COMMERCIALIZATION AND COMMODITIZATION: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN PERSPECTIVES

COMMERCIALIZATION AND COMMODITIZA- TION: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN PERSPECTIVES PETER VANDERGEEST.

INTRODUCTION

The question of the dynamics and effects of integration into market relations is an old one in the discipline of sociology. In the field of development sociology, the ‘commercialization of agriculture’ school in the 1960s and the ‘commoditization of production’ school of the 1970s and 1980s both address this question with respect to the Third World peasantry. The first school is based in ‘modernization’ theory and draws on Parsonian evolutionary theory, Anglo-Weberian and Durkheimian sociology and neoclassical economics, while the second emerged from the Marxist critique of the modernization theory and of capitalist development. In this paper I review the literatures on commercialization on one hand and commoditization on the other.

Writers in different ‘schools’ of sociology are often unfamiliar with one another’s work even where the problematic is similar - a tendency encour- aged by the diverse and conflict-ridden classical heritage of the discipline. This is also true for the case of the commercialization and commoditization literatures. At present, however, a dialogue has emerged between the neo-Marxist and an emergent neo-Weberian tradition in the discipline of the sociology. The dialogue is in part a response to the impasse created by the crisis in neo-Marxist sociology, a crisis which has been extended to neo-Marxist sociology of development (Booth 1985)’ The purpose of the paper is to extend this dialogue to the field of the sociology of rural development, and consider what aspects of the two literatures may be reconstituted into a contemporary theory of the sociology of rural development which avoids the extremes of hopeless structuralism on one hand, and conservative voluntarism on the other, and which aims first of all at getting history right. Particular attention is given to a critique of the commoditization tradition working from the assumption that this tradition has something to learn from a look backward to the commercialization literature.

I shall argue that the commercialization literature, developed in a cold war context to legitimate and theorize an ongoing intervention in the newly independent Third World, was ideally suited for application, but failed to get its history right. It therefore by and large failed as well in

* Department of Rural Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. U.S.A.

Sociologia Ruralis 1988. Vol. XXVIII-1

8

achieving an unachievable program. The commoditization literature developed out of a critique of capitalism and of history as written by commercialization writers, and failed in at least three senses. First, its history was distorted in many cases by the reaction to modernization and liberal social theory more generally. Second, in line with the Marxist tradition, it was susceptible to the problem of the reification of its theoretical categories, that is, reification of ideal types. This has led to a number of irresolvable disputes and debates. Finally, as a critique it failed to allow for a program of practice which might have led to a self-correcting dialectic of theory and practice.

In the following two sections I shall describe the two literatures and their debates and assumptions. In a final section I shall evaluate the two literatures and present the outlines of a new approach to the study of the issues raised by these perspectives.

COMMERCIALIZATION OF AGRICULTURE

The ‘commercialization of agriculture’ school emerged from the post- war modernization school, which provided the theoretical underpinning of the Third World development effort. The cold war and competition for global hegemony following the Second World War stimulated first the ‘reconstruction’ of Europe to counter a surging communist movement there and, thereafter, following decolonialization, ‘development’ of the Third World to counter the specter of self-determination accompanied by poverty, political unrest, and radical anti-capitalist ideologies.

Two key phrases describing the commercialization of agriculture effort are the titles of two of the major books of the era: Getting Agriculture Moving by Arthur T. Mosher (1966a) and Transforming Traditional Agriculture by Theodore W. Schultz (1964). According to this school, peasants engage in a static traditional agriculture, using unproductive and poor methods of farming evolved over centuries. ‘The man who farms as his forefathers did cannot produce much food no matter how rich the land or how hard he works’, begins Schultz’s (1964:3) book. The problem was to modernize peasants by the introduction of modern technology and the commercialization of agriculture: ‘The farmer who has access to and knows how to use what science knows about soils, plants, animals, and machines can produce an abundance of food though the land be poor. Nor need he work nearly so hard and long’, continues Schultz (1964:3). These were unquestioned assumptions. The reasons, however, for the resistance and persistence of traditional agriculture became the locus of considerable debate between the sociologists and anthropologists on one hand, and economists on the other.

9

The Sociologists (and Anthropologists)

Sociologists emphasized culture as the defining feature of traditional societies - a culture that was the equilibrium outcome of generations of subsistence production. Parsons’ grand theory provided the raw material: his pattern variables and theory of change as disturbed functional equilib- ria were deconstructed and reconstituted into a traditional-modern continuum by Hoselitz (Hoselitz 1960, see also Taylor 1979). One set of pattern variables - combining particularism, diffuseness, ascription, and self-orientation - were held to characterize traditional societies, and the other - universalism, functional specificity, achievement orientation, and collectivity orientation - modern society (Taylor 1979:34). The Weberian concept of rationality as a means-ends orientation encompassed the list of modern attributes. Over the course of time, modernization increasingly became viewed as a process of economic rationalization?

