In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T E R F I V E Globalization and the Study of Development VERNON D. JOHNSON T HIS ESSAY DISCUSSES THE evolution of development studies in the contemporary period, which has come to be called the era of globalization . The study of development, with economics as the lead discipline, became a preoccupation of the social sciences after World War II. The postwar international setting was structured by three forces: the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as global superpowers, the collapse of the European colonial empires as a consequence of metropolitan enervation resulting from the war effort, and the emergence of a host of sovereign postcolonial countries. The United States and the Soviet Union were heirs to the Old European-based balance of power and became engaged in a global struggle for hegemony in the international state system. That strategic conflict was not only military and political but it was also ideological. It was a competition between democratic capitalism and state socialism, each of which purported to be better for the world than the other. Because dozens of new countries were emerging from colonialism, it became necessary for each side to compete for their allegiances by attempting to incorporate them into its power bloc and transfer its social system to them. The concern for bringing development to the new countries, thus, was motivated more by strategic interests than humanitarian considerations.1 Globalization can be seen as the spread of social forces and structures that link peoples around the world in ways that are beyond the control of national states and societies.2 The language of globalization has animated the imagination of policymakers and publics since the downfall of the Soviet bloc and with it, the end of the possibility for command economies and Leninist party–states. Two issues are of importance here. First, from a Western perspective, what became global after 1991 was the inexorable diffusion of market economies and democratic polities. Development, henceforth, has come to mean evolving in those economic and political directions. With economics, as usual still the driving force behind the pursuit of development, globalization has also been synonymous with the incorporation of national economies everywhere into a world-economy and the homogenization of economic structures and practices everywhere in compliance with capitalist norms of efficiency and economic growth. Second, what we have termed globalization after 1991 is only the most recent phase of forces that have been in motion since 1492 and earlier. The last fifteen years can merely be seen as the latest chapter of what began as the “expansion of Europe” after the voyages of Columbus.3 From this vantage point, American leadership in the surge toward globalization simply represents the further evolution of forces animated by World War II, when the United States picked up the mantle of leadership for liberal democratic capitalism, first to defeat the reactionary capitalism manifested by fascism, and finally to defeat state socialism during the cold war. So the industry of development studies after 1945 was emergent in a world where globalization had already been going on for centuries. Against that backdrop this chapter has several aims. It briefly discusses the major paradigms for the study of development in the West since the 1940s. In the process it offers a new typology of development paradigms, and it argues that what one finds in moving from the original paradigm to its competitors is an increasing acknowledgment of the reality that development occurs in a global context . Finally, it provides an in-depth overview of the latest of these paradigms, localglobalism, as part of an argument concerning the blind spots of mainstream political science and development studies in this period of globalization.”4 It concludes by giving some attention to the continuing relevance of scholarship under each paradigm. Three Paradigms for Development Studies According to standard treatments of the evolution of development studies, two major worldviews have dominated the field. The dominant paradigm has usually been dubbed either modernization or political development, or the liberal or mainstream paradigm; the opposing paradigm has been referred to as the paradigm of dependency or underdevelopment, or the neo-Marxian, radical, or Eastern paradigm.5 Alvin So broke with this tendency in his text Social Change and Development, in which he posited that there were three paradigms for development : modernization, dependency, and world-system theory. Whereas most treatments of development saw Wallerstein’s world-system theory as a derivative of the dependency paradigm...

Share