What is Modernization Theory?
- Modernization theory is a sociological approach that seeks to understand the process of modernization, and the variables conducive to the development of societies.
- Modernization theory was the dominant approach to global developmental issues in the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by the search for factors that underdeveloped countries lacked, and which were presumed to cause their lack of development.
- Rostow compared develop countries with undeveloped countries to identify the differences between them. These differences were put forward as the reason for the third world’s lack of development, such as a lack of technology, a lack of capital, over-population, and a lack of entrepreneurs.
- It examines a country’s internal factors, and holds that, with external aid, traditional societies can be developed in a way similar to how many developed nations have experienced progress.
- According to modernization theory, the adoption of modern practices and the dismantling of traditional norms are vital to progress.
Origins of the Theory
Modernization theory finds its origin in the ideas of Max Weber, the German sociologist. Weber studied a traditional society, one built on subsistence agriculture, custom and kinship, as it moved toward a modern one (Mayhew, 1985; Dibua, 2006).
Weber’s approach later became the foundation for the modernization paradigm developed by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons.
Parsons translated Weber’s writings and added his own interpretation. He then built an approach meant to help poor nations overcome what he saw as the obstacles to development.
Modernization theory took shape in the late 1940s. It aimed to address third-world poverty with an explicitly non-communist solution: a capitalist model of industrialized development and Western democratic values.
In the aftermath of WWII, many Asian, African and Latin American nations, despite some prior exposure to capitalism, remained poor and largely un-industrialized. The West was alarmed. It saw fertile ground for violent revolution and Soviet-aligned communism.
The Cold War shaped the theory in three concrete ways.
- Funding: much of the field’s research ran through well-funded university centers focused on foreign-policy questions, including the Harvard project behind the six-country study discussed below (Inkeles, 1969).
- Personnel: Rostow advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and helped shape US policy toward Latin America, so his stages model circulated as government doctrine, not just scholarship.
- Framing: Rostow subtitled his book A Non-Communist Manifesto, a title that states the work’s political purpose as plainly as any critic could (Rostow, 1960).
Characteristics of Modernization Theory
The features of modernization theory are chiefly twofold:
Modernization theory makes this case in two parts. First, it explains poverty. Cultural norms in the poorer countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia were treated as the primary impediment to progress. Internal institutions, customs, governance and economic practices were held responsible before any external cause was considered.
Second, it prescribes a solution. These nations would need to adopt industrial practices such as large-scale factory production in place of small home workshops. They would also need a capitalist system in which private capital runs industry and goods are manufactured for large markets rather than individual consumption.
Examples of Modernization
- The eradication of smallpox: a coordinated vaccination campaign, backed by the USSR and the United States, eliminated a disease that had killed millions. The last case came in 1977, with eradication certified in 1980.
- The Green Revolution (Hazell, 2009): The third agricultural revolution saw the transfer of technology to impoverished regions such as India and Mexico resulting in the salvage of billions of people from starvation.
This also included the adoption of scientific farming methods as well as modern management techniques. The Green Revolution, moreover, reduced poverty, infant mortality and the emission of greenhouse gases.
- Indonesia’s breakthroughs (Prozorovskii, 2016): The 1970s saw Indonesia’s gradual transition to a modernized economy. Western assistance to President Suharto’s anti-communist new order was accompanied by the creation of industrial conglomerates.
Moreover, the dominance of intelligence agencies and the military assured political stability. It bears noting however, that Suharto’s administration was far from ideal, and Indonesia, during this stage, experienced the suppression of human rights, corruption, and nepotism.
Impediments to Development
Parsons characterized many indigenous practices, rituals and institutions as utterly hostile to progress. He attributed the paucity of social and geographical mobility in many poor nations to tribal systems and traditional kinship obligations.
Following are some of the particular cultural values which he argued were barriers to development (Parsons, 1951, 1964):
Collectivism
An emphasis on group identity over individual identity can create obligations that impede individual development. The clearest example is the expectation that children leave school early to help with family farming.
From a household’s point of view this choice is rational: a child’s labor is worth more right now than their schooling will be worth later. The trade-off is real, not imagined. In aggregate, though, it depresses the stock of human capital a country needs to industrialize.
The same logic applies whenever a successful person’s earnings are claimed by a wide circle of kin. This reduces both the incentive and the capacity to save and reinvest.
Particularism
The allocation of roles based on familial relations in many poor countries diminished opportunities available for competent and talented people.
When a government official or a CEO gives a job based on blood-kinship, ethnic identity or friendship rather than merit, the best available talent goes unused. The nation’s human capital is underutilized as a result.
