Stanley Arthur Hetzler - Technical Growth and Social Change

TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH
AND SOCIAL CHANGE

TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTHAND SOCIAL CHANGE
In 18 Volumes

TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH
AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Achieving Modernization

by
STANLEY A. HETZLER

First published in 1969 by
Routledge

Reprinted 1998, 2000, 2002
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1969 Stanley A. Hetzler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in The International Library of Sociology. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Technological Growth and Social Change
ISBN 0-415-17692-1
The Sociology of Work and Organization: 18 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17829-0
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

The philosophical foundations of this book began to take form while the author was a member of the faculty of the American University of Beirut. The actual development of the text began in Costa Rica, where he held joint tenure at the Tropical Science Center and the University of Costa Rica, and it was completed at Colorado State University. As may be inferred from its title and general content, it was written for a wide reading audience for social scientists and engineers, for academicians and laity, for the member of transitional society who has an interest in identifying the factors stimulating technology, and the member of the technologically advanced society who is concerned with controlling these factors. In short, it was written for anyone having an interest in the areas of technological development and social change.

The writer would like to express his appreciation to the many persons who directly or indirectly contributed to the manuscript. He would like to express his gratitude to the entire staff of the Tropical Science Center, to the steadfast administrative support of the Center's director, Dr. Robert J. Hunter, to Dr. Leslie R. Holdridge, and to Professors Charles G. Curtis and George R. Gebhart, of Beloit and Monmouth Colleges respectively, and to Seores Mario Blanco and Fernando Umaa. The painstaking effort and never failing good cheer of the three typists who helped in the early stages of preparing the manuscript were an important part of the endeavor, and in this connection my thanks go to Miss Dorothy Lankester, Seora Irma H. Prestinary de Dorsam and Senorita Mara Cecilia Rodrguez. I am particularly grateful for the loyal aid later received from Miss Karen Prosser.

The writer would like to thank all his colleagues at the Colorado State University for their aid. Those reading and criticising the manuscript were Drs. Manuel Alters-Montalvo, Samuel Schulman, Glen Dildine, and Professor Donald Crim. Special acknowledgement is made of the many ideas arising out of interchange between the author and Dr. Joseph A. Tosi, Jr., of the Tropical Science Center, and Dr. T. R. Young of Colorado State University. And finally, but most importantly, I am humbly indebted to my wife, Esther, whose many kindnesses and patient understanding made this work a much more pleasant task, and to my sociologist son, Steve Hetzler, for his excellent editorial help and criticism during the preparation of the final manuscript, and to Professor Roger Williams for his invaluable aid in assisting in getting the manuscript published.

The many books recently written on the subject of development bear testimony to its importance. The greater number of these treatises, however, although they pass muster as scholarly works, repeat upon minutiae, elaborate upon old and threadbare themes and, to the extent that their ideas have been testable, have not proven capable of setting the mechanisms of development in motion in the underdeveloped society. The failure of traditional concepts to explain a rapidly changing social world calls for a redirection of effort, for the opening of new avenues of inquiry. This book represents such an attempt.

Conventional views on development are held with tenacity and new ones are admitted only when they align with the existing thought-scheme. The Western concept of development is almost beyond dialogue. It has become a crystalline, unbendingly sacrosanct view of the world, which has given rise to its own rationalizing sciences to whose dicta all new ideas must conform. To challenge the Western approach to development, which rests unalterably upon classical economics, is to call into question the entire economic order which is commonly presumed to have grown out of that philosophy.

U.S. academicians who specialize in development make their livelihoods through teaching, writing and consulting in propagating the existing order. Theirs is a relatively closed universe of discourse in which they communicate mainly with one another and in a dialect of steadily diminishing interest to the outside world of developing nations. Indeed, if the academician-developer is to prosper professionally he has no choice but to stay sensitive to the views and wishes of government aid-granting agencies and the private foundations upon which he depends for employment and research funds. The publishing houses, along with the reviewers and others who live by their largesse, form the final shielding integument against penetration of the new. Taken altogether, the domains of U.S. academia, government and publication comprise one of the world's largest and most monolithic authorities on matters of development, and ironically, as they proffer their advisory services abroad, the home society, showing alarming developmental imbalances by race, ethnic group, social class, and by geographic region, slips into an ever-deepening slough of despondency. Nowhere is the impotence of current U.S. development theory more vividly illustrated than that society's own bailiwick. While the historical growth of U.S. production facilities has been striking, the uncertainty of our knowledge of the factors accounting for this growth has been equally obvious. The society is in the predicament of not understanding its most distinguishing feature, technological movement, and failing to understand it is unable to describe it, predict its course, control it, or to distribute its benefits more evenly. For this reason, of the many tracts that have been written on the subject of development, few are likely to survive the establishment through which they have been borne and nurtured.