Trace the trajectory of development perspectives on social change. (2022)
Change is a value-neutral concept; development is value-laden — the deliberate, desired and directed movement of a whole social system towards goals it has chosen. How sociology has imagined that movement has itself changed decisively: from growth, to structure, to capability, to sustainability and finally to a suspicion of the idea itself.
Stage one — modernisation and the market-oriented view (1950s–60s)
- W. W. Rostow‘s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) set the template: traditional society, preconditions, take-off, drive to maturity, high mass consumption. Development was an aeroplane on a runway, and aid from the rich world was the fuel.
- Culture supplied the obstacle. Talcott Parsons‘ pattern variables recast the transition as a shift from ascription to achievement and particularism to universalism; Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society, 1958) made “empathy” the modern personality trait; David McClelland (The Achieving Society, 1961) located growth in achievement motivation.
- The assumption throughout was unilinear, endogenous and Western: poverty was the fault of tradition.
Stage two — the structural turn: dependency and world-systems (1960s–70s)
- Raúl Prebisch showed that the terms of trade moved systematically against primary exporters. Andre Gunder Frank turned the argument inside out: underdevelopment is not an original condition but a produced outcome of metropolis–satellite extraction.
- Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World-System, 1974) rescaled the unit of analysis from the nation to a single capitalist world-economy of core, semi-periphery and periphery. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto softened this into “associated-dependent development”.
- Prescription shifted from more contact to less — delinking, autonomy, self-reliance.
Stage three — bringing the state back in (1980s)
East Asia fitted neither camp. State-centred theories showed that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore developed through directed state action — cheap credit to chosen industries, public housing, mass education — not through free markets or delinking. Even the World Bank conceded in 1997 that without an effective state, sustainable development is impossible.
Stage four — from income to capability, and beyond
- Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, 1999) redefined development as the expansion of substantive freedoms, not of GNP; with Mahbub ul Haq this became the Human Development Index in 1990.
- Sustainability entered with Our Common Future (1987) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) argued modern development now manufactures the hazards it must then manage.
- Gender entered as a perspective rather than a target: from the “women in development” approach of the 1970s to gender and development, which asked not how women could be added to existing projects but how development itself allocates work, land and time between the sexes.
- Post-development scholarship — Arturo Escobar‘s Encountering Development (1995) — treats “development” itself as a discourse that makes the South a deficit to be administered; Amita Baviskar‘s Narmada work shows who pays for it.
Conclusion
India traces the whole arc. Its HDI rose over 53% since 1990 and life expectancy from 58.6 to 72 years, yet inequality still erases 30.7% of that HDI value, and the top 1% holds 40.1% of national wealth. The trajectory has therefore moved from how fast a society grows to who grows, and now to at what ecological cost — development is no longer read as a destination but as a contested distribution of life chances.