These pattern variables and similar characterizations became the basis of a characterization of a specifically peasant or traditional culture - a culture understood as a social system in functional equilibrium in the Parsonian sense. George M. Foster and Everett M. Rogers were especially influential in furthering the theory of peasant culture. Rogers, for example, writes that:

Central elements in this subculture of peasantry are: (1) mutual distrust in in- terpersonal relations; (2) perceived limited good; (3) dependence on and hostility toward government authority; (4) familism; (5) lack of innovativeness; (6) fatalism; (7) limited aspiration; (8) lack of deferred gratification; (9) limited view of the world; (10) low empathy (Rogers, 1969:25).

Foster explained that the peasant economy is essentially non-productive because peasants view the productive pie as constant. Thus any individual who gets ahead is seen by members of the community as doing so at the expense of others and will therefore be subjected to sanctions (Foster,

Not all the culture-based views of traditional societies were as openly prejudicial and essential is ti^,^ but Rogers and Foster set the tone for an implicitly negative characterization of peasants, contrasted to positive characterization of modernization and development. The key for breaking down and modernizing traditional peasant culture was commercialization. Parsons (1964) in his later evolutionary work described the market as a universalizing influence in the sense that it allows for efficient mobilization of resources. The operation of the market emancipates resources from ‘such ascriptive bonds as demands to give kinship expecta- tions priority, to be loyal in highly specific senses to certain political groups, or to submit the details of daily life to the specific imperatives of religious sects’. Both the bureaucracy and the market incorporate and

196252-53).

10

depend on universalistic norms (Parsons 1964:351) - that is, formal rationality of the legal principle. According to Parsons (1964:341-342), the market, alongside social and biological attributes such as vision, language, stratification, legitimation, and bureaucracy, constitutes an ‘evolutionary universal‘ - that is, a ‘complex ... which so increases the long-run adaptive capacity of living systems ... that only systems that develop the complex can attain certain higher levels of general adaptive capacity’. The latter higher level was capitalist ‘democracy’ as practiced in the United States.‘

Unlike biological genes involved in evolutionary universals such as vision, ‘cultural patterns’ such as the market and bureaucracy are subject to diffusion (Parsons 1964:341). A diffusion model had been developed in the sub-discipline of rural sociology in the United States (Rogers 1962) in order to characterize rates of adoption of new agricultural technologies developed by the land grant research system - in particular, the diffusion of hybrid corn in Iowa (Beal & Bohlen 1962; Ryan & Gross 1943). This model was readily adopted by sociologists involved in the Third World de~elopment .~

The difference, of course, was that farmers in the United States were already heavily involved in the market, whereas the aim in the case of the Third World was to introduce the market. Commercialization was generally defined as production for the market. Writers commonly suggested that a working definition of commercial farmers, as opposed to subsistence peasants, was the proportion of the product sold in the market, although occasionally criteria such as the purchase of the factors of production were also introduced (Wharton 1969:12-20).6 Diffusion of market production was equated with the diffusion of ‘rationalization’, which in turn also implied the application of ‘Scientific’ methods to farming. The difference between primitive and scientific agriculture was thought to lie in the degree to which scientific control over the production of plants and animals has advanced (Mosher 1966a).

The barriers to rationalization and production for the market were assumed by sociologists to be the specifically peasant cultural character- istics and individual attitudes. Relevant research problems included speci- fication of the likely adopters (for example Rogers 1962:172), characterization of the rate of adoption, identification of specific cultural barriers (kinship obligations, health and food myths, and so on), and determination of how barriers might be circumvented. Theories and evidence were produced, for example, that showed that those less integrated into a social system - the outsiders - were more likely to innovate. The mood was optimistic; once some become adopters, the functional interrelatedness of subsistence culture would be broken. Peasants would begin to want the benefits of commercial production, and they would soon transform themselves into commercial farmers. The transition was conceived as liberating peasants from ascriptive bonds and from the vagaries of nature, while

11

gaining for peasants the rights of citizenship and the security of scientific control of the production process.

The Economists

The economists disagreed with the cultural explanation of tradition but accepted the evolutionary premise of history and the need to modernize peasants. The first task for economic development studies was to formulate an evolutionary model of economic history to serve as an alternative to that of Marx - the ideological foe in the cold war and the last economist to attempt such a model. This was supplied by Rostow (1960) in his Stages of Economic Growth. According to Rostow, ‘it is possible to identify all societies, in their economic dimensions, as lying within one of five categories : the traditional society, the preconditions for takeoff, the takeoff, the drive to maturity, and the age of high consumption’ (Rostow 1960:4). Although the specific stages and the applicability of a pure Western model to the Third World as such was questioned by later writers, the concept of stages of growth from traditional to modern was accepted by development economists as representing the future of Third World countries.

