roles performed by individuals and to be concerned with just one of them –
as employer or employee, landlord or tenant, for example. Individuals in
modern societies are seen as involved in a multiplicity of single stranded
relationships. Specificity signifies the separateness of social relations and
their relative independence from each other. Diffuse relations combine all
aspects of the individual’s role in society and it is not possible to exclude
consideration of some of these different aspects when individuals interre-
late. Relationships are multistranded. No individual can abstract one of
those relationships and give it an independent existence.
Such variables enable us to see how far a society has changed along
different dimensions. However, each set of pattern variables represents an
analytical model to which no reality corresponds exactly.
From tradition to modernity
Building upon these theoretical foundations, modernization theorists
emphasized features of the process by which it was thought the undevel-
oped societies of the world would become modern. First, they contrasted the
characteristics of an ideal-type which was designated ‘modern’ with one
that was designated ‘traditional’. Development is then viewed as the trans-
formation of the former into the latter (Nash, 1963). Development is seen as
evolutionary, implying the bridging of a gap formed by observable differ-
ences between rich and poor countries ‘by means of an imitative process, in
which the less developed countries gradually assumed the qualities of the
industrial nation’ (Blomstrom and Hettne, 1984, p. 20).
Sociologists such as M. J. Levy (1952) and Neil Smelser (1963) described
the structures of relationships that are required in industrial society, arguing
that the patterns dominant there inevitably spill over into other areas of
life, especially the political system, where values must be compatible with
those of the economy. The importance of structural differentiation in the
social changes accompanying economic development was emphasized.
Differentiation occurs with the transition from domestic to factory produc-
tion, the replacement of family and church by the school in the education
function, and the substitution of the complex political party structure for
tribal factions.
Modernization theorists also asked what needs must be satisfied to main-
tain a social system in a healthy state. Are there general functional prereq-
uisites in society? Parsons argued that there were. The first was adaptation
so that a social system can survive in its environment. The second was goal
Modernization and Political Development 49