ADVERTISEMENTS:
This article provides information about the decline of the paradigm in modernisation:
The modernisation approach dominated the social science domain in the West and in several parts of the developing world for a decade and developed most between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s. Towards the end of the 1960s, however, it began to lose appeal.
Image Courtesy : ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71QPAf2DPJL._SL1360_.jpg
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The gap between promise and performance of modernisation was too wide to escape attention. The absence of results generated mass apathy and anger and left the modernising elite confused. In the process, the concept of modernisation got demystified.
It was observed that the paradigm of modernisation sought to transfer technology without effecting necessary institutional changes. Imaginative and systematic efforts were to be directed towards institution building for accomplishing the highly specialised and differentiated tasks implicit in the process of modernisation. The notion of rationality, which was the cornerstone of modernisation paradigm, was itself ambiguous.
It is now recognised that rationality can be of different kinds operating at different levels and in different contexts. The explanatory power of the paradigm was limited and the guidelines for action embodied in it were somewhat obscure. It was evasive on the vital issue of the poverty of the masses, especially in the less developed countries. The formulation did not take into account the qualitative changes in the problems that humanity faces. The prospects of modernisation and development against the backdrop of the realities of the contemporary world order were not clear.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Thus the global context of modernity remained unexamined. The notion of ceaseless and limitless modernisation has been challenged powerfully from other quarters, especially by environmentalists and conservationists.
Non-renewable natural resources, on which the edifice of modernisation is built, are being rapidly depleted; and adequate, efficient and economic substitutes are not yet in sight. The consequences of environmental pollution and ecological imbalance are dangerous.