According to the early development economists, as modernization proceeds, urban population grows and industrialization advances. The function of agriculture is to feed the growing population, provide a market for industrial products, and give up surplus for investment in non-agricultural production (Rostow 1960:22). It is to the advantage of agriculture to give up a surplus, for the development of industry benefits the agricultural population by providing opportunities for work in urban areas, drawing off the surplus labour, leaving more resources for those who remain (Mellor 1966:28). In order to fulfill these functions, agriculture must be commercialized. Thus, revolutionary changes in agricultural production are an essential condition for takeoff (Rostow 1960:8).

An important stimulus for the commercialization of agriculture effort in the 1960s was the shift toward conceptualizing a more direct role for agriculture in development, a shift which followed especially from a paper by Mellor and Johnston (1961). According to them, agriculture could be an engine of accumulation in and of itself and the development of agriculture was important for stimulating demand for industrial products.

Science and investment were the key variables (Rostow 1960:4). Schultz was particularly influential among the agricultural economists in elaborat- ing on the problem of the application of modern science to agriculture. Like Rogers, he assumed that traditional agriculture is characterized by equilibrium (Schultz 1964:29). Unlike Rogers, Schultz believed that the

The critical conditions underlying this type of equilibrium, either historically or in the future, are as follows: (I) the state of the arts remains constant, (2) the state of

12

traditional tenets of rational economic behavior applied to peasants. H e had in 1964 what would now be considered a very Chayanovian view of the peasant economy: peasants allocated factors rationally, and balanced drudgery and leisure, His interpretation of traditional agriculture is exemplified by the following from his major statement, Trunsforming TYU- ditional Agricuhre :

preference and motives for holding and acquiring sources of income remains constant, and (3) both of these states remain constant long enough for marginal prefer- ences and motives for acquiring agricultural factors as sources of income to arrive at an equilibrium with the marginal productivity of these sources viewed as an investment in permanent income streams and with net savings approaching zero (Schultz 1964:29-30).

The fact that peasants are rational allocators of factors will mean that if given access to factors which will increase profitability and knowledge of how to use the new factors, they will quickly change from static, traditional, subsistence agriculture to a modern, dynamic, commercial agriculture.

The barrier to modernization of agriculture is therefore not a traditional peasant sub-culture but national policy. Commercialization is achieved through research and development to produce the appropriate new technologies, the development of industries to manufacture the inputs, and education and extension to give peasants the capability to use the new inputs.

Modernization in Practice

The commercialization of agriculture literature was built around these two models. Both incorporated substantive and theoretical assumptions that peasant agriculture was static, in equilibrium, subsistence-oriented, and at the traditional end of a traditional-modern continuum. Both also adopted the political or normative assumption that peasant agriculture needed to be modernized through the use of modern factors of production, with the prediction that such a change would increase farmer income and the well-being of the society as a whole, sending it down the path to modernity. Peasants would be liberated from the bonds of tradition and lack of resources while avoiding the trap of communism. Their views as to the barriers to modernization diverged. The sociological school pointed at cultural resistance or the traditional orientation of peasants, while the economists claimed that the barriers lay in lack of knowledge and lack of development of appropriate factors of production.

The key characteristic of the literature on the commercialization of agriculture was that it was relatively easy to devise a program to implement the theory. The implementing agency was the state, with the aid of

13

the Western powers, especially the United States. The application of the commercialization of agriculture literature is illustrated by the series of technical guides and case studies put out by Arthur Mosher and the Agricultural Development Council (Mosher 1966a, b; Borton 1966, 1967). Lessons in Mosher’s training manual for third world extension workers pointed out the importance of thinking in ‘rational’ business-like ways about the farm enterprise and of flouting traditional or family attitudes.’ Modernizing influences were assumed to diffuse from the cities. Modern attitudes were expected to be adopted first by those most peripheral to the traditional society - for example, members of ethnic outgroups - and therefore least influenced by cultural barriers. Mosher also emphasized the creation of infrastructure by the government, including transportation, a legal system, stable currencies and education. Agricultural extension services based on the United States land grant university Cooperative Extension system were set up in most developing countries.

COMMODITIZATION OF PRODUCTION

Background: the Neo-Marxist Critique

The commoditization literature is the second generation of the neo- Marxist critiques of ‘modernization’ theory. The emergence of the ‘dependency’ explanation of underdevelopment in Latin America during the late 1960s signalled the realization that after several centuries of capitalist expansion and over a decade of development effort, subsistence and non-capitalist forms of production were not everywhere being trans- formed to high-income, commercial enterprises. Poverty, hunger and famine had persisted throughout the world.

The commercialization of agriculture literature proposed that the root of poverty was an unproductive subsistence-oriented traditional agriculture unchanged for many generations, and that poverty could therefore be eliminated through ‘modernization’ - that is, through the introduction of market relations. Marxist critics claimed that low productivity and the poor development of the forces of production (technology) are, in fact, the result of the penetration of capitalism or market relations. However, neo-Marxists have disagreed as to the actual mechanisms and characterization of underdevelopment in a manner roughly analogous to the debate between the economists and sociologists of modernization. The result has been the formation of schools within the tradition and incessant debates between members of these schools.

