More on Modernization

Raymond Grew

Journal of Social History, Vol. 14, No. 2. (Winter, 1980), pp. 179-187.

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MORE ON MODERNIZATION

Fashions in the social sciences are inevitable and revealing. Inevitable because scholars have no choice but to build on each other's work, they reveal the underlying assumptions and common experiences that sophisticated language and methods tend to hide. Accepted styles help mask the tension between abstract claims to the rigor of science and inescapable ties to immediate social and political concerns. Intellectual fashions are dangerous, however, because in the name of newness they invite comformity and because they suggest that arguments can be judged in terms of the company they keep rather than by the cumbersome and disputed criteria of evidence and logic. The concept of modernization has, I think, both in its dominance and its decline been the victim of such thinking.

Now, as more and more articles begin with tendentious and ritual denunciations of previous studies, there is danger that we will ignore whatever lessons a generation of work on modernization can teach, repeating old errors in a new vocabulary while missing the chance to make our knowledge of social change somewhat more cumulative. There is a curious paradox in the fashionable use of the concept of modernization. A short time ago almost any study of an industrial or industrializing society could be expected to make heavy use of the term. Sociologists and political scientists were perhaps the most enthusiastic, but anthropologists employed it to evoke the sense of a world-historical process, economists to imply hard necessities that they understood, historians (in introductions and conclusions) to show they shared in scientific discourse. Paradoxically, as rejection of the term has become stylish, it is used as frequently as ever. We still depend on it, which may well suggest that the concept contains something central or at least convenient. Always rather loose, with different connotations in different disciplines, the term can now be as easily employed to imply someone else's bias as it once was to evoke a sense of progress. To admit this much is to recognize the looseness of the current polemic as well as of the ideas of modernization and to raise the question of what value the concept may still have.

First, then, let us reject as unnecessary any elaborate denunciation of simple- minded visions of modernization and note the distortion and unfairness in criticizing positions no serious scholar has ever really held, in ridiculing specific authors while ignoring the qualifications they cautiously included, or in attacking a school of thought by treating passages taken out of context as if they were representative. This should not need saying, but I believe it does. Civility is so modest an achievement (and so convenient as excuse for moral or intellectual indifference) that one is almost embarrassed to advocate it. Social scientists need to be reminded of the rules of fairness, however, because the pressures to ignore them have become so great. Institutionalized scholarship of all sorts puts great emphasis upon discoveries and fresh ideas. Since these are both hard to come by and difficult to recognize, the temptation to advertize (even a little exaggeratedly) is strong. The social sciences, in which the rewards for new discoveries or new methods are as great as in the natural sciences and in which the measures of

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newness are often no clearer than in the humanities, may be especially vulnerable to this temptation. So, of course, are younger scholars with whole careers at stake. In addition, work in the social sciences is directly and necessarily affected by social and political trends. These pressures and influences combine to encourage a generational attitude that applauds the unmasking of fathers, established schlolars whose very prestige is remembered as oppressive. Some current comments on scholars who wrote of modernization, rather like Lytton Strachey on the Victorians, describe a group in terms of its unattractive qualities.

Ironically, the scientific practice of introducing one's research in terms of its place in the existing literature, a practice strongly encouraged in the social sciences, can easily obscure critical distinctions. Authors eager to establish their own erudition and the significance of their work are likely to treat points that were peripheral in earlier studies as if they had been central (and erroneous). New arguments come to seem the cancellation of previous work rather than its supplement. Interpretations not necessarily in conflict at all thus appear to be exclusive alternatives. Similarly, praiseworthy admiration for formal theory often leads social scientists to apply the term too generally. Critics, aware that there is far greater prestige in deflating a theory than in merely exposing some ideas as loose, have an incentive to preserve the illusion of a "modernization theory" -although in fact there are scores of partial theories and most of the ideas of modernization rest on little theory at all. But whatever else it accomplishes, scholarly discussion should seek to clarify and to raise, not lower, the level of discourse.

If we turn from some alleged modernization theory to the general body of literature on modernization, four major criticisms - ideological, cultural, theoretical, and methodological - still broadly apply. These are that concepts of modernization and much of the literature in which they were developed served the interests of liberalism, capitalism, and (American) imperialism; used a seemingly objective vocabulary to maintain an ethnocentric Western viewpoint; incorporated false assumptions (teleological ones that see development as uniform, proceeding in stages to a common end, and structural-functional ones that consider equilibrium the natural social state); and employed a taxonomic method that encouraged scholars to assign parts of social reality to abstract categories which overlook much that matters (especially about economic relationships and power). These are serious and important charges. Historians, incidentally, should find them familiar, for the social scientists who make them are saying in more formal terms what a great many historians have said (and more have secretly thought) about much of social science. Broadly taken, these charges seem to me essentially correct. If so, they deserve to have dramatic effect on future work in all the social sciences. Yet these criticisms do not in themselves justify the rejection of all previous work using concepts of modernization. Nor do they necessarily argue for abandonment of the concept itself.

