Individual
Change in the Midst of Social
and Political
Change
Scholarly
writing about rapid political and social changes, especially in the Third
World, has had a Janus-faced quality. Some scholars focused on macro-level
topics, dealing with changes at the structural or organizational level. Much of
the research labeled political development, social and political
modernization,
economic development, and dependency was pitched at this level. Others
concentrated on the individual as the key to the direction and content of rapid
societal change. Rarely did a single work seriously attempt to join the two
levels of analysis. Frequently authors writing on one level would do little
more than acknowledge the problems and complexities on the other. More often
than not, scholars dealing with macro-level topics shrouded the subject of
individual change in implicit assumptions instead of explicit assertions. Or,
at times, they put forth ideas of individual change based on purely mechanistic
notions of
individuals as rational actors, who engage in simple costbenefit calculations.1 Those
focusing on the level of the individual likewise made simple assumptions about
complex macro-level political and social changes.
Every
theory of social and political change must have a corresponding model of
individual change: There is no social change without individual change and vice
versa. The gap between the two levels of analysis
has led to some
curious developments. Whereas the literature on macro-level change written in
the several decades after World War II has come under severe attack leading to
new approaches to the subject, the literature on individual change in the throes
of rapid social and political.
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