| A series of lectures given by Howard Richards at the University of Baroda, Gujarat State, India, in August and September of 1995 | Lecture 1
My only desire is to say something that will serve to relieve the unnecessary
suffering of the poor. I believe that a great part of the suffering of the
poor is caused by conceptual mistakes, which those of us who are in academic
life are responsible for and can change.
I do not want to give a brilliant lecture. I am always somewhat frightened when people say I am brilliant because I think it is a polite way of saying that they do not understand me. I do not see any point in giving a good lecture if the lecture is not understood, and I do not see any point in being understood if the ideas expressed are not true and useful, and I do not see any point in expressing true and useful ideas if nobody acts on them. Whether or not these lectures have a point will be determined later, by the actions that you and I take in the future. I will be doing conceptual work, starting with the concept of constructive development, and I will be trying to engage you join with me in this process of improving our working concepts. If the working concepts prove, later and in practice, to facilitate actions that relieve the suffering that is all around us, then these lectures will have had a point. The ideas I wish to discuss with you and thus to test have been developed in South America, mostly in Chile, in the French-speaking part of Canada, and in the United States, mostly in the midwest. It is a wonderful opportunity for me to be able to exchange ideas with you here in this very different part of the world. My thought is framed in terms of a distinction between the biological and the cultural contributions to the guidance of human conduct, and I like to think that my thoughts are not, or not entirely, a product of a particular culture, but rather are a theory of cultural action, a theory of how to adjust culture - any culture whatever - to physical function. If my ideas ring true and are useful here in India, in a setting so far away from and so different from the cultural settings in which my ideas were developed, and in a place where I am an ignorant visitor - or, rather, a visitor just knowledgeable enough to be misled and to be misleading - then my philosophy's claim to cross-cultural validity will be somewhat confirmed, or at least it will have passed a test which might have shown it to be ethnocentric. Paradoxically, however, in the light of what I have just said, and perhaps as a token displaying that in many ways today wherever we happen to be standing on the planet we are living in a global culture, the first idea I want to work with, that of "constructive development," comes from here, from India. It is a phrase I learned from Poonam Muttreja, a woman from India who spent a year as a visiting professor in our Peace and Global Studies program at Earlham College, in Indiana, USA. I have some misgivings, as I am sure Ms. Muttreja does, about using the word "development" at all, even when it is qualified by the adjective "constructive." The use of the word has been justly criticized. For example, Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru advocates ceasing to speak of "development" because the very idea implies that poor societies are backward and that they should "repeat more or less faithfully the historical experience of the developed countries in their journey towards modern society." Others find that the very concept of "development" implicitly endorses human practices that exhaust the physical resources of the planet; for example, "development" is associated with ever-greater numbers of automobiles and airplanes, which use huge quantities of irreplaceable fossil fuel. I use the word "development" in spite of its drawbacks because it is the word commonly and officially used worldwide to describe efforts to end poverty. I use the term because I want to stay in touch with the mainstream while trying to change its direction. I use it, too, because whatever else development may be about, it is about economics. Today social and educational issues are economic issues, and vice-versa. Although there may have been a time when religious and cultural values determined educational and social philosophy, I do not believe I exaggerate when I say that today the practical and effective educational and social philosophies are increasingly driven by what is taken to be economic reality; and inspired by economic theories that prescribe what is to be done about that reality. The term "development," which in turn is associated with the idea of a "development model," helps us to remember that wherever we go in our contemporary world we are never far from the pervasive influence of economics. I will support the view that, because of the basic structure of modern society, economics must be dealt with in order to deal successfully with literacy, child care, gender, race, caste, ethnic conflict, environment or other issues. I add the word "constructive" partly to cancel some of the usual meanings of "development." Similarly, some people speak of "sustainable development" when they believe that one of the main consequences of development as it is ordinarily understood is ecological ruin, which is unsustainable. Thus the qualifying adjective subtracts from as well as adds to the meaning of the noun qualified. For me "development" is only tolerable when it is transformed by a qualifying term like "sustainable" or "constructive." The word "constructive" redeems the word "development" in two ways. First, it connotes, "the social construction of reality," as in Berger and Luckmann's book with that title. Thus it reminds us that humans create and recreate multiple social worlds that are constructed, that can be deconstructed, and that - to the extent that they are nonfunctional - should be reconstructed. This connotation balances the tendency of the word "development" to suggest that history is a series of parallel one-way streets, leading every country in the world in the same direction from being an undeveloped area, through being a developing country, to being a fully developed modern nation. The word "constructive" helps to remind us that cultures create many realities, and we human beings, versatile mammals that we are, live in them. Secondly, the word "constructive" connotes what is positive and desirable, as in the binary polarity, "constructive, not destructive." Thus it implies a critical and selective attitude toward development; it implies that since there is constructive development there must also be