The ideological roots that made modernization fashionable - even if they include belief in liberal democracy, a pax Americana, and the progressive impact of modern capitalism (and claims to that effect are easily overdone) - may be historically important. They may lend support to any number of admonitions, but they should not determine how we now consider the concept. In social analysis as in the realm of ideas we are freer than that. The Karl Pearson whose coefficient of correlation we proudly use as a test of significance also wrote National Life from the Standpoint o f Science: A n Address Delivered at Newcastle. November 1 9 , 1900

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(London, 1901), an offensive expression of racist imperialism. We can use the one without accepting the other, though they came from a single mind and one that no doubt considered both to be the products of scientific thought. Social scientists as well as theologians cannot afford to reject an intellectual system merely because it can be misused.

Nor need we automatically and mindlessly blanch at charges of ethnocentrism. T h e Icar ian d r e a m of overcoming t h e limits of a s ingle cu l tu re is itself characteristically Western, the expression of a quite remarkable appreciation of other cultures as well as disillusionment with our own. Surely in 1980 it requires n o ex t raord inary subt lety to avoid intel lectual imperial ism e v e n while acknowledging that the spread of Western influence is a central fact of history, and that it has occurred through imitation and conversion as well as by conquest and domination. Ironically, the extension to the non-Western world of Western criticisms of Western culture can also be parochial, inviting a n ethnocentric indifference to all the creative variety in the ways non-Western societies met the challenge from Europe. As to the dangers of teleology and taxonomy, these important matters of method, which merit the extended discussions they have earned, are not well-handled in asides. Perhaps most general statements about the processes of change are open to the dangers of teleological bias, and any typology can be used to make mere taxonomy look like analysis. There is little reason to assume that the substitution of a different teleogy or newly labelled categories will automatically be an improvement. On this score, there is no magic protection, not even in frameworks that emphasize dependency, macrosocial analysis, world- capitalist systems, conjunctures, class conflict, structural analysis, or the relations of center and periphery.

In fact, close reading of the best works using ideas of modernization reveals great concern to avoid all these errors. T o recognize this is more than a gesture toward fairness, although such gestures are welcome. If our intention is to build some lasting framework of analysis, it is self-indulgent to concentrate on the third-rate or obviously flawed. Criticism of "modernization theory" should consider how the best of such works managed to avoid these dangers or where and why they slipped into them. But those who concentrate on previous errors are likely (as the history of religion, politics, and science shows) to replace old errors with new ones, preserving in the process the system of thought that produced both.

The current fashion of attacking the concept of modernization can, I have suggested, be harmful, encouraging pretensions that are unsupported, inviting tendentious and unfair dismissal of the work of others, parading the destruction of straw men that threatened nothing, and lowering the level of discourse. Still, neither the bad manners nor the loose thinking of some of its critics can serve as reason for clinging to the concept of modernization. That seems to me worth doing for four reasons: many similar changes - in demography, modes of production, technology, urbanization, communication, political mobilization, etc. - have occurred (at different rates and in different degrees) throughout most of the world since the eighteenth century, and modernization has become the convenient, commonplace term for those changes; the concept is fundamentally historical, not merely in its attention to change over time but in its emphasis upon the interrelatedness of change in different parts of society; the concept is interdisciplinary in its vocabulary and tradition (an advantage despite the fact that its varied use in different disciplines is frequently a source of confusion); and the

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concept invites comparison among groups and in a single society, across time, and between countries. If these qualities no longer seem impressive, they nevertheless incorporate some of the major trends of the social sciences over the past fifty and especially the past thirty years.

In practice ideas of modernization lead to a conceptual framework that includes 1) the establishment of categories that describe the organization of society or important segments of it, 2) the definition (usually very broad) of the direction that change can be expected to have within these single categories, 3) the hypothesis that change within one category will be related in varying degrees to change in the others, 4) the assumption that various social groups will participate in, adapt to, or resist changes in the categories most relevant to them and 5 ) the identification in these terms of new or changing patterns of social organization and behavior. Applied to a particular society, these five points form a matrix used to suggest a series of questions - a very useful feat. In addition they invite a search for measures of change and for various comparisons. Given the complexities of social analysis, that is quite a lot.

