate human characteristics
ROSTOW’S STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH
• Western model of free enterprise (vs. state planning); Based on
U.S. experience
• Evolutionary “stages” traverse linear sequence:
– “Traditional Society”
– “Preconditions for Take-off”
– “Take-off”
– “Maturity”
– “Age of High Mass-Consumption”
• Goal to which other (developing) societies should aspire through
membership of “free world”
• Depended on a political context: development state
 GLOBAL CONTEXT:
DEPENDENCY THEORY
• Unequal economic relations between metropolitan societies and
non-European peripheries develop former at the expense of
“underdeveloping” latter
• Greatly influenced by:
– Hans Singer: “peripheral” countries export more natural resources to pay
for expensive manufactured imports
– Raul Prebisch: Latin American states should industrialize behind
protective tariffs on manufactured imports
– Marxist theories of (exploitative) imperialist relations
• However, “dependency” implies a “development-centrism” with
(idealized western) development as the term of reference
 GLOBAL CONTEXT:
WORLD SYSTEMS THEORY
• Advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein
• States: political units competing for, or surrendering, resources
within a world division of labour
– “Core”: concentrates capital-intensive/intellectual production
– “Periphery”: lower-skilled labor-intensive production
• Geographical hierarchy complicated by Thomas Friedman’s “flat
world” processes (associated with India’s Information
Technology boom)
• Western development as “lodestar”
• Denied many other collective/social strategies of sustainability
or improvement in other cultures
 AGRARIAN QUESTION
• Urbanization: defining outcome of “stages of growth”
metaphor
– Absence of peasantries in First World is a key register for
development theory
• Huntington: “Agriculture declines in importance
compared to commercial, industrial, and other
nonagricultural activities, and commercial agriculture
replaces subsistence agriculture”
• How we perceive these changes?
 AGRARIAN QUESTION Cont.
• Small farming: development “baselines”
– Extrapolation: peasant cultures as remnants of Traditional
Society destined to disappear
• Is the change “internally” driven?
– Thus, if subsistence agriculture declines or disappears, is this
because it does not belong on a society’s “development
ladder”?
• Or is it because of a deepening exposure of
smallholders to unequal world market competition by
agribusiness?
 SESSION SUMMARY
• The Session begins by examining the ecological and social crises stemming from
our current consumer-based practices of globalization and development and
identifies the obstacles and possibilities for global efforts toward sustainability.

• The session also examines how the idea and practice of development emerged
during the colonial era that socially engineered non-European societies by
reconstructing labour systems and disorganizing the social psychology of
subjects.

• We touched on how the exposure to European liberal discourse fueled anti-

colonial movements for independence

• Specifying development as consumption privileges market as vehicle of social

change.
 SESSION SUMMARY Cont.
• Moreover, theorization of development as a series of evolutionary stages, as
posited by Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, as A Non-Communist
Manifest, naturalizes the process, whether it occurs on a national or an
international stage.

• Because of continuing First World dependence on raw materials from the

Third World, some societies were more equal than others in their capacity to
traverse Rostow’s stages

• A global theoretical context is provided by “Dependency analysis” and

Wallerstein’s “World-system analysis.”

• Concepts of commodity chains, food miles and ghost acres, which help
illuminate the social and environmental linkages of global production, are
then introduced.
 ACTIVITY
• What are some of the questions being raised about
‘development’ today? Why?
• How do dependency and world systems analysis
conceptions of development differ from Rostow’s
theory of development (stages of growth)? How do
they illuminate the difference between
understanding development in sequential and
relational terms?
 REFERENCES
• McMichael, Philip (2012). Development and Social Change: Global
Perspective (Fifth Edition). Los Angeles: Sage Publications, Chapter 1.

• Cohen, Michael and Robert Shenton. 1995. “The Invention of

Development.” Pp. 27-43 in Jonathan Crush (ed.), Power of Development.
London and New York: Routledge.

• Esteva, Gustavo. 1991. “Development.” Pp. 1-23 in Wolfgang Sachs (ed), The
Development Dictionary. London: Zed Books.

• Ferguson, James. 1994. “Epilogue.” Pp. 279-288 inThe Anti-Politics Machine:

Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

• Seers, Dudley. 1972. “What are we trying to Measure?” Journal of