Abstract
This Special Issue of the Chinese Journal of Sociology is devoted to six papers concerning Developmental Idealism (DI) – a broad and powerful cultural model with many interrelated dimensions. Like other cultural models, DI contains values about what is good and should be achieved, thereby providing motivation for action. DI also contains beliefs that tell people how the world works, how they can achieve the things they value, and what consequences flow from their achievements.
The DI cultural model is focused on individual and societal advancement or development. It specifies the nature of development and the good life by indicating proper and valued individual and societal goals. In this way, it provides individuals, families, communities, nations, and the world community with aspirations and motivations that guide behavior and relationships.
Developmental Idealism also tells how development occurs – that human societies develop through similar stages but at different speeds. This differential rate of development along a fairly uniform pathway means that at any one historical time, societies could be observed to exist at different levels of development, ranging from quite low to quite high. The DI cultural model has consistently placed northwest European populations and the various diasporas from this region at the top of the developmental hierarchy, the indigenous peoples of Australia, Africa, and America at the lowest levels, and other places, including China, in middle positions.
The DI cultural model also specifies the factors that produce development and the consequences of development. As such, DI specifies the appropriate methods for achieving the goals it has identified. For example, it contains beliefs that many individual and social dimensions, such as family life, economic organization, and education, are causes and consequences of development. Thus, DI indicates, for instance, that European modes of production, education, gender equality, smaller households, and individualism positively influence economic development. It also indicates that economic development induces changes toward gender equality, smaller families, later marriage, individualism, and more autonomy of young people. These DI propositions about the causes and consequences of economic development guide people’s beliefs about what they need to change for their societies to become more developed, and thus they serve as motivators for social change.
Many elements of DI can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, were found in the writings of Christian theologians, and were advocated by important European philosophers, political elites, and social scientists during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Although DI originated as a cultural model in Europe, especially in Western Europe after 1700, it has been disseminated across and within societies in nearly every part of the world through many different mechanisms. The dissemination of DI around the world has had numerous implications for social conflict and social change in many dimensions of life, including public policies, social institutions, family relationships, and individual behavior.
The six articles in this special issue focus attention on the dissemination of DI around the world, with particular emphasis on China. These papers cover a wide range of issues, including how people in different areas of the world conceptualize and use the concept of development and global international hierarchies, how the attributes of individuals and communities affect perceptions of developmental hierarchies, and how people place China in that global hierarchy. These papers also examine how people conceptualize DI beliefs concerning the consequences and causes of development and the reliability and stability of DI measurement at the individual level.
The first paper is ‘Developmental Idealism in China’ by Arland Thornton and Yu Xie. In this paper, the authors examine the intersection of DI with China. The paper discusses how DI has been widely disseminated within China and has had enormous effects on public policy and programs, on social institutions, and on the lives of individuals and their families there. This dissemination of DI to China began in the 19th century, proceeded rapidly during the first half of the 20th century, and was especially vigorous in the last half of the 20th century. The beliefs and values of DI have also been disseminated to the grassroots in China, where large numbers of Chinese citizens have assimilated them.
Paper Two is ‘The perception of global hierarchies: South Eastern European patterns in comparative perspectives’ by Attila Melegh, Tamás Kiss, Sabina Csánóová, Linda Young-DeMarco, and Arland Thornton. This paper provides a summary of the perceptions of ordinary people in Hungary and Romania concerning development and developmental hierarchies. It demonstrates that Hungarians and Romanians – like many other populations around the world – have and use the DI concepts of development and developmental hierarchies and conceptualize them very much as international elites such as the United Nations do. The paper also shows that people in these countries rate some nations higher in the developmental hierarchy than one would expect on the basis of economic performance or position on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI). China is one country that is substantially overrated relative to standard international index scores, and Russia is also overrated in this regard, although to a smaller extent than China. This paper also provides new insights concerning the criteria that people use to rate countries on development, with the economy, democracy, science and technology, and education being especially important.
The third is ‘Universal, yet local: The religious factor in Chinese Muslims’ perception of world development hierarchy’ by Qing Lai and Zheng Mu. The authors use data from Gansu Province in west-central China to show that the DI model of development and development hierarchy is widespread in this population of Chinese; people in Gansu rate countries on development very similarly to the way the United Nations rates country development. Lai and Mu also expand our understanding of people’s conceptions of development by moving below the aggregate level and showing that both Muslim and Han Chinese rate countries on development similarly to the United Nations. However, this paper also demonstrates that individual views of development are affected by religious identity, with Muslim Chinese rating Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country, considerably higher than do Han Chinese. This suggests that the Muslim religious composition of Pakistan may have caused Muslims in Gansu to have a more positive perception than non-Muslim Chinese have of Pakistan’s development. This study, thus, documents the importance of local culture and knowledge in modifying the global culture of development.
Paper Four is ‘Perceptions of developmental hierarchies in Taiwan: Conceptual, substantive, and methodological insights’ by Arland Thornton and Li-shou Yang. The authors use data from five waves of a panel study of university students in Taiwan to examine many conceptual, substantive, and methodological issues concerning the rating of countries on development. This paper demonstrates that students in Taiwan, like more general populations discussed above, have ideas of development that are very similar to those of the United Nations' HDI. Thornton and Yang also go beyond this general finding and report that average place development ratings are measured exceptionally reliably and are very stable across the college careers of these Taiwanese students. Place development ratings ascertained at the individual level are also measured reliably – in fact, as reliably as other standard survey measures ascertained in the same data collection. In addition, the individual ratings of development by Taiwanese students are very stable across the four-year college career. These findings provide strong support for the quality of these measurements.
The fifth paper is ‘Chinese and world cultural models of developmental hierarchy’ by Shawn F. Dorius. In this paper, Dorius expands the measurement of international hierarchy from a single global measure of development to multiple measures of different dimensions of world hierarchy. Dorius takes advantage of an extensive data set that was not designed with developmental idealism in mind but as an effort to ascertain people’s views of various nation brands. Respondents in numerous countries ranked other countries on several dimensions that were summarized into six indices: Immigration and Investment; Products; People; Governance; Tourism; and Culture. Dorius focused extensively on the Chinese data and shows that Chinese participants rank countries and regions similarly on each of the six indices. Furthermore, Dorius shows that rankings on each of these six dimensions correlate closely to respondent global ratings of development obtained from other studies and with the United Nations' HDI. At the same time, the Chinese respondents departed from the global developmental hierarchy in having less positive views of Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and India, and particularly positive views of Russia. Dorius also provides insights into how people outside China rank China on any of the six separate indices, showing that local idiosyncrasies can provide important perturbations of the global model.
Our sixth and final paper is ‘Evaluating the measurement reliabilities and dimensionality of Developmental Idealism measures’ by Arland Thornton, Georgina Binstock, Linda Young-DeMarco, Colter Mitchell, Kathryn M. Yount, and Yu Xie. This paper shifts the focus from people’s views of development and developmental hierarchies of countries to the beliefs that people have concerning the factors associated with development. More specifically, it investigates the measurement properties and dimensionality of empirical measures of these beliefs. The authors formulate and test multiple conceptualizations of the factor structure underlying the empirical observations and estimate levels of measurement reliability using the different conceptualizations. Cross-sectional survey data from Argentina, China, and Egypt are used. These data indicate that there are multiple dimensions of DI and when family items measuring very similar underlying constructs are available, measurement reliability is very high. These results provide evidence that these constructs of DI can be measured with a high degree of reliability.