When mistakenly taken for a theory, it is not much. The descriptive categories do not derive from modernization but from the common lore of all the social sciences; they can vary in scope (the State or recruitment for the civil service) and kind (industrial production or literacy). Some writers on modernization make extensive use of social class; others largely avoid it. Some include a whole range of social attitudes, others stick largely to formal organizations. There are few rules, because there is no required theory of social organization, a lack which conveniently permits flexibility but leaves awkward uncertainty about what to include. The expected direction of change is derived from experience (which may be a carefully controlled empiricism or the ethnocentricism so often attacked) or borrowed from some body of theory (most often, perhaps, derived from the works of Max Weber). Emphasis upon social linkages and comparison, nevertheless, often proves especially fruitful.

None of this is a substitute for careful, contextual research. In fact, it is the emphasis upon the interrelatedness of the various aspects of society - the effort to see society whole - rather than any assumption of one universal historical evolution that makes the framework of modernization applicable to non-Western as well as Western societies. If various aspects of society respond to challenge differently and also affect each other, then social change includes an element of choice (whether conscious or not). Such a view leaves room for traditional historical concerns and invites attention to group attitudes and social psychology. The framework of modernization draws attention to culture, which like politics and economics is generally granted some significant autonomy. Because this framework can stress linkages, include culture, and allow for variety, its coherence depends on the quality of contextual and essentially historical analysis. The most obvious misuse of modernization has been by writers insensitive to the complexity of history.

As an historical framework, however, modernization raises some of the classical problems of historical analysis, including that of periodization. When the framework of modernization is applied over too vast a sweep, it leads not to discoveries but to trite summaries that tend in practice to obscure important problems while rushing from a mythic, traditional, feudal, or preindustrial world to modern, mass, or post-industrial society. When applied to very short periods, the framework of modernization tends to exaggerate change, stretching adaptations and alterations in institutions or policies or behavior until they seem to be processes. Of course it is easier to reject the extremes than to define the

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length of time proper to the framework, but the period studied should be determined by the change under consideration and by its history within a segment of society. The period is thus given a kind of closure. The beginning and end should be both demonstrably different and related - from the establishment of public schools to universal education, from representative government to universal suffrage, from a few large cities to an urban society - when, that is, such changes occur within a single social system and, usually, within a few generations. The beginning should mark a time at which the historian can establish that certain problems have been posed and the end a time at which particular resolutions have taken root. The framework of modernization then points up the connections between changes in one sector and in others (in which the chronology of change may be different) and allows comparison.

The framework, which thus best fits a society undergoing fairly rapid and self- conscious change, has proved particularly useful, for example, in understanding the recourse to centralized, authoritarian regimes (of the right or left) in rapidly developing societies. It has drawn attention to and stimulated impressive work on education and communications. On the other hand, ideas of modernization (although they have been effectively applied to milennarian movements or colonial markets) have contributed much less to the study of established religion or markets, where linkages to the rest of society may be too intricate and the capacity for adaptation too multiform for so coarse a framework. Nor is modernization an effective device for predicting the specific outcome of social change or public policy.

These are important limitations. If concepts of modernization are often useful but also easily misused, then there may be some lessons to be learned. Let me suggest a beginning, in the grand reductive tradition. Six general difficulties seem sources of the most common errors in writings on modernization, errors that account for much of the heavy criticism modernization currently receives. These are problems of theory, of scale, of method, of change, or prediction, and of abstractness.

The Problem of Theory. To recognize that the concept of modernization is not a theory is a useful first step. It obviates much of the most sweeping criticism and requires critics to point to specific interpretations and hypotheses. To do that would improve the level of discourse. The impression that there is a definable body of thought called "modernization theory" comes, however, at least in part from users of the framework of modernization. The dangerous tendency in the social sciences to pretend to too much has here done great harm. Much good and useful work can be done with little formal social theory, but allusions to unstated (and untestable) theories, while they seem to add a handsome setting for the jewels of research, are likely to be obfuscatory and misleading to the researcher and to future users of that research alike. In the case of modernization, the pretense to theory creates gaps in the interpretation that have to be filled; clouds of unacknowledged ideology and borrowed abstractions become the convenient filler. General theories - liberal, marxist, or structuralist - and specific ones of ~olitical mobilization or bureaucratic organization can all be fruitfully amlied - .. kithin the framework of modernization to appropriate cases. But the theory must be explicit. Similarly, the identification of patterns of change or development can be a valuable exercise; unless part of some theory, it has little explanatory power. Known patterns of development or linkage among groups and institutions can have heuristic value, but the process of change still needs to be studied and explained. Modernization is not a substitute for theory.