development that is not constructive. I do not hesitate to say that constructive development requires a restructuring of the global economy. In thus introducing the word "restructuring" I add to what I have already said about "the social construction of reality" and "being constructive." I am afraid, however, that I am at the same time posing a task that appears to be far beyond our powers. I am suggesting that the global economy, the master and mother of us all, can be changed and made more cooperative, more humane, and more ecologically sustainable, by what we do in the classroom, as parents, as grassroots organizers, and as research workers. I will show you examples of constructive development at the grassroots level which are contributing to the restructuring of the global economy. I hope to be able to encourage you to persist in and to believe in the good work you are doing in your everyday world, by connecting your daily work with the global transformation that the planet earth, its air, its water, and its living forms (humanity included) need today. To thus persuade you and encourage you it will not be enough to show you facts; it is necessary that the facts be not just seen but seen as examples of constructive development contributing to the restructuring of the global economy. For this reason I need to propose to you a shift of theoretical perspective, a shift of the conceptual framework in which our activities are perceived. Or - on the other hand - I may not need to persuade you and encourage you at all, because I may be simply restating what you already believe, although perhaps from a viewpoint somewhat different from yours, since mine is derived from reflections on experience in North and South America. Either way - whether what I am doing is trying to persuade you or suggesting a way to restate what you already believe - I will talk about "structure." "Structure" is, of course, an idea already suggested in the word "constructive," which suggests making a structure, and the word "restructuring," which suggests changing a structure. Now I want to add two more ideas, which also make use of the word "structure," namely "cultural structure" and "basic structure." I am proposing a vocabulary that will make it possible to articulate this conclusion: Education for constructive development is cultural action which changes cultural structures, and in particular the basic structure of the global economy, leading toward a new basic structure that will be more cooperative, more humane, more ecologically sustainable, and which could helpfully be called, in one word, post-economic. Let me now discuss some key terms one by one. About the word "structure" itself I will only say two things, first that a structure is an ordered whole, and secondly that I do not think there is anything unusual in the way I use the term; hence if in listening to me you use your intuitions and preconceptions concerning what a "structure" is, you will probably interpret me correctly. I have written elsewhere on the concept of "structure," as have many others, and I would refer you particularly to Jean Piaget's little book, Le Structuralisme which reviews the use of the term "structure" in mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, linguistics, and other fields; and to Anthony Wilden's book System and Structure. Let me now introduce the idea of "cultural structure," which is that which education for constructive development reconstructs. "Cultural structure" is to be compared to "biological structure." As the instructions for the growth of the human body are given by DNA, a biological structure, so we can speak of instructions for human practice given by culture. Cultural instructions for conduct are sometimes called norms, or rules, values, ideals, conventions, or customs; in Greek ethikos, nomos; in Latin mores, jus; in Sanskrit sanskar, rta. A culture is to some extent and in some respects like a living organism. Like a living organism a culture tends to form ordered wholes, in which all the parts relate to one another - such as a language in which each word relates to all the other words - although cultures are generally less neatly organized than organisms, even in their ideal codes of conduct. Another respect in which a culture is to some extent like a living organism is that its parts tend to fit together and to work together. In the case of culture, the instructions which permit more-or-less coherent functioning are transmitted by education, while in the case of the organism they are transmitted mainly by DNA. In the case of the cultural animal, the human being, education (in a broad sense, not just in the sense of schooling) makes it possible for patterns of cooperative action to continue, and to improve, generation after generation. To a large extent the means by which culture guides humans are symbolic. "Cultural structures" are to a considerable extent "symbolic structures," which are able to guide behavior because humans, as they develop from birth in a normal environment, come to possess what Jean Piaget calls la fonction symbolique. Jurgen Habermas analyzes historical developments in modern society in terms of the evolution of "symbolic structures," using that phrase in a way roughly equivalent to the way I use "cultural structures." Culture is learned; biological structures grow. Natural growth is guided by processes older than culture. Human symbolic processes, culture, are a relatively recent arrival on the Earth scene. Culture is, as Clifford Geertz puts it, "the human ecological niche." Cultures have a certain relative stability, persisting from generation to generation over time. But, as a language provides a framework for composing any number of new sentences as people use the language, culture provides frameworks in which practices as well as discourses vary constantly. By continually changing behavior patterns humans survive by versatility, somewhat as the AIDS virus eludes its enemies by constant mutation. Culture is not different from nature; it is a subsystem of it. Nancy Tanner has summarized in On Becoming Human the anthropological and archaeological evidence showing how the ancient primates evolved the capacities for culture which eventually made them, and consequently us, human. As Thomas Berry puts it, humans are biologically coded to be culturally coded. Our character as cultural beings is built into our larynx and lips; into the language centers of the brain; into the hormones; into the constant social attraction which distinguishes us from animals in which estrus (mating) is seasonal; in the physiological