Back to development in the XXI century

Note from the editor: Back to development in the XXI century

Mariana Heredia
Outside the major Western nations, the word “development” is often used as a substitute or synonym for progress. Both project into the future and celebrate science and technology as an outpost of civilization, both are confident of a destiny of ever-increasing improvements for humankind. As documented by Gilbert Rist (1997), the shift in the usage of one word to the other occurred at the end of World War II and was not anodyne.

Development as a social fact

Andrew Schrank
This paper challenges both mainstream notions of development, which treat it as an objective feature of self-contained societies, and constructivist alternatives, which view it as an ethnocentric product of western imperialism. Instead, I argue that development is a social fact that’s “not always so clearly discernible,” much like the systems of “economic organization” alluded to by Durkheim in The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 57), and go on to explore the implications for economic sociology.

Anti-statist development? Growth, economic concentration, and segmented welfare in Chile

Jorge Atria
The modern capitalist revolution in Chile – the moment when the economic liberalism project was established as a stage prior to the Reagan and Thatcher governments, generating a radical break with the previous model (Gárate 2012) – immediately provoked a strong discussion on the implicit idea of development. Whether due to the profound transformation in the coordination between the state and the market, the various reforms in social areas, or the increase in economic concentration, it introduced a set of ideas on how development should be understood and, therefore, how the economy should set the standard for thinking about a better future for Chile.

Antitrust between success and failure: A sociological and ethnographic reappraisal of Brazilian competition policy

Iagê Miola and Gustavo Onto
Market concentration, alongside financialization and the climate crisis, is increasingly perceived as a major problem in contemporary capitalism. The fact that significant economic sectors are in the hands of a small number of powerful corporations – a phenomenon that is epitomized by Big Tech domination of the “digital economy” – is causing widespread concern. Excessively concentrated markets can be dysfunctional for the competitive logic that underlies them, as well as for consumers and for small and medium-sized companies, whose very survival is threatened. That in turn aggravates existing social and economic inequalities and may even undermine established democratic structures, for example through the conversion of economic power into political power.

Global connections between development and finance

Horacio Ortiz
At least since the 1980s, development policies and narratives promoted by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been shaped by the idea that development could be better achieved if economic practice and social organization more generally were articulated mainly through markets, relegating states to mere guarantors of the rules of exchange. This imaginary has given a central role to the financial sector, presented as a marketplace in which free investors are able to invest in financial assets, extending credit and monetary resources in a socially optimal way thanks to the mechanism of informational market efficiency.

Entrenched informality: How nonenforcement, fintech, and digital payments are challenging development in Latin America

Matías Dewey
In the late 1990s, José emigrated from Bolivia to Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, he found a formal job, which he lost in 2000. The following year, in 2001, José obtained 50 dollars and, using his mother’s sewing machine, began informally manufacturing children’s caps and selling them in La Salada, an informal garment-oriented marketplace located in a disadvantaged suburb of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Twenty-three years later, José is still producing and trading in this economy. He now has two production facilities, manufactures an average of 10,000 caps per month, and informally employs 16 people.

Productive planning in an unstable country: The case of Argentina (2019–2023)

Daniel Schteingart
Introduction During the period 2019–2023, Argentina was governed by a coalition of different factions of Peronism, a party that traditionally made state-led industrialization part of its narrative. In this context, there was a prioritization of the productive development and industrial policy agenda, which increased its resources compared to the previous government (2015–2019), whose orientation had been more economically liberal.

Book reviews

Paula Jarzabkowski, Konstantinos Chalkias, Eugenia Cacciatori, and Rebecca Bednarek · 2023
Disaster Insurance Reimagined: Protection in a Time of Increasing Risk
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Reviewer: Matthias Römer

Till Hilmar · 2023
Deserved: Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain
New York: Columbia University Press
Reviewer: Gabor Scheiring

Cathie Jo Martin · 2023
Education for All? Literature, Culture and Education Development in Britain and Denmark
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Reviewer: Osman Demirbağ