Understanding Third World Politics

essentially a matter of how we perceive people with whom we come into contact, whether in the family, wider social organizations ...

roles performed by individuals and to be concerned with just one of them – as employer or employee, landlord or tenant, for exam ...

attainment– the need to be organized so as to achieve collective objectives such as waging war. Thirdly, there is the function o ...

and affects the general capabilities of the system in its domestic and foreign environments’ (Almond, 1965, p. 185). If the chan ...

Once again biology provided the required insight: The problem of developing categories to compare the conversion processes of di ...

Another major contrast drawn by the functionalists between developed and developing societies was in the existence of boundaries ...

The political system was thus perceived as a legitimate set of interrelated structures for maintaining order and responding to t ...

Finally there is the concept of function, central to the needs of the com- parative analyst as perceived by the developmentalist ...

reflect the technology available as well as the type of social organization that had developed. Societies then have to transmit ...

and complexity found within modernizing societies. Whereas in a traditional absolute monarchical polity there would be found, bo ...

acquisition by a political system of some new capability and its associated changes in political culture and structure (Almond, ...

authority and the generation and distribution of wealth; and that effective gov- ernment needs to be responsive and accountable ...

associated with disturbances to the status quo. The tendency of modernization theory was to encourage the view that such reactio ...

They also contain ‘moral bases for materialistic motivations and for disci- plined and rational pursuit of wealth’. Nor are old ...

be continuity from pre-modern forms of politics in which religious and political authority and processes were undifferentiated, ...

on the part of the clergy (Ram, 1997). Fundamentalist opposition in Saudi Arabia combines Islamic and modern Western concepts su ...

Modernization may be selective, with rapid social change in one area obstructing change in others, rather than tradition being t ...

analysis are those that lead to stability and inertia through mechanisms of adjustment and social control. The structures of the ...

radical. Institutions and practices are given no inherent value, only their consequences matter. They are only preserved until t ...

a result of political independence, particularly after the Second World War (the phase of liberation from colonialism with which ...