Theorists of the dependency school, as represented for example by de Janvry (1981), argue that because the most dynamic market for products produced in the commercial sector of the Third World periphery is

14

located in the First World center, there is no functional dynamic to increase peasant and worker incomes in the periphery, since they do not constitute the market by which the value of the product is realized. Dependence on the center allows a drain of surplus capital from the Third World, so that there is little or no capital accumulation and development of the forces of production. De Janvry’s solution to poverty is similar to that proposed by the commercialization writers - that is, the need for the further development of the forces of production. The barriers, however, are very different - systematic distortion in the development of world capitalism, as opposed to cultural change or the generation and extension of appropriate factors of production.

The dependency school followed up on Baran’s (1957) ‘political economy’ theory of stagnation’, which represented the temporary suspension of the classical Marxism of Luxemburg, Lenin, Bukarin, and SO on. Its emergence on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s soon stimulated a debate among the Marxist theorists of development. Dependency theory was criticized as ‘circulationist’ and economistic by the French structuralist or ‘modes of production’ school and by classical Marxists such as Brenner (1977) and Warren (1980). In particular, opposition was expressed to the idea that all contemporary production relations are capitalist ‘through and through’, and as such are structured by a single logic of accumulation. The articulation of modes of production school (Meillassoux, Rey and others) pointed to non-commodified social relations of production and suggested that these constituted distinctive non-capitalist modes of production which are articulated with and dominated by the capitalist mode of production. This domination served the interests of capital and main- tained the subordinate mode in a state of underdevelopment. The forms of articulation varied with the non-capitalist mode of production concerned.

These critiques, however, were themselves criticized as essentialistic, dualistic, and overly structuralist by those persuaded by Baran and latter- day dependency theory. The literature on the commoditization of peasant production developed, in part, as a response to a recognition of these problems, as a means for overcoming a debate that was increasingly circular and unproductive. It represented a shift down in the unit of analysis from ‘mode of production’ to the ‘form of production’ - that is, to the production unit, typically the peasant household. The debate was, however, reproduced through debates over the status of apparently non- commodified labour and the overall direction and logic of commoditization - often conceptualized as a debate between Leninist and Chaya- novian approaches.

The publication of Chayanov’s Theory ofthe Peasant Economy in 1966 (Thorner et al, 1986) was particularly timely and influential in shaping the shift in the debate. As Shanin (1986:3) notes, the aspect of Chayanov which captured most attention was the idea that the peasant farm was

15

economically different from capitalist farming even in an environment dominated by capitalism. Harriet Friedmann (1978) in particular has elaborated on this concept of a distinct and identifiable ‘logic’ of simple commodity production within a capitalist environment. Chevalier (1982, 1983) has also made a concerted effort to overcome the persistent disputes using a Chayanovian-influenced logic. I will return to this after describing the development of the commoditization literature, focussing on aspects which contrast with or are analogous to the commercialization literature.

The Commoditization Literature

Instead of conceptualizing the peasant social relations as an equilibrated social system which has had no contact with modernization, commoditization theorists such as Bernstein (1977), Kahn (1982), Watts (1983), and Smith (1984a, c) take a long-term view in which the present relations of production are the outcome of a transition to capitalism which began during colonialization. The most forceful and influential advocate of this perspective is undoubtedly Eric Wolf (1982) in Europe and the People Without History. By sketching the histories of ‘the people without history’’ he outlines the consequences of European imperialist expansion since the 15th century on the non-European peoples.

The tendency in this tradition has been to study cases which are designed to demonstrate the negative impact of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. For example, Kahn’s study of the Minangkabau of Su- matra shows how subsistence production and so-called ‘traditional’ structures - universal access to land through local kinship groupings, absence of production for the market, etc. - actually went hand-in-hand with the Dutch attempt to secure a monopoly on coffee (Kahn 1982:6). This orientation leads to the thesis that the cause of poverty and underdevelopment is not static traditional agriculture, but capitalism.

Associated with the latter thesis is the frequent theme that the process of commoditization implies the destruction of a specifically peasant moral or natural economy. The moral economy is supposed to have evolved and been adapted to the environment over the long term (Watts 1983), and evolved social institutions designed for the minimization of risk (Scott 1976). Institutions of extraction of surplus by traditional elites are incorporated into the moral economy and thus rendered relatively benign. These portraits of traditional peasant societies in equilibrium, interesting- ly enough, by and large adopt the modernization view, but with two differences: the neo-Marxist critics ascribe a much more positive value to the traditional world, and they claim that the destruction of the natural economy had already occurred when post-World War I1 modernization programs were initiated. Once again, poverty is shown to be the outcome

16

not of the persistence of a traditional peasant economy, but rather of colonialization and commoditization.

