Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to his take-off and road to maturity stages were the infusion from out-
side (presumably the USA or its Western allies) of two factors of mod-
ern industrial success: (1) the existence of already-functioning modern
technology which can be made available by technology transfer from
benevolent outsiders and public-private partners, and (2) the existence
of international aid and technical assistance (including technical educa-
tion, and consultants) provided by the governments of developed coun-
tries and their contracted professional/technical advisers.
Another contribution from economics, this by Hirschman in his 1958
volume,
The Strategy of Economic Development
, also promoted the
take-off notion, but in his view this should lead to the encouragement
of 'growth poles' to prompt regional development, not national or over-
all societal development. In one sense, this represented a rejection of
the 'balanced growth' idealistic notions that had prevailed in the imme-
diate post-1945 period. Geographers took up this idea and their contri-
bution to this multidisciplinary mix was the mapping of so-called
modernization surfaces, in which patterns of regional development,
innovation diffusion, and metropolitan and regional nodes of develop-
ment, or growth poles, could be spatially identified.
68
Postmodernism, Post-structuralism or
Modernity Reconfigured? Geo-economic
'Development' in the Post-1980s era of
Globalization
The shortcomings of modernization theories, as abstract and ahistori-
cal depictions of developed and underdeveloped societies, appear to
have been repeated in postmodernist 'deconstructions' and sociocul-
tural critiques:
•
Postmodernism
was the earliest cultural and phenomenological
construct advocated as the contemporary successor to modernism in
art, literature and philosophy. It was also trumpeted as a
philosophically-humanistic critique of cultural change, dissemina-
tion and difference, claiming it represented:
a shift ... into the heteroglossia of inter-cultural change, as idioms, discourse
across the arts and academy and across these and other popular or mass
forms, are montaged, blended and blurred together. (Brooker, 1992: 20)
