STRUCTURE

• Introduction – A short introduction to modernization (15 words)                     
• Body – Explain factors that are responsible for the process of modernization (220 words)
• Conclusion – Mention a short conclusion  (15 words)

ANSWER

Accepting or adopting the modern style or modern ways and ideas of thinking, living, etc is ‘Modernization’.

Modernization has assumed a lot of significance particularly after the end of the Second World War, in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Industrial Revolution in England and to some extent, French Revolution in France brought Modernization to limelight. Volumes of literature written about these three concepts have contained many contradictory observations and conclusions. As a result, no single theory of modernization has been justifiably presented to explain the process of modernization for social change. The process of modernization dates back to the age of Renaissance and formation in all walks of life-like literature, science religion etc.

FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR MODERNIZATION

• A number of factors are involved in modernization i.e., education, mass communication, ideology, values and attitude, growth of knowledge and science.
• Education is the prime instrument in the creation of modern man; a study indicate that education plays a vital role in the inculcation of a sense of national loyalty and in creating attitudes and skills essentials for technological innovation.
• Development of mass communication is an important means of spreading modern attitudes.
• The media helps create knowledge of desirable things faster than these things themselves produced. Ideology also plays a significant role in changing mass behaviour and attitudes.
• Attitudinal and value changes are pre-requisites of the creation of modern society, economy and political system.
• The growth of knowledge and its application will enhance man’s control over nature. Science has provided the information needed by people to increase the strength of their own impulse to modernize.
• Thus modernization is a multi-dimensional process and the complex and interrelated series of changes in man’s way of life.
• The occidental people have been undergoing this process for last five centuries and peoples in the least developed regions of the world for less than a century. It is a part of the universal experience.
• Although modernization holds great hopes for the welfare of mankind, it has also been regarded as a destructive process in many respects.
• By destroying the traditional pattern of life, it has shattered the humane values evolved through centuries together.
• Implying considerable value changes, modernization involves the emergence of a new behavioural system having certain distinctive characteristics of its own.
• Value change is considered essential for institutional rearrangement which is absolutely necessary for modernization.
• A multiplicity of analyses of modernization provide its historical, economic and political perspectives.
• However, from the sociological angle these perspectives lack tolerance and miss certain important aspects of human context.