Commoditization is thus a process which leads to impoverishment, loss of control over the means of production and new institutions of surplus extraction. It is a process peasants are expected to resist. As an example of the forced nature of commoditization, Bernstein (1977) develops a concept which he calls the simple reproduction ‘squeeze’. H e notes that compulsion in the form of taxes, corvee labour and so on, was frequently used initially to break into the reproductive cycles of ‘natural economies’, but he goes on to focus on economic compulsion in the extension of peasant commodity production. When households are already partially dependent on goods obtained in the market to satisfy subsistence needs and obtain the factors of production, they must produce commodities to obtain money to purchase such goods. A rise in the cost of these goods or a fall in the price of the commodity produced by the household implies that either consumption must fall, commodity production must be intensified, or both. Peasant resistance is conceptualized as resistance to attempts by ‘capital’ to appropriate control over the means of production.

One of the salient features of the commoditization approach is the focus on access to the means or factors of production, and on the reproduction or transformation of institutions which structure access to these factors. Reproduction refers to the renewal over time of relations of production, a renewal which to be achieved implies that factors of production and subsistence must be obtained. Harriet Friedmann (1980) has suggested that what differentiates a ‘peasant’ from a ‘simple commodity producer’, such as the American wheat farmers she has studied, is that access to at least some factors of production and subsistence among peasants is not mediated by Commodity relations. Commoditization occurs when these non-market ties are undermined, and factors of production and subsistence are increasingly obtained through the market. This definition is in contrast to the method of defining ‘commercialization’ by the proportion of product sold in the market as in the commercialization approach.

Differential access to the factors of production leads to advantage and differential ability to profit from those more productive technologies which may be introduced (Griffin 1979). Control of factors of production also constitutes the basis of power in class relations. Unlike the commercialization writers, who assume that given appropriate attitudes, knowledge, or technology, everybody will benefit, the political economy school tends to hone in on structural inequity and exploitation.

Debates in Commoditization

As indicated above, commoditization theory as initially formulated was intended to avoid pro’blems such as dualism, evolutionism, essentialism

17

and functionalism, and to move away from the debates between articulation theorists, dependency theorists and classical Marxists (Long 1986a:2). However, a series of analogous exchanges and debates concern- ing commoditization show that these problems are not yet resolved (C. Smith 1984b; Chevalier 1982,1983; G. Smith 1985; Goodman & Redclift 1986; Friedmann 1986; Whatmore et al, 1986; Long et al, 1986).

A particularly thorny problem concerns the question of the status of those activities or relations which cannot be characterized as ‘commoditized’ in any immediate sense (domestic labour, peasant production for subsistence). The controversy has reproduced the debate between articulation theorists and dependency theorists, and is analogous to debates in the modernization literature between sociologists such as Rogers and economists such as Schultz. O n one hand, some claim that these activities must be analyzed as non-commodified or operating to some logic other than that of accumulation or exchange value (Friedmann 1986; Van der Ploeg 1986; G. Smith 1985; C. Smith 1984b), while others claim that they are commodified but that ideology hides conversion to exchange value (Chevalier 1982, 1983; Bennholt-Thomsen 1981; see Long 1984, for a review of some aspects of the debate).

Attempts to resolve this problem among the latter group have generally taken the form presented by Chevalier (1982, 1983).9 Chevalier suggests that labour can be commodified and formally subsumed under capital without direct purchase by capitals. This occurs when bourgeois categories penetrate economic strategies, so that peasants apply exchange value calculations to the deployment of non-wage labour. To verify this proposition, it is necessary to demonstrate that exchange calculations are applied and that labour is allocated according to a social established logic of ‘abstract labour’, even in cases where the product is intended for self-consumption or used as a factor of production. Moreover, according to Chevalier, where this logic predominates, production has been formally subsumed under capital. Processes of specialization constitute a sort of real subsumption.

Several points are noteworthy about this attempt. First, the strategic or subjective orientation of peasants must be interpreted in order to know whether an activity is commodified. This is indicative of a turn among many theorists to more ‘actor-oriented’ approaches. Those who dispute claims such as that made by Chevalier on his terms need to show that labour is treated according to principles other than that of abstract exchange value (see van der Ploeg, 1986, for an example of such an argument).

Second, questions of the type raised by Chevalier have led to increasing interest in the labour process, in particular to questions regarding the formal and real subsumption of labour (Goodman & Redclift 1985), to the various principles and specific con junctures generating variation in the

18

labour process (van der Ploeg 1986; Long 1986b), and the persistence of patriarchy in mobilizing labour within the household (Friedmann 1986).

Finally, as C. Smith (1984b) notes, the approach attempts to integrate cultural and material elements along the lines proposed by Pierre Bour- dieu’s (1977) theory of practice. It is representative of recent attempts in the Marxist tradition to accord the cultural realm some autonomy in discussing transitions in peasant society (the other notable attempt is by Scott, 1985).

