What Is Social Development?

"Economists the world over talk of development as the development of wealth, infrastructure, comforts, conveniences, technology, and resources possessed. They see land, oil, natural resources, buildings, roads, airport, education etc. as development. But these are the results of development, not development. Again, community development, national extension service, hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and liberalization are spoken of as development. These are strategies, programs and projects. They are the means to development but not development itself. A social energy helps develop. A certain will of the society releases that energy. Sometimes that energy is directed to become a social force. That direction is given by the social attitude and social goals. An organization in the society converts that force into social power. The available social skills convert that social power into the social results mentioned above. The process by which the social energy is converted into social results is a social process. It is this process that is called development. Development is a process and not a program or a policy. Will, energy, direction, force, organization, power, and skill all go to accomplish development. All together they make up the development organization which incidentally includes a part known as organization too. It is this that serves as the lynch pin for development. In a sense this developmental organization is the backbone or social structure that enables the process of development to complete itself." (MSS)

What Is The Definition Of Social Development?

Social development, or social change, is the phrase that refers to the alteration of social order within a society. It may also refer to the notion of sociocultural evolution, or social progress. This is the philosophical idea that society always moves forward by dialectical means, or evolutionary means. The phrase can also refer to a particular paradigmatic change within the socio-economic structure. Say for example, this could be a movement away from feudalism, and a movement towards capitalism. Its essentially a huge change in how society works in one area, en masse. The phrase can also be used to refer to a social revolution. A social revolution like the Communist revolution, associated with Marxism is the perfect example of this. However, other social movements that werent involved with the takeover of government include the Womens suffrage, or the Civil rights movement. You may even refer to something more recent, the Venus Project. Social change comes in these forms but is also associated with many other forces within society, including cultural change, religious influence, economic status, scientific change or even technological forces within society. Generally, social change is more involved with natural, social behaviours, social elations and social institutions, how Social development is often related to the social, emotional and personal development of an individual. This concept of social development can be defined as a combination of learning diplomacy and candour in order to interact with either an individual or a group. The social aspect of the development relates specifically to the interaction of people, dependent on the different social situations that the individual is subjected to. In contrast, the emotional side of the development relates to the understanding and the

ability to control ones emotions, which again is dependent on the situation. Both the emotional and the social side of the development relate specifically to internal and the external progression of the individual. Both the social and emotional concept of development is measured during a childs growth which is split up into different stages. At each stage the child should be demonstrating a different aspect of social development. The older the child gets the more progressed this social development should appear. Physical growth is easier to measure than emotional, so in terms of social development; growth is evaluated based on different behavioural characteristics. These behaviours will reflect the childs growth and level of understanding as they progress into adulthood. Good social development is imperative, because it is this progression of the child that will determine their social skills - allowing them to display proper reactions to specific emotional situations. The significance of this development will allow for the childs learning, relating specifically to being able to interact adequately with all types of people, whether this is family, friends or work colleagues. This development during the early stages of a childs life can have a huge impact on leading well-balanced and age-appropriate actions during the different stages of a childs existence that will lead onto to adulthood, serving to define and shape the person you are.

What is "uneven development"?

prepared by Patrick Bond (appears in P.O'Hara (Ed) (1999), The Encyclopaedia of Political Economy, London, Routledge.) A useful summary of the process of uneven development, as a necessary aspect of capitalism, comes from volume one of Marx's Capital (ch 27, paragraph 15). Here he states that a major contradiction of capitalism is the simultaneous emergence of concentrations of wealth and capital (for capitalists), on the one hand, and poverty and oppression (for workers), on the other. This "general law of capitalist accumulation", as Marx termed it, highlights capital-labor conflict, and is one way to ground a theory of uneven development. But thinking about uneven and combined development dates further back, at least to Marx's Grundrisse (1857-58), where unevenness represents the condition for a transition from one declining mode of production to another rising, more progressive mode. In general terms, then, uneven development can relate to differential growth of sectors, geographical processes, classes and regions at the global, regional, national, sub-national and local level. The differing conceptual emphases are paralleled by debate surrounding the origins and socioeconomic mechanisms of unevenness. Neil Smith (1990:ch 3) rooted the equalization and differentiation of capital -- the fundamental motions of uneven development -- in the widespread emergence of the division of labor. Ernest Mandel (1968:210) searched even further back, to "private production" among different producers within the same community; insisting that "differences of aptitude between individuals, the differences of fertility between animals or soils, innumerable accidents of human life or the cycle of nature," were responsible for uneven development in production. Political Implications. Ultimately, it is less the definitional roots of the concept, and more its political implications and contemporary intellectual applications, for which uneven development is known. Leon Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development -- established in his book Results and Prospects (1905) -- served as an analytical foundation for "permanent revolution". Given the backward state of Russian society in the early twentieth century, due to structured unevenness, both bourgeois (plus nationalist or anti-colonial) and proletarian revolutions could and must be telescoped into a seamless process, led by the working class. (See Howard and King 1989.) In more measured, less immediately political terms, the debate was revived when Marxist social science regenerated during the 1970s. Here the phenomenon of uneven and combined development in specific (peripheral or semiperipheral) settings was explained as a process of "articulations of modes of production". In these debates, the capitalist mode of production depends upon earlier modes of production for an additional "superexploitative" subsidy by virtue of reducing the costs of labor power reproduction (Wolpe 1980), even if this did not represent a

revolutionary or even transitional moment. Smith (1990:156.141) insists, however, that "it is the logic of uneven development which structures the context for this articulation", rather than the reverse. That logic entails not only the differential (or "disarticulated") production and consumption of durable goods along class lines (de Janvry 1981). It also embraces the disproportionalities (Hilferding 1910) that emerge between departments of production ~ especially between capital goods and consumer goods, and between circuits and fractions of capital (see CIRCUIT OF SOCIAL CAPITAL). For example, the rise of financial markets during periods of capitalist overproduction crisis amplify unevenness (Bond 1997:ch 1). Or as Aglietta (1976:359) remarks: "Uneven development creates artificial differences in the apparent financial results of firms, which are realized only on credit. These differences favour speculative gains on the financial market." Tendencies towards sectoral unevenness are manifest periodically in financial crisis. In spatial terms, unevenness has been associated with theories of unequal exchange and forms of core- periphery dominance. This is in part because of their grounding in progressive Third World nationalism. Such debates have had the effect of over-emphasizing interstate relations and under-emphasizing the flows of capital and social struggles that have more decisively shaped local "underdevelopment". But as David Harvey (1996:295) has argued, historical-geographical materialism entails a consideration of the process of unevenness in more general ways. The fulcrum of geographical unevenness is the differentiated return on investment that creation and/or destruction of entire built environments -- and the social structures that accompany them -- offer to different kinds of investors with different time horizons. Meanwhile, different places compete endlessly with one another to attract investment. In the process they tend to amplifying unevenness, allowing capital to play one local or regional or national class configuration off against others. Conclusion. Comprehending the uneven development of sector, space and scale is ambitious enough. But there must be, as well, future opportunities to explore systematic unevenness in spheres as diverse as the production and destruction of the environment, social reproduction, and human domination along lines of class, gender and race/ethnicity. Can the theory of uneven development move from political economy through politics and culture, all the while stressing the social damage associated with uneven capitalist development? Uneven development analysis can inform activists intent on reversing unevenness, not because -- as Smith (1990:159) points out -- "our goal is some rigidly conceived `even development'. This would make little sense. Rather, the goal is to create socially determined patterns of differentiation and equalisation which are driven not by the logic of capital but genuine social choice."