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The Problem of Scale. As a term, modernization can be a convenient shorthand for long-term changes, but so used it merely summarizes received interpretations. When new analysis is the point, more is needed. I have asserted that the framework of modernization implies a direction of change and an element of choice, that it can invite comparison and the fruitful use of a rich body of literature in several disciplines, but that it should be applied to specifically identified problems in particular sectors of society and to the way those sectors connect with each other and with the rest of society. This is to argue for limitations of scope (to a part of society) and of chronology (to a period of particular change) that allow the analysis to remain tied to the evidence.

The scale of investigation, however, is then determined by the problem being analyzed and the methods used - not by modernization itself, whatever that is taken to be. Alas, the relation of any particular change to long-term trends has to be established, and modernization is not a prefabricated mechanism for doing so. Nor is it an automatic means for giving the microscopic larger significance (a common temptation among historians) nor for giving static analysis an historical context (a common temptation among sociologists). In short, the framework of modernization can aid analysis and the search for significance, but the scale of analysis is neither determined by it nor altered by appending it to research already completed.

The very concept of modernization is an attempt to break history's seamless web, yet there is a tendency to write about the process of change using two different and extreme scales simultaneously. One is microscopic. The changes within a bureaucracy or party or trade balance that take place in the course of a few years are the changes we can trace most precisely. These, then, are given direction and meaning by a vocabulary that can also be used to describe sweeping changes from an imagined past to the present or even the future. The closely reasoned, contextual analysis of specific change is thus not tightly tied to the significance given it; and the significance soars beyond the evidence presented. As a general rule, the changes studied and the process of change adduced should be directly related and exist within a similar chronological framework. Historians know better than anyone that otherwise the middle class is always rising, bureaucracies differentiating, societies becoming more secular until there is the risk that specific changes in fact lose significance. If the same description of change is used for one moment in one place and for change over centuries and in whole civilizations the result is usually banal at best.

The Problem of Method. Criticisms of "modernization theory" have often been methodologically more advanced than the concepts of modernization themselves, a flattery that has increased confusion. Ideas of modernization have in themselves added nothing to available methods; in fact, the temptation to rely upon them for methodological guidance is likely to lead to unfortunate revivals of nineteenth- century evolutionism. Nor is there, among the methods of social science, one more suited than others to studies of modernization. Social scientists must look elsewhere for guidance. Indeed, loose, historical concepts of modernization do not easily support precise or elaborate behavioral methods; and indexes of achievement, communication, or modernization itself have, whatever their ingenuity or specific value, not lent scientific rigor to the central concepts.

Nevertheless, the search for clear indicators of change, the sophisticated use of quantitative methods, and the formal testing of models and hypotheses have all added to our understanding of change and to theoretical statements about it. A significant proportion of this work has used concepts of modernization and added

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to their value. One's views of modernization and the methods used to explore them need to be closely related, but the choice of method and its proper use is not resolved by having a framework that suggests what to look for.

The Problem of Change. If the concept of modernization means more than historical change from the past to the present, then it must refer separately or in combination to 1) change toward certain goals, 2) changes that occur in certain ways, 3) certain kinds of change, 4) changes that have a certain effect. Obviously, these overlap; but the first two open dangers especially worth noting. Since few of us are truly imaginative for very long, to assume that change has a goal tends in practice to lead to the assumption that some condition or institution that now exists (advanced technology or the Social Democratic Party) is a necessary model and then to measure the modernization of something else by its distance from that standard. To give modernization a goal leads to the classic error of thinking history ends with us. That in turn narrows our thinking and overlooks the variety and adaptability of human society. Indeed, it may well be that China or Brazil or Cuba or any number of other societies will conduct their modernization in ways that create new challenges for Western Europe or the United States, pressing them in turn to modernize in new directions. I see no gain in assuming that modernization will end, grave dangers in thinking the process has some goal already familiar. This becomes most obvious within a single aspect of society: the unconscious assumption that one form of family or state or division of labor is modern. Usually ethnocentric, such assumptions are, worse than that, dull- minded. Yet the evidence is overwhelming of family farms and putting-out systems and religions that adapted remarkably to new conditions. A concept of modernization that omits such possibilities unnecessarily embraces errors that have earned the term disrepute.

To begin one's research with a kind of checklist of changes that constitute modernization - the changes that demark secularization or economic growth, for example - is not so likely to have unintended results. And to work with a list of changes that usually produce outcomes that constitute modernization - greater efficiency or differentiation, for example - can be a useful aid. Even so, one should be careful not to reduce modernization to multifold tables of factors, variables, functions, and roles, the taxonomic schlock syndrome that puts the emphasis on making historical cases fit rather than on discovering something new from studying them. Historians, at least, will find it more valuable to compare the changes that occur in a sector or two of one society with those that occurred in the same sectors of other societies to see what similarities and differences need to be explained. What modernizing changes have in common is more the similarity of needs and challenges being met than the similarity. real as i t often is, in the means found for doing so.

