Symposium / Sociology and Development Sociology and Development: What is at Stake?

Development and modernisation processes are amid the fundamental themes, if not the constitutive ones, of classical sociological thought. In an attempt to spell out conditions, characteristics and consequences of the economic and social development of countries and contexts, scholars have conceptualised them in various ways. In the different classifications furnished by the sociological classics – from Comte and Spen-cer to Marx and Engels, from Durkheim to Weber and Simmel – development theory has been central to the theoretical construct. Development is therefore the large meta-theme from which both the basic concepts of the discipline and the analytical tools necessary for tackling contingent social problems are derived, whatever their origins. More recently, the development concept has been subjected to such strong crit-ical revision that it has even lost its traditional centrality as a discipline. On the one hand, owing specifically to its multidimensionality, it has started to split up, thereby following the process of a number of specialisations in the sociological field and re-emerging from time to time in different forms within the various subdisciplinary areas. As a result, the potential of the development concept to link different empirical research fields within a single theoretical framework has been weakened. On the oth-er hand, the criticisms expressed against the more rigidly evolutionistic and unidirec-tional versions of this concept (at times drawn even from the classics themselves) have introduced different distinctions, such as that one between development and growth or between development and progress, as well as new forms of qualification, includ-ing sustainable development, human development and territorial development