Modernization theory maps onto four perspectives of structure, culture, person, and nature

Evidence

Dealing with the heterogeneous and partially contradictory multiplicity of both processes of change and analytical perspectives is a fundamental problem for every systematic theory of modernization. Drawing on a suggestion of Hans van der Loo and Willem van Reijen, who themselves unmistakably build upon the (notoriously detemporalized) general action schema of Talcott Parsons, it seems sensible to me to distinguish between perspectives focused on social structure, on culture, on personality structure (or on the subject), and finally on society’s relationship to nature. Social formations and social developments can then be investigated under each of these four aspects in a principled way. If one places these perspectives in relation to the approaches that were reviewed in the previous section, it becomes apparent that the modernization process can be and has been culturally interpreted as rationalization, social-structurally as differentiation, with respect to the development of the predominant subjective self-understanding or personality type as individualization and in terms of the relation to nature as instrumentalization or domestication (see figure 1.1). — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 216

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Rosa’s four-fold framework for analyzing modernization processes.
• XREF: Connects to Parsonian action schema and the four modernization diagnoses (rationalization, differentiation, individualization, instrumentalization) covered in classics like Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Marx.