IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/oxdevs/v44y2016i3p349-365.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is the West really the best? Modernisation and the psychosocial dynamics of human progress and development

Author

Listed:
  • Richard Martin Eckersley

Abstract

Scientific and political interest in measures of human progress and development is increasing, but the indicators are far from capturing all we need to know. They place Western liberal democracies at the leading edge of progress, and present them as models of development; Western nations typically occupy all but a few of the top 20 places in progress indices. However, indicators are measuring modernisation rather than optimal quality of life or well-being; modernity’s benefits are counted but its costs are underestimated. In particular, the measures do not adequately acknowledge the ‘psychosocial dynamics’ of human societies: the complex interactions and relationships between the subjective and objective worlds. Unless we pay more attention to these dynamics, we will not develop solutions which match in scale the problems they are intended to address. Indicators need to allow a transformation in our worldview and beliefs as profound as that which gave rise to modernity.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard Martin Eckersley, 2016. "Is the West really the best? Modernisation and the psychosocial dynamics of human progress and development," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(3), pages 349-365, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:oxdevs:v:44:y:2016:i:3:p:349-365
    DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bing Wang & Tianchi Chen, 2022. "Social Progress beyond GDP: A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of GDP and Twelve Alternative Indicators," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-18, May.
    2. Richard Eckersley, 2019. "Letter to the editor: Are indicators telling us the real story about progress?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 141(2), pages 919-929, January.
    3. Becky A. Black & Margaret L. Kern, 2020. "A qualitative exploration of individual differences in wellbeing for highly sensitive individuals," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-11, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:oxdevs:v:44:y:2016:i:3:p:349-365. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CODS20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.