4.3 Social Change and Development Theories
Key Takeaways
- HBSE sub-topic E.3 carries five items and asks candidates to use development theories to analyse emerging development trends and to analyse neoliberal globalisation's impact.
- Modernisation theory explains underdevelopment as internal traditionalism and prescribes stages of growth toward an industrial model.
- Dependency theory explains underdevelopment as a product of core-periphery relations that actively produce peripheral poverty.
- World-systems analysis extends dependency into core, semi-periphery and periphery positions within a single world economy.
- Alternative, post-development and feminist development theories reject the single universal path and centre local knowledge, care work and ecological limits.
4.3 Social Change and Development Theories
Blueprint anchor. HBSE sub-topic E.3 carries 5 items: four on using development theories to critically analyse emerging development trends and one on analysing neoliberal globalisation's impact on peoples' lives within and between countries by class, race and gender.
1. Modernisation Theory
Diagnosis. Societies are underdeveloped because of internal characteristics — traditional values, fatalism, low savings, weak entrepreneurship, and pre-industrial institutions.
Prescription. Move through successive stages toward an industrial market economy: from traditional society, through preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, to high mass consumption. Import capital, technology, education and modern values.
Key claims.
- Development is a linear, universal path already travelled by industrialised states.
- The obstacle is internal; the remedy is diffusion from outside.
- Cultural change (achievement orientation, rationality) is a precondition of economic change.
Standard critique. It is ethnocentric, treating one historical trajectory as universal; it ignores colonial extraction; and it blames the poor society for its own poverty, exactly the move social work analysis rejects at the case level.
2. Dependency Theory
Diagnosis. Underdevelopment is not an original state but a produced one. The world divides into a core (industrial centres) and a periphery (raw-material and labour suppliers). Surplus flows from periphery to core through unequal exchange, profit repatriation, debt service and terms-of-trade decline.
Prescription. Reduce dependence: build domestic industry, regulate foreign capital, pursue regional cooperation, and in stronger versions, delink from the dominant circuits.
Key claims.
- The development of the core and the underdevelopment of the periphery are the same process.
- Local elites can act as intermediaries whose interests align with core capital rather than with the national majority.
- Export-oriented growth can deepen rather than reduce dependence.
Standard critique. It can understate internal class dynamics and the agency of peripheral states, and it struggles to explain the industrial rise of some formerly peripheral economies.
3. World-Systems Analysis
Extends dependency by positing a single capitalist world economy with three structural positions — core, semi-periphery and periphery — and mobility between them. The semi-periphery both exploits and is exploited, and stabilises the system politically. Applied to the Philippines, world-systems analysis frames labour export and export-processing zones as the country's characteristic insertion into the global division of labour.
4. Alternative and People-Centred Development
Diagnosis. Both modernisation and orthodox growth strategies treat people as means to output. The deficit is participation, ownership and appropriateness, not only capital.
Prescription. Development that is endogenous, participatory, needs-based, ecologically sound and self-reliant. Small-scale, appropriate technology; local knowledge; community ownership; and organisation of the poor as the driver.
This is the theoretical home of Philippine community organising, participatory action research and the developmental social welfare tradition. The vocabulary that appears in items — empowerment, self-reliance, people's organisation, conscientisation — belongs here.
5. Post-Development Critique
Diagnosis. "Development" itself is a discourse that constituted much of the world as deficient and requiring expert intervention. Its measurement systems, professions and projects reproduce that hierarchy.
Prescription. Support plural, locally defined visions of a good life rather than a single ladder; treat vernacular and indigenous knowledge as valid rather than as obstacles.
Use and limits. Valuable as a check on professional arrogance; criticised for offering weak guidance when a community demands water, schools and clinics now.
6. Feminist Development Theory
Diagnosis. Development theory and practice have treated the household as a unit and ignored unpaid care work, so gains are misattributed and burdens invisible.
Prescription. Disaggregate every measure by sex; count and redistribute care work; distinguish practical gender needs (immediate conditions — water, income, health) from strategic gender interests (position — control over resources, freedom from violence, decision-making power); move from integrating women into existing development to transforming gender relations.
This is the theoretical basis of the shift from Women in Development to Gender and Development, and of the gender-responsive planning tools used in Philippine programmes.
7. Comparative Matrix
| Theory | Cause of underdevelopment | Unit of analysis | Prescribed action | Role assigned to the poor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Modernisation | Internal traditionalism | The national society | Diffuse capital, technology, modern values | Recipients to be modernised |
| Dependency | Core-periphery surplus extraction | The international system | Reduce dependence; build domestic capacity | A class with structural interests |
| World-systems | Position in the world economy | The world system | Shift structural position; regional strategy | Labour in a global division |
| Alternative / people-centred | Exclusion from decision and ownership | The community | Organise, empower, self-reliance | Principal actors |
| Post-development | The development discourse itself | Knowledge and power | Pluralise visions of a good life | Knowledge-holders |
| Feminist | Gendered division of labour and power | Gender relations | Transform relations; address strategic interests | Agents whose work is counted |
8. Applying the Theories to Neoliberal Globalisation
The TOS explicitly asks for analysis of neoliberal globalisation's impact by social class, race and gender:
- Class. Capital mobility strengthens the bargaining position of employers relative to workers; the gains of trade concentrate in owners of capital and skilled professionals while casualised labour absorbs the volatility.
- Race and ethnicity. Global demand for low-cost labour and raw materials falls disproportionately on racialised and indigenous populations; ancestral domains sit where extractive projects are sited.
- Gender. Export manufacturing and global care chains recruit women intensively; care work is transferred down a chain from richer households to migrant women to their own left-behind relatives, and rarely redistributed to men.
9. Worked Practice Application
A province promotes a large plantation project, arguing it will bring employment and "finally modernise" upland barangays.
- Modernisation reading: uplands are backward and need capital, wage employment and market integration; the project is the remedy.
- Dependency reading: the crop is exported unprocessed under a long-term supply contract, so value added and processing profit accrue abroad while the province supplies land and labour.
- World-systems reading: the province is being deepened into a peripheral raw-material role rather than moved toward semi-peripheral processing.
- Alternative development reading: the affected communities were not organised participants; existing diversified upland farming systems and their food security value were not assessed.
- Feminist reading: hiring will concentrate on men; women's food gardens will be displaced, transferring an income source into unpaid care burden.
- Post-development reading: the label "backward" is doing the political work of justifying dispossession.
Professional output. The social worker's situational analysis names the theory implicit in the proponent's framing, supplies the alternative readings, and recommends free and prior informed consent processes, community organisation before negotiation, sex-disaggregated impact assessment, and evaluation of the existing farming system before it is replaced.
A consultant argues that an upland municipality is poor because residents are fatalistic and lack entrepreneurial values, and recommends importing capital and modern management training. Which theory is the consultant applying?
Which statement captures the central claim of dependency theory?
A water project reduces women's daily collection time but leaves decisions about water tariffs and system management entirely to male barangay officials. In feminist development terms, this project has: