SOSC 1430 Lecture 2: Development as Progress

• School: York University
• Department: Social Science
• Course: SOSC 1430
• Professor: Miguel Gonzalez

Document Summary

Introduction: progress and modernization: competing interpretations, parson"s pattern variables, summary principles: progress and development, assessment and conclusions. Not a single idea or vision of development. Contesting definitions include: progress, economic growth, basic needs and human. Conception of economic and social changes (progress captures the change in social transformation) Academic interest in examining the solo-economic conditions conducive to modernization (1950s-1960s: why development or underdevelopment occurs? (important question) Key themes (progress, social evolution, social change, and development by stages. Multidisciplinary: social science, economics, anthropology, political science, philosophy (academic disciplines grouped to solve the important question) Theories: a set of propositions which summarize, organize, and explain/predict facts, conditions, or events . Progress as modernization = the view from the north. 5 process in a changing international/global context: expansion of industry and manufacturing, population growth, importance of the state - as agent of economic development, decline of colonial empires, capitalist development a global phenomenon.