Cover: Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries, from Harvard University PressCover: Becoming Modern in E-DITION

Becoming Modern

Individual Change in Six Developing Countries

Product Details

E-DITION

$65.00 • £54.95 • €60.00

ISBN 9780674499348

Publication Date: 01/01/1974

437 pages

World

Available from De Gruyter »

Media Requests:

Related Subjects

Harvard University Press has partnered with De Gruyter to make available for sale worldwide virtually all in-copyright HUP books that had become unavailable since their original publication. The 2,800 titles in the “e-ditions” program can be purchased individually as PDF eBooks or as hardcover reprint (“print-on-demand”) editions via the “Available from De Gruyter” link above. They are also available to institutions in ten separate subject-area packages that reflect the entire spectrum of the Press’s catalog. More about the E-ditions Program »

Becoming modern, the battle lost by so many developing countries in the sixties, requires modern men to run the technical and political institutions of the modern nation stale. Yet modern men are often scarce in the countries that need them most. Alex Inkeles and his colleagues set about to identify the process whereby people shift from the traditionalism that restrains progress to the individualism that will help their state “move into the twentieth century.” Becoming Modern is based on an extraordinary sample—almost 6,000 men In Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Nigeria, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Many of its results are striking; they are all clearly presented and argued. The interpretation is controversial and the work is guaranteed to have a big impact. Inkeles and David Smith explain what they mean by modern man and how this concept was converted into a research tool—a complex methodological excursion into the construction of an attitude–value–behavior scale. The authors were committed to specifying and testing a set of qualities that would define the modern man, and they find that psychological modernity is a distinct syndrome— complex, multifaceted, and multidimensional.

Recent News

Black lives matter. Black voices matter. A statement from HUP »

From Our Blog

Jacket: Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, by Peter Wilson, from Harvard University Press

A Lesson in German Military History with Peter Wilson

In his landmark book Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, acclaimed historian Peter H. Wilson offers a masterful reappraisal of German militarism and warfighting over the last five centuries, leading to the rise of Prussia and the world wars. Below, Wilson answers our questions about this complex history,