arousal states which, when we have interpreted them through the meanings provided by our culture, we call emotions (or, following Carl Jung, "affectivity"). If you ask me to count cultural structures by individuating them, naming them, and then using numbers to calculate how many of them there are, I will be unable to comply with your request. I cannot briefly explain why this cannot be done. If you ask me whether by "cultural structure" I refer to small norms, like a recipe for soup, or to large norms like the Constitution of India or the Charter of the United Nations, the answer is: both. If you ask me whether I refer to norms followed unconsciously, as the grammar of a language is followed unconsciously by its native speakers, or to norms followed consciously, such as the rules for conducting trials written in law books and followed by judges and lawyers, then the answer is again: both. Nevertheless, I would not recommend to you the use of the concept of "cultural structure" if I did not believe that there are criteria for distinguishing what is and what is not a cultural structure. Cultural structures have three defining characteristics: (1) They are structural, and hence they are ordered wholes in which the parts relate to one another; (2) They are cultural, and hence they must be cultivated; they do not grow naturally; (3) They are normative, that is to say, they set norms according to which conduct is guided, and criticized. To introduce now the idea of "basic structure" I wish to call your attention to the practice of some anthropologists of classifying cultures according to their food supplies. Early people are called "hunters and gatherers" because they got food by hunting and gathering. Anthropologists also speak of pastoral peoples, whose food comes from keeping herds; and of fishing peoples; and of people who practice slash/and/burn agriculture, and so on. As Ruth Benedict has shown in Patterns of Culture, and as others have shown too, a people's way of obtaining the basic physical means of subsistence influences everything else the people does. We can say that of all the cultural structures that guide them, the ones that govern how they acquire the basic necessities of life constitute their basic structure. In this connection I would like to mention a long footnote in Jurgen Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests, in which Habermas demonstrates that inevitably, and even in the theoretical framework developed by Karl Marx, production relations are embedded in a set of social relations. For example, in a factory there are relationships among raw material, machines, and people doing the work, which are production relations; and these are embedded in a set of social relations, which include such things as the property rights of the owners of the machines and the contracts that govern the pay of the workers. Translated into the terminology I am recommending, Habermas shows that the basic physical processes for producing and distributing the necessities of life are always, in organized human groups, governed by cultural structures. Notice that as an abstract concept "basic structure" is neutral with respect to the question whether class, gender, race, caste, or something else is the primary form of the exploitation of some humans by others. The basic structure commonly involves the exploitation of someone; for example, among settled tribal peoples it is common for women to do all of the gardening and gathering, and most of the domestic chores, and most of the child care. By observation it can be determined that the way the men acquire the basic necessities of life is by the labor of women, and therefore gender subordination is a basic structure. Among some other peoples, observation may show the basic structure is such that a privileged class, race, or caste lives by the labor of others. Conceiving the basic structure as a cultural structure justifies the progressive school philosophy of John Dewey against critiques like those of educational pessimists like Pierre Bourdieu and Alphonse Passeron. Dewey believed that the social reform could begin in the classroom. In schools children could learn democracy and cooperation by practicing them, and the moral influence of the schools could uplift the entire society. For Bourdieu and Passeron, on the contrary, economics necessarily dominates education. In the capitalist society analyzed by Bourdieu and Passeron, schools and other educational influences shaping behavior, necessarily reproduce the elements of a regime of capitalist accumulation; workers learn to be workers; the elite learns to be elite; the system necessarily reproduces itself. But if - contrary to Bourdieu and Passeron - the rules of property and contract that govern capital accumulation are seen as cultural structures, which govern the physical processes of production in a particular kind of society, then it follows that Dewey was right after all. Culture must be cultivated, or it disappears; it is a product of education, not of biological inheritance; its structures are constructed, and they can be reconstructed, provided that the reconstruction stays within the bounds of what is physically possible. Although it may not be easy, and it may not be obvious, there must be some way that the school and other educational institutions can change society. That schools can change society, and are not completely bogged hamstrung by social structures they are powerless to do anything about, is a point that can be generalized beyond schools. In other fields too - for example in dealing with unemployment, with crime, with violence toward women, with child malnutrition, with environmental pollution - people of good will often feel that the little bit they can do is useless, because the major social structures of the society are massively pitted against them and cannot be changed. But if the basic structure is a cultural structure, then it follows that cultural action - that is, schooling and other deliberate attempts to improve culture while transmitting it - can change all social structures, even those that are basic. It follows too that we need theories and practices that deliberately focus on what we are doing to improve the basic cultural structures as we go about our every day activities as parents, community organizers, teachers, researchers, or whatever our role may be. Since we are working within a structure of interrelated parts, we find change difficult. We cannot change a part without encountering the tendency of the whole to resist change. But, for the same reason, because we are working within a