Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 5th Edition (Sociology for a New Century)

Explores development through historical narrative and examines the globalization/development paradox through in-depth case studies.

In his Fifth Edition of Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, author Philip McMichael examines the project of globalization and its instabilities (climate, energy, food, financial crises) through the lens of development and its origins in the colonial project. The book continues to help students make sense of a complex world in transition and explains how globalization became part of public discourse.

Filled with case studies, this text makes the intricacies of globalization concrete, meaningful, and clear for students and moves them away from simple social evolutionary views, encouraging them to connect social change, development policies, global inequalities and social movements. The book challenges students to see themselves as global citizens whose consumption decisions have real social and ecological implications.

Key Features:

• a world-historical perspective that situates globalization in the declining fortunes of the postwar development project, and considers current global limits and possibilities

• a political perspective that views development and globalization as discursive practices managed by historic elite groupings, as mechanisms of power and world ordering

• an ecological perspective drawing attention to the environmental consequences of development and attempts to reintegrate social life in ecological cycles

• an emphasis on resistance and social movements as actors shaping the meaning and direction of these projects, in addition to building alternatives

• a series of case studies that allow in-depth examination of development/globalization dilemmas and paradoxes to interrupt the idea of a linear process.

New to the Fifth Edition:

• developmental impacts of the rise of the BRICS

• structural adjustment and new inequalities come to the global North

• ′de-growth′ philosophies

• the re-centering of agriculture in light of the food, energy and climate crises

• land-grabbing and biofuels

• green technologies and climate proofing

• transition towns and re-localization

• new democratic movements.

Philip McMichael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, completing undergraduate degrees in economics and in political science at the University of Adelaide. After traveling in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and doing community work in Papua New Guinea, he pursued his doctorate in sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has taught at the University of New England (New South Wales), Swarthmore College, and the University of Georgia, and he is presently Emeritus Professor of Global Development at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. Other appointments include Visiting Senior Research Scholar in International Development at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College) and Visiting Scholar, School of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Queensland.

His book Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (1984) won the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial Award in 1985. In addition to authoring Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), McMichael edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (2005) with Frederick H. Buttel, Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010), The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change (2011) with Jun Borras and Ian Scoones, and Finance or Food? The Role of Cultures, Values and Ethics in Land Use Negotiations, with Hilde Bjørkhaug and Bruce Muirhead (2020).

He has served twice as chair of his department, as director of Cornell University’s International Political Economy Program, as chair of the American Sociological Association’s Political Economy of the World-System Section, as president of the Research Committee on Agriculture and Food for the International Sociological Association. He is also an active member of the International Studies Association. He has also worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Civil Society Mechanism of the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the international peasant coalition Via Campesina, and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty.