Sociological Forum, VoL 4, No. 4, 1989

Preface Aiejandro Portes and A. Douglas Kincaid The articles in this issue of Sociological F o r u m constitute an attempt to infuse the field of sociology of development with a series of innovative statements grounded in sociological research and bearing on issues of current relevance for the social actors caught up in developmental struggles and dilemmas. In this sense, the collection represents a partial research agenda for the new decade, certainly not comprehensive in its scope, but exemplary of the types of approach and analysis that we believe best suited to the exigencies of present development trends. Readers will judge for themselves the extent to which the collection is successful in that objective. As with other broad and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, it is difficult to establish precise boundaries around the sociology of development. In devising a set of themes, we quickly became aware that there would be inevitable omissions, given the range of matters to which sociologists have addressed themselves under the general rubric of development. Our ultimate choices reflect certain criteria that deserve to be made explicit here. In the first place, we sought to focus on themes that we judged to possess major significance for contemporary development processes. This selection stems from concern over the relative paucity of sociological specialists working in the field of development studies, and our conviction that if sociology is to gain broader legitimacy in this area, its practitioners must tackle issues that make a difference to the populations, groups, and individuals in their field of view. While valuable insights have been generated in a recent wave of comparative historical studies-for example, with regard to the rise of capitalism in Europe and the United States--urgent challenges to the sociology of development lie in the complexity of contemporary processes affecting the bulk of the world's population. If such a focus is likely to produce some erroneous diagnoses and predictions at first, this seems preferable to a continuing disregard for such issues. Second, perusal of the table of contents will reveal that our selection has been strongly weighted toward economic matters. This is by no means 475 0884-8971/89/t200-0475506.00/0

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intended as a statement of the primacy of an economistic approach to development. Rather it follows from the preceding point concerning contemporary relevance, for in our view the ongoing restructuring of global economic relations constitutes perhaps the most far-reaching of present trends, both across and within individual societies. In any case it will be noted that our contributors generally attribute considerable significance to noneconomic variables in their explanations. A third factor in our selection has been to delimit the field as the sociology of national development. Thus, for example, we have not included any works that take the world system as the fundamental unit of analysis. The relationship between these approaches is discussed below in our own article. At the same time, the systemic character of the world economy is increasingly taken for granted in the field of development studies, and it features prominently as a contextual variable in nearly all of the contributions to this volume. With these criteria in mind, we set about assembling a group of specialists to develop selected themes. Independent of our intentions, although perhaps not of our choice of authors, these essays possess certain traits in common. They do not seek to test macrosocial theories of development, such as modernization or dependency theory, but instead make use of research findings to explain distinctive patterns of development. They share a methodological preference for the approach that Evans and Stephens (1988), in their own overview of the sociology of development, have labeled the "new comparative political economy." As such, they tend to rely on comparative historical analyses of small numbers of cases instead of single case studies or large quantitative comparisons. Some of the resulting juxtapositions below-Zaire and Japan, the Canadian Rockies and the Brazilian Amazon, Hungary and Latin America- may seem far-fetched until the theoretical logic of the comparison is made clear. Our own essay does not attempt to summarize or synthesize the other articles. Instead, it seeks to delineate some of the principal concerns that guided the initial design of the volume, in the form of intellectual and empirical challenges to the viability of a sociology of national development. Subsequently, based in part on our reading of the other contributions, it also attempts to describe broad processes of social change underlying the more specific issues mapped out by the other authors. A number of acknowledgments are called for. Material support for this project was provided by the Department of Sociology at The Johns Hopkins University and Florida International University's Latin American and Caribbean Center and Department of Sociology and Anthropology. We are especially grateful to Sociological Forum for the invitation to us and for unwavering support during the lengthy period in which this issue was

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assembled. Finally, we wish to express our appreciation to all authors for their creative intellectual efforts, as well as their spirit o f compromise when the editorial scissors were unsheathed. None of the above-mentioned individuals or institutions is responsible for the views expressed in this preface or the following article, which are exclusively our own.

REFERENCE Evans, Peter B. and John D. Stephens

1988 "Developmentand the world economy." In N. J. Smelser (ed.), Handbook of Sociology:739-773. NewburyPark, CA: Sage.