structure of interrelated parts, what we do has a ripple effect that makes a difference far beyond what we can see, because our little part of the system cannot change without causing corresponding changes elsewhere. Martin Luther King Jr. called this "the interrelated structure of reality." It remains to name the basic structure of the global economy we are living in, the global economy that is at once our mother and our master; the global economy provides our daily bread - it must, because it is one single economy worldwide and from it and in its context we get everything we buy; the global economy disciplines us - it must, or at least so it appears, because the nation which does compete successfully in the global market sooner or later will be compelled to adjust to economic reality in ways that will impose hardships on many of its people. Given that the global economy is now, from the point of view of material success and physical survival, the context of our lives, the basic structure to be named - in order to understand which among our cultural structures govern the production and distribution of the necessities of life - is the basic structure of the global economy. And to do that, to name the basic structure of the economy we live in, we must take a stand with respect to the principal schools of sociology. Let me explain why this last point is true. Sociology, precisely, is the social science which studies modern institutions. Its task is to understand burgerliche Gesselschaft, the modern economic society which, although born in Europe, now imposes its characteristic legal and economic forms everywhere on the planet. The basic structure of the global economy is that of modern society writ large, of the European system expanded to become the global system. The science that studies modern society is sociology. Anthropology, on the other hand, studies mainly all the other societies. Anthony Giddens has written that there are three main sociological traditions, corresponding to three ways of thinking about modern society, and they differ essentially in giving different accounts of how modern society arose. I take Giddens' remark as a clue that identifying the basic structure of modern society is usefully thought of as an historical task, partly because history will help us to find a functional definition, one that classifies modern society by explaining how it functions. We need to look for the mechanism which produced it, which explains why it became, as Levi-Strauss puts it, "a hot society," i.e. a society that constantly changes its technologies and with its technologies its customs, as distinct from the world's many traditional societies, which Levi-Strauss contrasts with modern society as "cold," i.e. static generation after generation. Similarly, Max Weber characterized the traditional societies as governed by "conventional rationality" (Wertrationalitat), while modern society, according to Weber, is characterized by a goal-directed rationality, which implies a constant effort to achieve objectives more efficiently. What needs to be explained is how this modern "hot" or "efficiency-seeking" set of cultural structures gradually came into existence and then came to dominate and to replace one traditional society, that of medieval Europe, and from a European base expanded and eventually came to dominate all traditional societies. To identify the basic structure of the overriding social reality that humans have constructed, the global economy, is simultaneously to explain how it is that most people meet their basic physical needs on this planet at this time, and to explain how modern society arose and spread. Somewhat similarly, the problem of classifying an animal species is simultaneously a theory of the species' evolution, which explains how the species branched off from earlier forms over time. The three main schools of sociology, which see modern society differently is ways connected with different accounts of how it arose, are according to Giddens those founded by Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. It is a fourth and newer school, which draws on all three of these, that I find most persuasive, namely the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel, and the others associated with the French Annales historians. A main lesson that I draw from the massive documentary evidence they have assembled is that the mechanism for the creation of the global economy was the exchange of money for goods on a large scale. The first leading role in the expansion of the system outside Europe was played by the Portuguese, who by seeking and finding trade routes to India around Africa greatly expanded the scope of commerce. Later the Dutch established the first nation-state, the prototype of all the nation-states which constitute the membership of the United Nations today, a republic devoted essentially to commerce and integrated from the first into an international trading system. There are good reasons for saying that the set of causes which created modernity were decisively influenced by the expansion of the European international trading system, and the incorporation of all of the world into a single market. Hence by its origin, by its mechanism of evolution, as well as by its present operation, the basic structure of the global social reality we live in is exchange for money. At any given place other features will also be basic, but everywhere today exchange, at least is basic. (In the fourth lecture I will point out some good reasons why the subordination of women is also helpfully regarded as a feature of the basic structure of the global system.) I believe that today most intelligent people of good will are well enough aware of the need to transform social reality, for the sake of human happiness, and for the sake of preserving the fragile biosphere which the presently dominant cultural structures are systematically destroying. I will not dwell on the reasons why social reality needs to be restructured, but instead will dwell on how you and I in our daily lives can be educators who contribute to bringing the necessary restructuring about. Among educators I include people who work in TV and other media, parents, people who make it a point to talk to the people they sit next to on buses and airplanes, and everyone who does any of the cultural action work that is part of education broadly conceived. My next step will be to spell out some consequences of identifying the basic structure as (at least) exchange, by giving two examples, and by introducing one more concept: the concept of the post-economic.
