Sociology and Development: What is at Stake?

Abstract

Development and modernisation processes are amid the fundamental themes, if not the constitutive ones, of classical sociological thought. In an attempt to spell out conditions, characteristics and consequences of the economic and social development of countries and contexts, scholars have conceptualised them in various ways. In the different classifications furnished by the sociological classics – from Comte and Spencer to Marx and Engels, from Durkheim to Weber and Simmel – development theory has been central to the theoretical construct. Development is therefore the large metatheme from which both the basic concepts of the discipline and the analytical tools necessary for tackling contingent social problems are derived, whatever their origins. More recently, the development concept has been subjected to such strong critical revision that it has even lost its traditional centrality as a discipline. On the one hand, owing specifically to its multidimensionality, it has started to split up, thereby following the process of a number of specialisations in the sociological field and re-emerging from time to time in different forms within the various subdisciplinary areas. As a result, the potential of the development concept to link different empirical research fields within a single theoretical framework has been weakened. On the other hand, the criticisms expressed against the more rigidly evolutionistic and unidirectional versions of this concept (at times drawn even from the classics themselves) have introduced different distinctions, such as that one between development and growth or between development and progress, as well as new forms of qualification, including sustainable development, human development and territorial development.