C. Smith (1984b) takes issue with Chevalier’s arguments on two levels. First, at a theoretical level, she points out that Chevalier describes extra- economic or political compulsion in the working of the capitalist economy. She suggests that such compulsion is necessary where labour is not fully commoditized or dispossessed from the means of production, because simple economic controls do not work in except where such dis- possession is complete. In cases where labour is not fully commodified, we are therefore forced to pay attention to political struggle, in which agents of capitalists do not hold all the power, and in which the outcome is indeterminate and historically contingent. In this sense, she disputes the claim that the peasant economy studied by Chevalier is fully commodified.

O n a meta-theoretical level, C. Smith (1984b) claims that Chevalier and others err when they reduce capitalism to one basic or essential form, and then go on to argue over whether conditions in some particular time or place conform to that ideal type. According to her, capitalism can take on different forms in different times and places. In making this argument, she hopes to recover the initial promise of the shift down in the unit of analysis to forms of production.

Recent exchanges in Sociologia Ruralis are also concerned with the status of non-commodified labour, the labour process and epistemological status of concepts in understanding simple commodity production. Goodman and Redclift (1985) argue that simple commodity production must be conceptualized as an historically contingent phenomenon theo- rized in terms of its external relations with capital, rather than a theoretical category in and of itself, as Friedmann attempts to do. According to them, it is in the nature of capitals to seek to restructure the labour process so as to valorize all productive activities and maximize surplus value. In agriculture, this tendency has met with obstacles of organic nature: land and space. Capital therefore is forced to achieve its objectives in agriculture by pursuing a strategy of partial appropriation of the labour process, pro- gressively narrowing the scope of activities undertaken on the farm.

Friedmann (1986) responds that it continues to be important to under- stand relations internal to the family farm, where non-commodified relations of kinship and patriarchy prevail. She argues that there are not only obstacles of nature and the dynamic of accumulation, but also social

19

relations and a prolonged confrontation between simple commodity production and capital at play. This implies that there are counter-tendencies to the progressive ‘appropriation’ of the labour process by capital. She suggests that Goodman and Redclift are taking.a unilinear view of the development of capitalism and reviving the teleological claim that all non-pure forms are incomplete and will pass through stages in the direction of the pure form (presumably of the capitalism mode of production).

EVALUATION

I have suggested at several points above that there are a series of simi- larities and contrasts between the two sets of literatures under review. In this section I argue that the origins of the two schools - one in applied development efforts aimed to cut off social unrest, and the other as a critique of the former- have served to limit the world views of both sets of writers and to sever the relation of the theory to practice.

The Commercialization School

In the present intellectual climate, the evolutionary, traditional-modern models of the world accepted by the commercialization of agriculture writers seem naive and simplistic. The conception of Third World peasants as living in equilibrated traditional societies appears similarly anti- quated. Contemporary researchers have amply traced the profound effects of colonialism on the peasantry. And although there are stirrings of conservative dissent, few experienced observers believe that commercialization of agriculture is uniformly beneficial. Many peasants remain in poverty even as they become increasingly integrated into market relations. Studies have repeatedly shown that it is the poorest, along with the richest, who tend to be the most dependent on market goods for day-to- day survival. Thus, the market clearly does not by itself alleviate poverty. In most Third World countries, nothing resembling a ‘take-off‘ has occurred. Non-agricultural employment in the ‘modern’ sector has not been forthcoming, leaving the very specter that the initial modernization efforts were dedicated to prevent: the co-existence of the very rich and the very poor, and ubiquitous anti-market and anti-Western resistance move- ments. The Philippines, home for the International Rice Research Center and long a favorite target of modernization efforts, has come to epitomize these conditions.

It is not difficult to agree that commercialization can be a means by which elites extract surplus, not for local reinvestment in industry beneficial to the peasantry, but for consumption or investment elsewhere. The focus on class and strata, access to resources and so on in the commoditization school has highlighted weaknesses in the commercialization

20

school, and glaring inequities and poverty in the Third World (and in the United States and Europe) would indicate that this attention will continue to be important for understanding how these inequities are reproduced.

In its attempt to justify and theorize a program based on global cold war politics, the commercialization school failed to get its history right, and therefore failed to formulate an effective program of intervention. How- ever, the school has not died out in the face of the attack by the neo- Marxist critics. Three reasons may be cited: First and most obvious, the political situation which gave rise to modernization theory as ideology - that is, as justification for imperialism and manipulation of Third World nations - has not disappeared. The World Bank, the IMF, USAID and other development organizations continue to engage in such activities as a matter of course under the rubric of development aid, and all are in the business of funding development research. Second, commercialization writers continue to address important points which have been neglected by their critics, as I shall elaborate below. Finally, critics have been unable to formulate an applied program for the development worker who must return to the office on Monday after reading Frank, de Janvry, and Bernstein over the weekend. Commoditization theorists have been ad- verse to dealing with practice.

In general, the commercialization writers have retained a monopoly on the recognition that peasants may in some cases gain in terms of well- being and some aspects of control as commercialization proceeds. The question of the loss and gain of ‘control’ cannot be resolved in any easy way. The emergence of rights of citizenship, freedom from feudal obligations or ascriptive ties and freedom from the vagaries of nature, ideological as these ideas may be, should not be dismissed as containing no truth whatsoever - what is ideology if it does not contain an important element of (distorted) truth?