These two examples prepare the way for the introduction of the concept of the post-economic. There are many ways to get food besides exchanging money for it. A baby gets food by crying; when it cries its mother suckles it. There are also gardening, keeping poultry, barter, charity, government food programs, catching fish, being invited to supper by a friend, and stealing, to name a few. These other ways should not be thought of as a clear choice between either operating with money or without it, but as a continuum of ways food can be obtained, in which money plays different roles, and sometimes no role. There are also many motives for repairing a bicycle besides running a shop for profit. One might, like Mahatma Gandhi, conceive of one's life as a series of opportunities for service, and one might then repair a bicycle just because somebody needs it for transportation. Or one might repair one's own bicycle, or get together with a friend and repair each other's bicycles. To speak of the post-economic is to emphasize that the options for social reconstruction offered by the characteristic ideology of modern society, economics, are too narrow. To speak of the post-economic is to be rigorously empirical in observing what motives have and have not led to socially useful activity, and to be rigorously open-minded to wait and see what patterns of motivation modified cultural structures may be able to elicit in the future. To speak of the post-economic is to recognize the possibility of a basic structure different from the one that is currently dominant, one in which exchange for money would play a smaller role in governing the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Economic theorists may protest that the terminological shift represented by choosing to speak of the post-economic is unnecessary, because they are able to theorize at a level of abstraction comprehensive enough to consider any motives that might be observed, and to consider any institutional parameters that might be discovered or imagined. Economic theory might only exclude, as Robert Heilbroner has suggested, the study of some blissful future where humans would no longer have to make choices limited by scarcity. However, even if in principle economic science could be expanded to include every possible way to mobilize resources to meet needs, and to include every possible way to adjust culture to physical function, in practice economics is so associated by its own history as a discipline with exchange for money that economic theory connotes a limited viewpoint. Further, if economics were to be defined as including all existing and possible ways to meet human needs, it would take over large parts of psychology, anthropology, sociology, educational theory, history, and others too. It is better to opt for a post-economic concept which explicitly calls for all disciplines to contribute to establishing cultural structures that will more effectively mobilize resources to meet needs. I am not blaming economists. It is not their fault that their field of study does not include the methodology of social transformation. Even now economists are able to write good plans, which cannot be implemented for non-economic reasons. If our species consisted mainly of honest, hardworking, skilled, and cooperative people, willing to make sacrifices for the common good, and if the norms of our communities were those of rational solidarity, then economic techniques already known would work, as I will point out in the second lecture. If we as educators do our part, then the economists, and also the political leaders, will be able to do theirs. The post-economic perspective is intended to encourage multi-disciplinary efforts. The prefix "post" is intended to convey an orientation toward the future. It suggests that as the year 2000 approaches we recognize that prevailing cultural structures are not adequate for inspiring constructive work, meeting needs, and living in harmony with the environment; we need to look forward to something that will come after economic society and be its successor. The future orientation of "post" also implies a selective orientation toward older practices, which prevailed before the coming of the global market economy, and which still persist. Some of them deserve to be carried forward into the future, and some of them do not. For example, some forms of household production of garments and foods isolate and restrict women; although we might call them "non-economic," we would not call them "post-economic" because we would not see a role for them in constructing a desirable future. I am proposing that we say that we are now living in economic society, and that it is - like any society - governed by a set of cultural structures. Its basic structure - the one that governs the production and distribution of the necessities of life - relies on exchange for money. I am proposing that we conceive of the post-economic perspective as a comprehensive and future-oriented framework for evaluating education for constructive development. Talking in this way ratifies emerging practices in constructive development that already exist. Around the world there are thousands of grassroots projects which mobilize resources to meet needs in a comprehensive way, using market incentives, but also using self-help and cooperation and traditional cultural forms (like the minga in Ecuador and the ashram in India) and, speaking generally, drawing on whatever resources and motives prove to be available. I am proposing that it will be helpful to conceptualize education for constructive development as it is already emerging by talking about it in such terms as "cultural