modernization
modernization, modernization theoryThe process of becoming modern; the development of modernity. The term can be applied to the ideas of all the theorists concerned with this process. It is often used in a narrower sense to refer to theories that became popular in the early 1960s, as a consequence of the efforts by a group of development specialists in the United States to develop an alternative to the Marxist account of social development. The classic statement is Clark Kerr et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960).
In its most sophisticated variants, this modernization theory explains modernization by reference to the onset of the process that Talcott Parsons refers to as structural differentiation. This is a process which may be triggered in many different ways, but which is most likely to be initiated by changes in either technology or...
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