Book review: Rethinking social development: Theory, research & practice. By David Booth (ed.). (Harlow, Longman, 1994, pp. 319, £19.99 p/b.)
✍ Scribed by Yi Feng
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 181 KB
- Volume
- 8
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-1748
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This is a timely, intelligent, and pioneering project in an old field. The contributors to this volume of essays are intellectually ambitious. Theoretically, they try to bypass the Marxist view (e.g. dependency, world systems, classical Marxism, mode of production) which has been proven theoretically unsophisticated and empirically deficient since the mid-1980s; instead, they offer three alternative approaches as theoretical guidance for research in development sociology: structural, actor-oriented and post-Marxist. The book starts with an overview by Booth of social development as a field. It lays out the impasses of Marxism in research and emphasizes interaction between action and structural context. His argument is both an extension and reassertion of his 1985 World Development article which has been considered one of the turning points in scholarship in development sociology. Booth's command of the literature and his authoritative commentary on the metatheoretical shortcomings of Marxism are impressive.