structure," "basic structure," and "post economic." Let me now state two theoretical advantages of the post-economic perspective I am proposing. First, it tends to unify the social sciences. It calls for using the same framework for studying modern society that scientists use to study other societies. When archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians study an ancient human dwelling site, or a remote tribal people, they find it natural to conceive of what they are studying as a human group with a culture in interaction with an ecological context. The ecological context is the sum of the findings of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy, conceived as an integrated natural system evolving over time. The cultural structures emerge in ecological context, and they govern human life. Nevertheless, when it is modern society that is to be studied a dubious theoretical move is made. Suddenly there appears a third element, "the economy," which is neither nature nor culture. The proposal I am making accepts the position of the "historical school" of economics, widely regarded as the loser in the 19th century Methodenstreit controversy over methodology in economics, according to which economics is a science relative to certain cultural structures historically given at certain times and places. Looked at in this way, modern society is to be understood in the same way that all other societies are understood, as a special case in the series of socially constructed realities that our species has created and inhabited. It is one way culture adapts to nature. A second theoretical advantage of a post-economic perspective is that it is logically correct. In principle, it cannot be mistaken, because it is an injunction to consider all the incentives and institutional arrangements commonly considered by economics, and then to go on and to consider also all the others. However, it is not quite true that post-economics consists simply of seeing what is and doing what works. Indeed, doing what works in the short run, as in ill-advised cash-cropping and mono-culture, and in adopting new animal and plant hybrids that do not resist disease, is precisely one of the pitfalls of making decisions guided by economics, which needs to be corrected by thinking of human cultures in ecological context. Although a post-economic standpoint logically does not exclude anything, there would be little reason to choose it if it were not for the defects inherent in the economic assumptions of the standard development models. The typical economic paradigms lead to formulating policies based on the manipulation of monetary rewards, on the assumption that self-interest will produce the desired behavior; they have proven to be incomplete frameworks for research and inadequate guides to practice. A post-economic perspective is logically impeccable, but it is also a shift of emphasis. Let me close with a comment on a recent trend in research methods. Until recently the commonly accepted methods of social science research were tests, surveys, structured interviews, coding data, scaling, operational definitions of variables, calculations of statistical significance, comparisons of comparison and control groups, and the like. Increasingly in the last two decades such methods have been challenged by naturalistic observation, less structured interviews, participant observation, and case studies without research designs. I would like to suggest that dissatisfaction with orthodox methods of research stems at least in part from dissatisfaction with the orthodox purposes of research. Let us suppose that in talking about the need for a post-economic perspective, I have been restating thoughts many people have had. Suppose that many have come to believe that "development" conceived as "modernization" will not solve their problems. Suppose that they have lost interest in providing valid research results to government policy-makers, since they do not believe that government programs can solve their problems. Suppose that they also do not believe that through the growth of the world economy the private sector will rescue them. Such people might well begin to conceive of research in terms of how it can help people at the grassroots level to mobilize resources to meet needs. They may think the language of the participants in a project is more important than operationally defined terms, because the language of the participants is the medium in which the most important deliberations are conducted and the most important decisions taken. Such people may think it important to encourage certain ancient traditions and certain elements of popular religion in order, for example, to build on existing customs which provide for the care of the elderly, or for cooperative labor. Such people may find it important to understand the nuances of a community's perceptions of its own norms, in order to be able to make constructive contributions to encourage norms that should be encouraged and to changing norms that should be changed. For these reasons they may think that a good study is one that interprets the symbols and sentiments of the people. They may find that the most important audience of a study is the participants themselves, and that a participatory self-evaluation process, for example, would contribute more to constructive development than test scores comparing a treatment group with a control group. Thus it may be the case that recent trends toward more culturally meaningful research reflect a parallel trend in who uses research for what. These different uses of research may, in turn, reflect emerging new ways of thinking about how to restructure social reality.