The Problem of Prediction. Eager to match the achievements of the natural sciences, social scientists have long sought to make their own research empirical, to invent the equivalent of experiments, and to meet the supreme test of prediction. Despite the notorious uncertainties, interest in predicting outcomes was increased by the desire to prove the usefulness of social science in the service of governments. Whatever the mixture of idealism, careerism, and ideology that reinforced the attention to policy-oriented social science, ideas of modernization seemed in the 1950s and '60s to provide the needed framework that would lead from past research to predictions of the future (especially in other countries). In fact many of the criticisms of "modernization theory" now in vogue are primarily cri t icisms of the policies Western government s pursued. T o blame

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"modernization theory" for those policies seem to me doubly mistaken, an exaggerated view of the independent influence of social scientists (and of the clarity of their recommendations) that, by rejecting the concept of modernization, makes it more likely that similar mistakes will be repeated by policy makers and social scientists using another set of slogans.

Instead, let us try to learn the lessons that experience can teach. First, there may be something wrong with the clusters of changes identified as modernization. They may have been loosely defined, too narrow or too broad. The issues here are essentially historical, and fruitful work is being done on them right now. Second, the concept of modernization holds that the social changes it includes are interrelated, but the framework does not really say how sectors must be related, which are dependent or independent variables or in what order changes need occur. But general concepts of modernization do not justify the leap that many a social scientist made from what he thought he had seen in the Western past to what must occur in the future elsewhere. Third, when used to compare development in different nations, modernization posits a comparability in the kinds and direction of changes that have taken place; it does not speak to the outcome except to suggest that it will in some sense to be comparable, too. The functionalism associated with ideas of modernization can be useful in suggesting functions to be performed (such as political mobilization, capital formation, division of labor, and communication), but that is not to say what institutions or groups will do these things or in what way. The concept of modernization does not, in short, predict how any particular society or culture will come to look. The effort to use ideas of modernization to predict the effects of specific policies needed ideological assumptions and misapplied abstractions.

The Problem of Abstractions. As dissatisfaction with much of the writing on modernization has grown, so have attacks on structural-functionalism itself. But the latter need not be the issue here, for the most frequent flaw in its combination with concepts of modernization is a more common error, one very likely to be preserved even after structural-functionalism has been rejected. It is the tendency, especially common when writing about something so complex as society, to benefit from misplaced concreteness, reified abstractions and unconscious synecdoche that unknowingly substitute the part for the whole. The social functions or the sectors of society whose changes we have labelled modernization are legitimate, abstract categories of our invention. When, however, specific political parties are mistaken for political mobilization, or a "free" press for communication, or automobileslper capita for technology, clear analysis is threatened. These concrete, identifiable phenomena may be useful measures of the larger category in one society and quite inappropriate for another. That does not prove that the larger category is not useful, merely that we have mistaken its purpose and contracted our vision in the process. This occurs most egregiously perhaps in efforts to establish universal, behavioral measures of "modern" attitudes or personality types. But something similar occurs with other sorts of abstractions, such as "elites" or "stages" of development. A convenient shorthand for one set of historical circumstances is transferred to another society; in calling the leaders of that society an elite or its level of productivity a stage, the initial intent was merely to permit a comparison. Instead, it is then easily assumed that the comparison has already been made, and the common terms become the conduit for a flood of assumptions that may not be appropriate to the second case at all. Instead of leading to analysis, abstractions have replaced it.

The frightening list of errors and misconceptions, of problems overlooked and issues distorted that can be found in works that use the idea of modernization is.

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however, not an argument for rejecting the concept but only about how it (and other analytic frameworks) need to be used. Those who attempt to avoid such errors while still employing the concept of modernization will at least have the advantage of building on some of the best thinkers and most valuable works of the last thirty years, of using a framework whose vocabulary bridges disciplines and invites comparisons. And they wll be relating their specific investigations to those well-recognized trends that in the last two centuries have affected all mankind.

The University of Michigan Raymond Grew

NOTE: I am indebted to Peter Stearns who invited this reappraisal of my own views ("Modernization and Its Discontents," American BehavioralScienrist, November-December, 1977. 289-312, which contains some bibliography) and to a number of colleagues who have discussed these with me, especially Geoff Eley and Louise Tilly, while still disagreeing.