Modernization theorists did not read this as ordinary corruption. They treated it as the normal operation of a particularistic value system. That is why they thought it could not be fixed by enforcement alone: the problem was cultural, not criminal.
Discrimination against women
Certain entrenched patriarchal structures in 3rd world countries often impeded the rise of women to positions of economic and political power. Additionally, the lack of educational opportunities available for women would aggravate the situation whereby, most women would be ill-equipped to assume such roles.
Consequently, nearly half of a nation’s labor force would be placed on a vicious cycle of disempowerment and underutilization.
Fatalism/Ascribed status
When an individual’s birth is construed as determining his or her ultimate station in life, upward mobility is significantly hindered.
India’s caste system for instance, categorized individuals into Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaisyas (skilled traders, merchants and minor officials), Sudras (unskilled workers), and Harijans (the untouchable outcastes).
Such division meant people stayed within their own caste. Fatalism is the belief that one’s hardship and station in life are fixed and unavoidable. It often followed: people resigned themselves to the status assigned to them and saw little point in effort or ambition.
Causes of Progress
By contrast, Parson held that certain culturally embedded Western norms accounted for the development of 1st world nations by promoting economic growth and competition (Parsons, 1951, 1964):
Universalism
This is the antithesis of particularism. Herein, individuals are judged by universal standards applicable, in principle, to everyone in society. In other words, judgments do not depend upon a subject’s relationship to the adjudicator.
In such societies, the rule of law is upheld. This predictability supports long-term stability. Environments like this are more prone to attract investments and entrepreneurs than corrupt societies characterized by nepotism.
Individualism
When individual freedom and personal responsibility are valued over collectivist norms, people are no more required to constantly live up to the expectations of their families or tribal groups.
Consequently, individuals gain the liberty to pursue educational opportunities of their choice, set up businesses, and start unconventional careers. They are no longer strictly bound to roles assigned by others, such as working on a family farm.
Meritocracy/Achieved status
In more meritocratic societies, individual effort determines success more than family connections to power. When meritocracy is genuinely practiced, the most competent and hardworking people rise to the top, improving the match between talent and position and spurring economic growth.
Real societies rarely match this ideal. Family wealth, connections and inherited advantage still shape who reaches the top, even in highly developed economies.
Rostow’s 5-Stage Model
Rostow compared developed countries with developing counties:
Stage I: Traditional Society
At this inaugural stage, traditional societies depend on rural economies built around subsistence agriculture and barter, with little access to technology or industry. Output per person stays low, and so does its ceiling: the available technology places a hard limit on how productive the economy can become.
Little surplus is generated, so little wealth exists for investment. What surplus there is tends to be consumed, or spent on status display and religious observance, rather than reinvested.
Modernization theorists added a cultural explanation on top of this: a weak work ethic and a fatalistic outlook that treats hardship as simply the unavoidable condition of life. Rostow’s own image captures the stage well. The aircraft is on the ground, engines off.
Stage II
This is a transitional stage characterized by specialization, production surpluses and the construction of infrastructure. Herein, skill development and a greater appreciation for education could be salient. This often occurs thanks to Western aid packages.
The rise of technology and science would improve the agriculture sector, and aid for infrastructure would improve highways and communications.
Moreover, many Western companies would start establishing manufacturing plants.
Stage III: Take-Off
This is the take-off stage: investment rises sharply as a share of national income, typically within two or three decades. The pace quickens fast. One or more manufacturing sectors grow rapidly and start pulling the rest of the economy along, while a supportive political and institutional framework takes hold.
The nation moves beyond subsistence, exporting manufactured goods instead of only raw materials. A domestic entrepreneurial class emerges that is willing to take real risks.
Reinvestment becomes routine rather than exceptional. Growth turns self-reinforcing. It no longer needs the outside push that started it.
This is the moment the aircraft leaves the runway. It is also the stage at which modernization theorists thought foreign aid could make the biggest difference. A modest injection of capital at the right moment could tip an economy over the threshold.
Stage IV: Drive to Maturity
This is a long period, something like the sixty years following take-off, in which modern technology spreads from the original leading sectors to the whole economy. Investment stays high. The industrial base diversifies well beyond where it started.
The economy becomes able to produce more or less whatever it chooses, not just what its existing resources happen to allow.
Dependence on imports falls as domestic capacity broadens, and skills, management and technological competence all deepen. The shift compounds over decades.
The workforce grows more urban, more literate and more highly trained. New opportunities open up, and people strive to make the most of them. The aircraft climbs steadily toward cruising altitude.
Stage V: The Age of High Mass Consumption
In the final stage, leading industries shift toward consumer durables and services. Growth broadens further. Real incomes rise to the point where large numbers of people can buy considerably more than basic necessities, and the service sector becomes dominant.