Notes and ReferencesThe quotation from Gustavo Gutierrez is from his A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1973, pp. 22-37. In spite of my unwillingness to give up the term "development," I am generally sympathetic with the reasons Gutierrez and others give for ceasing to use the term, or for using the term negatively, to name a destructive process. Some of the others are: Thierry G. Verhelst, No Life Without Roots: Culture and Development. London, UK: Zed Books Ltd., 1987, pp. 52-57. Rosemary E. Galli et al. (eds.). Rethinking the Third World. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1992. "Development theory - whether in the guise of development economics, sociology, or comparative politics - categorizes social groups in the Third World according to their capacity and willingness to rationalize their economic and social behavior along Western lines." (Galli et al (eds.) p. 2). Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics. Newbury Park CA: Sage Publications, 1993. Anthony de Souza and Philip W. Parker, The Underdevelopment and Modernization of the Third World. Washington DC: Association of American Geographers, 1974. These authors suggest that the word "development" is misleading insofar as it suggests that some countries are "developing" and others have "developed" and no longer need development. See generally, Jacques Freyssinet, Le Concept de Sous-Developpement. Paris: Mouton, 1966. It should be emphasized that the point of the refusal to use the word "development" by Gutierrez and others is to deny that the poor countries should "repeat more or less faithfully the historical experience of the developed countries." This is not simply a plea in defense of cultural diversity. The more important point is that a gruesome process of capital accumulation, as experienced in England's industrializaton or in the Soviet Union under Stalin, is not a prerequisite to improving the lives of the people. The critics of the word "development" have been misunderstood by Peter Berger, who expresses the greatest sympathy for those who must suffer the "social costs" of development, but contends nevertheless that it is an inescapable and tragic fact that the poor of a nation must suffer for several generations while either capitalists or socialist planners accumulate the capital necessary to install modern industry in the nation. See Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Gutierrez and others assert that the suffering of the poor is not caused as much by lack of capital accumulation in their nations as by their powerlessness, and for this reason prefers to name what they need as "liberation." Cf. Tony Beck: "In West Bengal and no doubt in India generally, exploitative and oppressive village social structure is the main cause of poverty." Tony Beck, "Survival Strategies and Power Amongst the Poorest in a West Bengal Village," IDS Bulletin (published by the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex), vol. 20, no. 2 (1989), pp. 23-33. Lappe and Collins find that in every country in the world there are sufficient resources to meet needs, and that it is lack of democratic control of resources, not lack of capital accumulation, that keeps the poor hungry. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977. Buckminster Fuller has shown that a "design revolution" could install technology everywhere in the world that would meet people's needs with existing resources, without any antecedent need for a painful process of capital accumulation. Fuller, R. Buckminster, Critical Path. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. Fuller there wrote, "Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to 'make it' economically on this planet and in the universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution." The adoption of appropriate technologies, alternative food sources, and scientifically valid public health measures can produce major improvements with little or no capital accumulation. See M. Carr, Appropriate Technology for African Women. New York: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 1978; N. W. Pirie. Food Protein Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975; Leaf Protein and its By-Products in Human and Animal Nutrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. Much more can be said about alternative paths to human welfare; the main point here is that Gutierrez is right to criticize the term "development" because it tends to logically foreclose all paths but two: capitalist accumulation or socialist accumulation. Denis Goulet has written an extensive series of books and articles in which he holds that the word "development" should be used, but only as a "hinge" to promote an "authentic development" based on normative values. In a sense these lectures are a contribution to Goulet's philosophy, because they are about how to make operational a "creative incrementalism" that builds steps toward structural change and a culture of solidarity into every development project. In another sense these lectures try to cope with economic issues I find that Goulet and many liberation theologians cannot cope with effectively, because they are too grounded in a liberal ethics that shares too many premises with liberal economics. See e.g. Denis Goulet, Mexico: Development Strategies for the Future. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983; "`Development' ...or Liberation?" International Development Review vol. 13, no. 3 (September, 1971). For a critical review of attempts to rescue the word "development" by qualifying it as "sustainable development," see S. Lele, "Sustainable Development: A Critical Review," World Development, volume 19 (1991), pp. 607-621. See generally the International Journal of Sustainable Development. On the other hand, the term "development" is often given a positive and constructive meaning. For example, "`Development' is taken here to mean the general improvement in human living conditions, including access to more consumption goods, better health care, greater job security, and better working hours and conditions." Clive Hamilton, "Can the Rest of Asia Emulate the NICs?" The Third World Quarterly, volume 87 (1987), pp. 1225-1256. "Development" has generally been associated with finding ways to mobilize and put to use the energies of the unemployed and underemployed. See Amartya Sen, "Development: Which Way Now?," Economic Journal. vol. 93 (December 1983), pp. 745-62. "Development" has as a connotation creating "linkages" and "complementarities" so that a major social investment is not just an isolated event, but part of a related series which opens up new possibilities and opportunities. See A. O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. "Development" has been associated with policies that make efforts to redistribute wealth in order to increase the purchasing power of consumers. See Lance Taylor, Varieties of Stabilization Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. A wise development policy has been said to include the principle of "shared growth," so that whatever benefits accrue to a nation are shared even with the poorest of its people. See John Page et al, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Part of the