Measurers of Modernity

...And since the main goal of the factory is to produce goods, Inkeles and Smith argue, "any increased modernization of the work force in the factory is therefore a gain achieved by society with virtually no marginal cost...

...Out of those questions that stood together, Inkeles and Smith constructed what they called their "om Scale," an index of "overall modernity" demonstrating that modernity was not a viewpoint unique to the West, and that it existed in widely differing underdeveloped lands...

...There will always be those who maintain that important concepts are untranslatable, but although one might dismiss such objections, Inkeles and Smith were still faced with the problem of rendering their sophisticated inquiries into a language understandable by people with little or no education...

...The authors detail, often with a deadpan humor, how they went about motivating the project's field directors and making sure that the interviews were actually conducted...

...The method is to survey about a thousand men, aged 20-30, in each of these lands...

...Once the raw data was collected, the task of analysis was divided into three parts...

...Inkeles and Smith deal with this objection by showing that the degree of modernity increases with the length of factory exposure, and that recently-arrived factory workers in the sample are only slightly more modern than their village brothers...

...Would a person who valued punctuality also believe he should take the job he wanted, rather than the one his parents wanted for him...

...Would a man who felt his nation was more in need of good economic planning than help from the gods be the same man who supported women's rights...

...Where does all this take us...

...The two authors also were sensitive to claims that any such syndrome might be peculiar to the West...

...The second part of the data-analysis process was an investigation of the kinds of characteristics?e.g., education, urban residence, occupation—that were related to a high score on the om Scale...

...The core of Inkeles and Smith's conclusions seems to be that the best way to speed up psychological modernization is to speed up the objective processes of education and industrialization...

...The last and briefest part of the analysis was to ascertain whether the modern person in a developing country is, as some maintain, more unhappy, uprooted and unstable than others...

...the point, however, is that policymakers should be aware that such processes produce not only the immediately recognizable result of increased production, but also the indirect result of generating modern attitudes in those exposed to industrialization...

...Furthermore, the factory is a "great equalizer," for "men who have had the misfortune of securing little or no formal education may, in substantial degree, compensate for that deprivation as far as individual modernity is concerned through and in the course of their industrial experience...

...But the fundamental challenge to the validity of their contention, they feel, is the argument of self-selection—i.e., that people with modern inclinations choose factory work in the first place...

...We fully understand that to be modern a nation must have modern institutions, effective government, efficient production, and adequate social services...

...The subject of Becoming Modern is the modernization process in six developing nations (Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Nigeria, and Bangladesh...

...It provides models of efficacy in the form of other skilled workers and technicians...

...To find out if modernity was indeed a syndrome similar to the one they posited, the authors correlated each individual question with the set of questions as a whole...

...Translating the questionnaire was also an obstacle...

...In fact, it did turn out that the type of person who valued punctuality was the same type who believed he should take the job he wanted, although a few queries did not correlate with the group and were discarded from the study...

...They explain not only the results of their scholarly enterprise, but the processes of scholarly reasoning...

...In India, for example, the project director independently gathered information about each respondent—his age, father's occupation, etc.—to match against the data recorded on the interview forms...

...Naturally, underdeveloped countries are trying to do this anyway...

...Whether or not individuals in the six countries who held some of these values would also hold the others, enabling one to demonstrate a coherent outlook called "modernity," was at this point an open question...

...The goal is to demonstrate that a "modern man," identifiable by his attitudes toward different aspects of life, does indeed exist, and to find out what factors encourage the transformation from "traditional" to "modern.' Inkeles and Smith's project took about 10 years, involved field directors and staff in each of the six countries studied, and must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (Becoming Modern is, among other things, a monument to a bygone era of largesse towards social science research...

...The authors recognize their mammoth exercise would be relatively worthless if it contributed nothing to the emerging countries in their efforts to wrench themselves out of poverty...

...The first was to determine whether the separate attitudes hypostatized by social-scientist professors in their air-conditioned offices actually formed a coherent framework for people living in underdeveloped countries...

...This was not as easy as it sounds...

...The authors realize that this finding is likely to be controversial, both among those social scientists who regard the transition to industrialization as a source of pain and psychic dislocation, and among those psychologists who believe basic attitudes are sealed during childhood...

...The initial stage of Inkeles and Smith's endeavor was to decide theoretically which attitudes might make up "modernity...

...And, in the words of the project director: "Every interviewer was required to give sureties from two responsible persons that he would refund all the money spent on him if it was found that he had dishonestly filled in the questionnaires...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Author, "Behind the Berlin Wall," "Push Comes to Shove" This is a valuable and fascinating book—valuable because of the findings it presents, fascinating because of the way it presents them...

...These expressions simply mean that the results were genuine findings, not sampling errors...

...The reader should not let himself be scared off by the arcane statistical language, particularly "significant to the .05 level" or "significant to the .01 level" in the tables...

...The authors report that "even if it upset the local staff's sense of propriety, we insisted that they find and use the words of the common people, no matter how bizarre, ungrammatical, or even vulgar they sounded to our translators...

...They see the factory stimulating the development of modern attitudes in several ways...

...To assure that the field interviewers did not merely fill out the questionnaires themselves at some local cafe (the project director in India referred to this as the "tea-shop bias") an elaborate system of checks was developed...

...In other words, modernization can be made to reinforce itself...

...This leaves a feeling of exhilaration in anyone who believes important findings more often come from painstaking research than from epiphantic insights...

...But their most striking discovery, the one with the greatest likelihood of stirring discussion, was that factory workers tend to have higher scores on the om Scale than people in other occupations: In the developing world, the factory is a "school in modernity...

...To the surprise of nobody, the authors found that the most powerful correlate of modern attitudes was education...

...Nevertheless, we believe a change in attitudes and values to be one of the most essential preconditions for substantial and effective functioning of those modern institutions which most of the more practical programs of development hope to establish...

...The next step was to select the sample—one thousand men per country under investigation—and get them interviewed...

...And we recognize full well that there may be structural obstacles to such development stemming not only from nature, but from social, political, and economic causes as well...

...Included were a sense of personal efficacy, a sense of trust in others, a commitment to hard work and punctuality, a belief in women's rights, and so forth...

...The evidence in Becoming Modern suggests that those scoring high on the om Scale are no more inclined to display signs of emotional stress than low scorers...

...It brings together people of different customs and traditions, exposing the former villager to new ideas...

...It demonstrates man's ability, through technology and organization, to transform nature...

...Inkeles and Smith write: "We are not unaware that a modern psychology cannot alone make a nation modern...

...A significant part of the pleasure in reading the book derives from the authors' account of how one goes about carrying off such a gigantic exercise...

...To encourage a greater sense of identification with the survey, the project directors were brought to Cambridge, Massachusetts, taught to use the computers at Harvard, and promised free computer time to analyze the eventual results...