Modernization writers have attempted to respond to their critics. By the late 1970s, for example, in the special volume of Economic Devel- opment and Cultural Change in honor of Bert F. Hoselitz (Nash 1977), sociologists were disavowing both the negative views of traditional culture and the unilinear version of evolutionism. However, the definition of modernization as ‘rationalization’ (Moore, in Nash 1977) or ‘the application of knowledge to production’ (Nash 1977:21) has been retained and elaborated. Rural and development sociologists no longer assume that all modern technology is appropriate for peasants. The focus among rural sociologists has shifted from the diffusion of technologies to, on one hand, the generation of technologies as a social process (for example Whyte & Boynton 1983; Busch & Lacy 1983) and, on the other hand, the social impact of technologies (for example, Summers 1983; Berardi & Geisler 1984). The literature on diffusion and adoption of technologies has incorporated the view that access to resources is an important determining

21

variable (Roling, Ascroft & Chege.1976; Hooks, Napier & Carter 1983), The views of Schultz have worn somewhat better than those of the

sociologists. His emphasis on appropriate technology and state policy for the production of appropriate technology has been carried forward, especially by Hayami and Ruttan’s (1985) ‘induced innovation’ model. To counter the moral economy arguments, writers like Popkins (1979) who follow the rational peasant viewpoint, have advanced the influential thesis that peasants will ally themselves with the state against the rural dominant classes to initiate commercialization in order to free themselves from the arbitrary power of traditional lords and to gain modern citizenship rights, There have been calls for land reform to address the inequities diagnosed as at the heart of the failures of commercialization. However, these calls are not generally accompanied by a political analysis of the power structures which block land reforms or render them ineffective.

Commoditization

Long et a1 (1986:3-4) criticize commoditization theory for its stress on external determinants and linear theory of agrarian development, the lack of attention to the meaning of commoditization in the everyday life of farmers and simple commodity producers, the failure to investigate the nature of intermediate structures, and for not dealing with the extent of resistance to commoditization. I would add that there has been a lack of attention to the state and to the relations of peasants with the natural environment as aspects of the process of commoditization. Most of these comments are now common as critiques of the Marxist tradition from the left (for example Giddens, 1981), and need little elaboration.

Here I will emphasize that the underlying reasons for many of these problems and the unresolved debates are epistemological and related to a lack of a practical dimension in the tradition. Moreover, these problems can to some degree be understood by looking at the relationship between Marxist-inspired commoditization theory and commercialization theory. In applying the critique at this level, I will point the way towards a renewal of commoditization theory.

I take the neo-Weberian position that we should recognize all categories as subjective ‘ideal types’, which help us to organize and make sense of the world, but which should under no circumstance be considered as ‘actually existing’. The latter tendency is the problem of the reification of ideal types - which underlies most of Marxist theory and the various debates in commoditization more specifically. There is no point, in other words, in trying to separate theoretical from historically contingent categories - all categories and theories are in the last analysis historically contingent, ideological, and interpretative social products. The world is a complex whole which can only be investigated empirically

22

and understood through theory. It cannot be reduced to the simple working out of a model derived through deductive theory - whether that of ‘simple commodity production’ (as Friedmann tends to do) or of ‘capitalism’ (as Goodman and Redclift do). There is no single deductive logic (such as the logic of exchange-value or accumulation) underlying or determining all relations in a capitalist formation, but there are different, historically-contingent principles which we can only investigate through empirical research.

A quick but much needed look at the variety of meanings applied to the concept of ‘commoditization’ highlights both the problem of reification and the biases which have plagued the commoditization literature. Cheva- lier relates commoditization to the penetration of exchange value calculations on the part of producers. Kahn and Bernstein point to an increasing need to purchase the factors of reproduction. Goodman and Redclift, and Van der Ploeg, appear implicitly to define commoditization as the progressive ‘externalization’ of activities from the household production unit. In most cases (Chevalier is the exception), the definitions sneak in without discussion. All these writers tend to reduce and reify social change to accord with the social phenomenon and definition of commoditization they have chosen to investigate. I would suggest that all these processes are worth investigation as varying aspects of commoditization, and that commoditization is not reducible to any one or another of these. Rather, commoditization is one possible concept through which we might organize our understanding of a broad social process which seems to be occurring around the world.

The very use of the word commoditization also demonstrates another problem in the literature. Modernization sociologists suggested that commercialization was simply the precondition or catalyst to social change in the cultural dimension. In the Marxist tradition, the focus on commoditization betrays an economistic bias. One of the most problematic aspects of commoditization theory has been the sparse treatment of transformations in the political dimension as represented by state formation, and the cultural dimensions of class, community and kinship relations. In moving beyond commoditization it will be important to expand the conception of the social change beyond that of economic commoditization to look at transformation in political and cultural dimensions as well. The following paragraphs will elaborate on this.