purpose of the grassroots empowerment of the poor that I am advocating is to create a cultural and political environment favorable for "sharing" (and for "growth" too if "growth" is defined as Joan Robinson proposed to define it, i.e. in such a way that nothing undesirable counts as "growth"). The widespread use of the term "development" today stems from Josef Schumpeter's use of it to distinguish structural economic change, which was "development," and which required deliberate collective action, from the normal successful operation of a market economy, which leads merely to "growth." See Josef Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934. Similarly Hirschman wrote of "development" as "punctuated disequilibria," i.e. as transitions from one structure to another. Apart from my general sympathy with its positive connotations, another reason I keep the word "development" is that I do not agree with people who criticize the social science tradition called "development economics" on the ground that it would be better to trust the fate of the species to the free market. Thus Deepak Lal writes, the "...dirigisme to which numerous development economists have lent intellectual support has led to policy-induced distortions that are more serious than, and indeed compound, the supposed distortions of the market economy they were designed to cure. It is these lessons from accumulated experience over the last three decades that have undermined development economics, so that its demise may now be conducive to the health of both the economics and economies of developing countries." Deepak Lal, "The Misconceptions of `Development Economics,' Finance and Development. No. 22 (June 1985), pp. 10-13. People like Lal are quite right to correct a naive confidence in the competence of the state. They are right to say that when government subsidies become a way of life, there is likely to be a lot of "directly unproductive profit-seeking" (DUP) because people will find it to their economic interest to do such things as lobbying for political favor, bribing officials, and the like. See P. T. Bauer, Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in the Economics of Development. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984; Bhagwati, Jagdish N., "Directly Unproductive Profit-Seeking (DUP) Activities," Journal of Political Economy. vol. 90 (1982), pp. 988-1002; Pranab K. Pardahn, The Political Economy of Development in India. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. But what these arguments show is that a development policy that tempts self-interested individuals to maximize their profits by buying political influence is not the answer; they do not show that the free market is the answer. Some authors move to rescue the old interventionist "development" tradition from critics like Lal, by criticizing the neoclassical market-oriented "new development economics" for being too theoretical. They propose a more thoroughly empirical study of the facts of each country's historical experience. They suggest that the historical facts refute neoclassical economics because deliberate collective action to instigate "development" has more often than not been essential to getting economic growth underway. See Helen Shapiro and Lance Taylor, "The State and Industrial Strategy," World Development, vol. 18 (1990), pp. 861-78. Such authors are empirically justified in showing that neoclassical theory can only be made to fit the facts by embroidering it beyond recognition. But they do not offer an alternative theory. I am seeking to show that a philosophy of cultural action provides a better social theory than any form of economics - one that is more comprehensive, better philosophically grounded, more uplifting, and more realistic. Part of my theoretical apparatus is the word "structure." One theme I want to endorse among the many that have gone under the name "structuralism" is that "structure" has often been wisely invoked to combat the atomistic tendency to reduce wholes to their parts. Thus "structuralist" psychologists look for gestalten and schemas; structuralist mathematicians look for isomorphisms; "structuralist" linguists and anthropologists look for transformation rules linking deep to surface structure, and study synchronously functioning unified language systems. I am particularly concerned to see development as decisively influenced by the structure of exchange relations which characterizes the global economy, and in this respect I read Immanuel Wallerstein as a "structuralist," insofar as he speaks of a "modern world system." See Piaget, Jean, Structuralism. New York: Basic Books, 1970; Wilden, Anthony, System and Structure. London: Tavistock Publications, 1972; Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963; Chomsky, Noam, Structural Linguistics. New York: Plenum Press, 1975. Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1976; Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy. New York: Academic Press, 1980; The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World Economy, 1730s-1840s. San Diego, California: Academic Press, 1989. Wallerstein's views are broadly similar to those of the French Annales historians, notably Fernand Braudel; see Braudel's Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1973; Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; Civilization and Capitalism from the 15th to the 18th Century. London: Collins, 1981. I have tried to explain what I do and do not mean by "structure" is Richards, Howard, Letters from Quebec. San Francisco and London: International Scholars Press, 1994. My thinking about "cultural structures" has been influenced by, among others, Jean Piaget, Jean-Marie Debunne ("regulations hermeneutiques") ; Victor Turner's anthropology; Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959; Nancy Tanner, On Becoming Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 ("practical understanding," "symbolic structure"); Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. The reference to Bourdieu and Passeron is to Pierre Bourdieu and Alphonse Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. London, Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1990. It is in insisting that the structures analyzed by Bourdieu and Passeron are themselves cultural structures that can be reconstructed that I agree with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: a Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966. The recent trends toward more culturally meaningful research are reflected in what are sometimes called "qualitative" or "naturalistic" studies of development projects; for example: E. Guba and Y. Lincoln, "The Countenances of Fourth Generation Evaluation: Description, Judgment and Negotiation," in D. Palumbo (ed.), The Politics of Program Evaluation. Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1987; M. Bamberger, "The Politics of Evaluation in Developing Countries," Evaluation and Program Planning, vol. 14 (1991), pp. 325-339; J. Van Sant, "Qualitative Analysis in Development Evaluations," Evaluation Review, vol. 13 (1989), pp. 257-272.
Education for Constructive Development
Evaluation for Constructive Development
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