Societies at this stage face a genuine choice about what to do with their surplus. Rostow argued it could go into consumption, into welfare provision, or into projecting power abroad. This is where his economic model turns most explicitly political.
Living standards approach those of the already-industrialized nations. The aircraft is in level flight.
The Cultural and Psychological Strand
Alongside Rostow’s economic stages, a related line of work asked what a “modern” individual actually believes and does, and whether that mindset can be deliberately produced.
Hoselitz: Education as a Lever
Bert Hoselitz took Parsons’ pattern variables and applied them to economic growth. He argued that the shift from particularism to universalism, and from ascription to achievement, was a precondition for development rather than a side effect of it (Hoselitz, 1960).
His practical focus was education. Formal schooling does two things at once. It teaches the skills a modern economy needs, and it weakens a child’s exclusive attachment to the family by judging them against universal, impersonal standards.
Lerner: Media and Psychic Mobility
Daniel Lerner told a different story about how people become modern.
His survey research across Middle Eastern countries put the mass media at the centre of the picture. Exposure to newspapers, radio and film, he argued, cultivates empathy: the ability to imagine a life different from one’s own (Lerner, 1958).
This “psychic mobility” makes physical and social mobility thinkable. Alex Inkeles made a related point, stressing how media exposure spreads ideas such as democratic participation and family planning. But it was Lerner, not Inkeles, who built the empathy argument that gives this strand its name.
McClelland: The Need for Achievement
David McClelland’s work is the most psychologically explicit version of modernization theory’s internal-obstacles argument.
- Aim: to test whether the need for achievement, a drive to meet a standard of excellence for its own sake, causes national economic growth rather than merely following it (McClelland, 1961).
- Method: McClelland’s team content-analysed children’s school readers from 23 countries at two points in time, around 1925 and 1950, scoring the stories for achievement imagery, then related national scores to later economic growth.
- Results: achievement imagery in the earlier readers was linked to faster growth decades later, with motivation coming before growth rather than the reverse.
- Conclusion: achievement motivation, instilled in childhood, is a genuine cause of development, not just a consequence of it.
The design is ingenious. But the evidence is weaker than it looks. The study is ecological: nothing shows the individuals who drove growth were the ones with high achievement motivation. Children’s readers are also a very indirect proxy for the motives of a working-age population.
Inkeles and Smith: The Six-Country Study
The largest empirical study in the whole tradition was a Harvard project asking whether “individual modernity” is a real, measurable psychological pattern (Inkeles, 1969; Inkeles & Smith, 1974).
- Aim: to determine whether exposure to modernization produces a consistent set of modern attitudes and behaviours, and to identify which experiences produce it.
- Method: the team interviewed about 6,000 men across six developing countries. They sampled cultivators, traditional craftsmen and industrial workers in each country, so people at different levels of exposure to modern institutions could be compared.
- Results: the same cluster of attitudes turned up in all six countries: openness to new experience, independence from traditional authority, and active civic participation. Education was the single strongest predictor, and factory work also mattered on its own.
- Conclusion: individual modernity is a real, cross-culturally consistent pattern, produced by specific institutional experiences rather than fixed by culture, and can therefore be deliberately cultivated.
The sample was entirely male. The design was cross-sectional too, so it cannot show that schooling and factory work caused the modern attitudes, rather than simply attracting people who already had them.
Critical Evaluation
Modernization theory is now heavily criticized, and much of that criticism is well founded. Five objections carry the most weight.
- Eurocentrism: the theory treats the historical path of Western Europe and North America as the universal standard every society should follow.
- Neglect of Colonialism: it locates the causes of poverty inside poor countries, saying almost nothing about colonial history or unequal trade.
- Weak Psychological Evidence: the individual-modernity research the theory generated has serious measurement problems.
- The Aid Critique: foreign aid is said to displace local initiative, though the modern evidence on this is more mixed than either side claims.
- Cultural Imperialism and the Family: the theory’s push to change traditional family structures has been read as neocolonial.
Eurocentrism
The most persistent criticism is that the theory takes the West’s historical trajectory as the universal measure of progress. “Modern” is defined by a list of features drawn from mid-century Western societies. “Traditional” is defined simply as their absence.
This structure carries an assumption the theory never actually establishes: that other societies want to become more like the West. Its own advocates rarely examined that assumption. Judging one culture by another’s standards is a general problem, and it runs through the whole framework.
Neglect of Colonialism
Much of the criticism stems from dependency theory. It blames colonial powers, not backward customs, for the developing world’s poverty (Ahiakpor, 1985).
