Development and Social Change - Philip Mcmichael

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Résumé :
Explores development through historical narrative and examines the globalization/development paradox through in-depth case studies.

In his Fifth Edition of Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, author Philip McMichael examines the project of globalization and its instabilities (climate, energy, food, financial crises) through the lens of development and its origins in the colonial project. The book continues to help students make sense of a complex world in transition and explains how globalization became part of public discourse.

Filled with case studies, this text makes the intricacies of globalization concrete, meaningful, and clear for students and moves them away from simple social evolutionary views, encouraging them to connect social change, development policies, global inequalities and social movements. The book challenges students to see themselves as global citizens whose consumption decisions have real social and ecological implications.

Key Features:

. a world-historical perspective that situates globalization in the declining fortunes of the postwar development project, and considers current global limits and possibilities

. a political perspective that views development and globalization as discursive practices managed by historic elite groupings, as mechanisms of power and world ordering

. an ecological perspective drawing attention to the environmental consequences of development and attempts to reintegrate social life in ecological cycles

. an emphasis on resistance and social movements as actors shaping the meaning and direction of these projects, in addition to building alternatives

. a series of case studies that allow in-depth examination of development/globalization dilemmas and paradoxes to interrupt the idea of a linear process.

New to the Fifth Edition:

. developmental impacts of the rise of the BRICS

. structural adjustment and new inequalities come to the global North

. 'de-growth' philosophies

. the re-centering of agriculture in light of the food, energy and climate crises

. land-grabbing and biofuels

. green technologies and climate proofing

. transition towns and re-localization

. new democratic movements.

Biographie:
Philip McMichael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an International Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His book Settlers and The Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (Cambridge University Press, ?1984) won the 1995 Social Science History Association's Allan Sharlin Memorial Award. He has also edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (Cornell University Press, ?1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (Praeger, ?1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Emerald, ?2005), and Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, ?2010). He has served as Director of Cornell University's International Political Economy Program, as Chair of the American Sociological Association's Political Economy of the World-System Section, and President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Agriculture and Food for the International Sociological Association. And he has recently worked with the FAO, IATP and UNRISD, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, and the international peasant coalition, La V?a Campesina.

Sommaire:
Preface to the Fifth Edition
About the Author
A Timeline of Development
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Development: Theory and Reality
Part I. The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)
2. Instituting the Development Project
3. The Development Project: International Framework
4. Globalizing Developments
Part II. The Globalization Project (1980s to 2000s)
5. Instituting the Globalization Project
6. The Globalization Project in Practice
7. Global Countermovements
Part III. Millennial Reckonings (2000s-Present)
8. The Globalization Project in Crisis
9. The Sustainability Project
10. Rethinking Development
Notes
References
Glossary/Index

I like this book a great deal. It is well-organized and the author writes in a style that works well for students that are not sociology majors and perhaps are starting their undergraduate careers.