Dependency theorists argue that the export of raw materials from poor countries, and the import of manufactured goods from rich ones, keeps this imbalance in place. It is fair to note, though, that dependency theorists have themselves paid little attention to indigenous institutions such as caste systems and slavery.
The colonial record itself is telling. Where European settler mortality was high, colonizers built extractive rather than settler institutions. Those institutions still depress income today (Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2001).
The regions of Africa hit hardest by the slave trades remain the poorest today, even after controlling for other factors (Nunn, 2008, 2020). The theory misidentified the cause.
Weak Psychological Evidence
The strand of the theory that produced the most research also has the shakiest foundations.
Armer and Schnaiberg (1972) tested four separate “modernity” scales on the same respondents. They found only moderate agreement between the scales. Worse, the scales predicted alienation and social class about as well as they predicted each other.
That is a real problem. If a purpose-built scale for a new construct predicts alienation as well as it predicts itself, the construct is not doing independent work.
The Inkeles and Smith study adds to the doubt.
Its all-male, cross-sectional design cannot show that schooling and factory work caused modern attitudes, rather than simply attracting people who already had them.
McClelland’s work has a related problem: it cannot rule out that achievement imagery and later growth both trace back to some third factor, such as prior state capacity.
The Aid Critique
Critics of foreign aid argue that it undermines local initiative and knowledge by substituting foreign expertise and foreign money.
Galeano stresses the dehumanizing effect on local populations.
The modern evidence does not support the strongest version of this objection.
A meta-analysis of the aid-and-growth literature found that aid’s positive effect on growth holds up across different time horizons and survives tests for publication bias (Mekasha & Tarp, 2019). A separate long-run study reaches a similar conclusion (Arndt, Jones, & Tarp, 2015).
Nor does the evidence support the theory’s original confidence. The estimated effect is modest and highly variable, and it comes from data that cannot fully solve the problem that aid is not handed out at random.
Cultural Imperialism and the Family
A final criticism concerns the family.
The theory’s treatment of traditional family structures as an obstacle to development has itself been read as an instrument of cultural imperialism. The international promotion of family and population policies has drawn sustained criticism from scholars including Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School (Glendon, 1999).
This criticism is hard to answer. Modernization theory explicitly proposes changing family structure as a development goal, and does so on the authority of outside experts rather than the populations concerned.
Contemporary Research
Two questions matter most here.
Does development really change a society’s values? And does economic convergence, the prediction that poorer societies come to resemble richer ones over time, actually happen? The evidence took decades to arrive. Long time-series on incomes, values and institutions have only recently accumulated enough to test the theory’s predictions directly.
Aim: Santos, Varnum and Grossmann (2017) tested whether the rise in individualism seen in a handful of rich countries is a global pattern, and what drives it.
Method: the researchers assembled 51 years of data on individualist practices and values across 78 countries, and modeled how each country changed over time.
Results: individualism rose in most societies studied. The change was linked mainly to rising socioeconomic development. Sizeable cultural differences between countries still remained at the end of the period.
Conclusion: development reliably pushes cultures in a particular direction, but it does not make them converge on one destination.
The second question, on economic convergence, had a discouraging answer for four decades: poor countries were not catching up with rich ones. That has changed.
Aim: Kremer, Willis and You (2022) re-examined the 1990s finding that poor countries were not converging with rich ones, using 25 more years of data as a test.
Method: the authors re-estimated cross-country growth relationships over the extended period, and decomposed how far human capital, policy, institutions and culture explained the change.
Results: unconditional convergence has held since around 2000, driven by faster growth in poorer countries and slower growth at the frontier. Many of the usual correlates of growth converged too.
Conclusion: the world has entered a period of real convergence. But it began decades after modernization theory predicted, and after its own policy programme was most heavily applied.
A different question follows: does development produce democracy? Seymour Martin Lipset’s classic answer, now called the Lipset hypothesis, holds that richer nations are more likely to sustain democratic government.
Reviewing the accumulated evidence, Treisman (2020) found a strong link between higher income and both democratization and democratic survival, though mainly over ten- to twenty-year horizons. The pattern is not immediate.
Treisman proposed that development’s effect on democracy is triggered by disruptive events, such as economic crises or a change of leader, rather than acting on its own.
One large study found the opposite arrow: new democracies raise GDP per person by roughly twenty percent over the long run (Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, & Robinson, 2019).
Further Information
- Tipps, D. C. (1973). Modernization theory and the comparative study of national societies: A critical perspective. Comparative studies in society and history, 15(2), 199-226.
- Arat, Z. F. (1988). Democracy and economic development: Modernization theory revisited. Comparative Politics, 21(1), 21-36.
References
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