Associated with the economistic bias is a problematic unilinear view of the issues of ‘control’ and resistance to commoditization, a view which arises out of the lack of attention to dimensions of social change other than the economy or production relations. As illustrated by Bernstein’s concept of the simple reproduction squeeze, a defining feature of the commoditization approach has been the idea that peasants are coerced into commoditizing household production through economic compulsion.

23

Commoditization is assumed to involve a progressive loss of control by peasant producers, a loss which peasants are likely to resist. The assumption that resistance is resistance to commoditization surfaces even in the critique by Long et a1 (1986).

The evidence, however, frequently shows that often there is no such resistance. In fact, peasants are frequently very much involved in forward- ing the process. By its blindness to this, the commoditization approach not only fails to give an account of peasants as active and knowledgeable participants in the social change (Long 1986a:23; Benvenuti 1985), but it also fails to provide an adequate account of the complete institutional context in which peasants are acting.

Appeals to concepts like the ‘moral’ or ‘natural’ economy suggests that many commoditization theorists have not accounted for how historically- specific relations have structured control of access to factors of production in non-capitalist social formations (Harris 1981 ; Friedmann 1980), nor have they looked at how breaking away from such relations may represent a degree of liberation for peasants, even as new controls become effective. To a degree this can be explained by noting that the commoditization approach was initially constituted in part as a critique of the equally one-sided focus on just these processes in the modernization literature. Nevertheless, in understanding agrarian transformation and how peasants are likely to react, it is important to look at both losses and gains in control, power, and agency, and in particular, at the choices peasants are able or not able to make as the economic, political, and cultural institutional context in which they live changes. The following are examples of the sorts of analysis which is needed.

In the political dimension, Marxist-influenced theorists commonly point out that social formations where labour is not fully commoditized are characterized by the use of extra-economic coercion for extracting surplus from producers. The process of commoditization has historically implied not the disappearance of extra-economic coercion, but the gradu- al appropriation of the legitimate use of such means by a state in formation. In other words, states not only act as agents in the process of commoditization, but the process of state formation is part and parcel of commoditization. Through the polarization of the political and economic spheres into states and classes, states in formation also establish, enforce and defend the legal and institutional framework of commoditization. The establishment of such a framework implies the establishment of bourgeois economic and political rights, rights which may subsequently be radicalized through a critique of ideology. The twin processes of economic commoditization and political state formation cannot be understood apart from one another when treated from a long-term historical point of view. As the reviews above indicate, writers in the modernization

24

school have always been more ready to acknowledge this than commoditization theorists.

The political aspects of transformation are, however, not unilinear or unidirectional. In particular, the continued role of extra-economic coercion is exemplified by the coercive aspects of the state and the patriarchal family in contemporary society. It is also important to look at expres- sions of power and politics at the local level, by individuals living in a community.

In the cultural dimension, the most useful analytical tools seem to be those of Bourdieu (1977) and the work of researchers who have attempted to apply his theory of practice (Chevalier 1982; C. Smith 1984b; Scott 1985). The key ideas include the concept of overlapping and ambiguous symbolic domains, and the replacement of ‘rule’ with ‘strategy’. Strate- gies are undertaken by actors in the context of the free play inherent in the fundamental ambiguity of different symbolic domains. Commoditization may represent the advance of the domain of exchange calculations in the cultural sphere, but the process is not unilinear, nor are other symbolic domains ever completely superseded by pure economic calculations. Scott (1985) shows how even now peasants continue to exact gifts from the local elite by invoking the ‘pre-capitakist’ normative legacy created by elites who euphemized surplus extraction through an ideology of charity. Willis (1977) has shown how patriarchal values become associated with manual labour and thus contribute to acquiescence of parts of the working class to their working class location, and therefore to the reproduction of capitalist relations, even in England, the capitalist core. The questions are always, how can we characterize different symbolic domains, how are they used, changed, and brought into articulation by strategizing people, and in what way are they ideological (serving to legitimate or hide domination)?

Transformations in the political and cultural dimensions cannot be separated from the process of commoditization in the economic dimension, and should be analyzed as part and parcel of the overall process, without reducing it to one dimension or another. These political and cultural processes are themselves never unilinear or unidimensional. Po- litical power and cultural production need to be analyzed at the levels of both the world system of national states, and the community.

The question of the loss or gain of control (power and agency) needs to be addressed in the context of change in all three dimensions. One can see how, in a particular case, a transformation might lead to decreasing control by the kin and community (‘individualization’), increasing dependence on the market and control by capitals, a gain in national level political rights with the formation and development of a state, and so on.

Polanyi (1944) emphasized the potential liberating aspect of the state. For him, the capitalist state during the 19th century was susceptible to a counter-movement forcing it to institute (formal) measures protecting

25

land, labour and capital from the operations of an instituted free market. Further research might attempt to assess how the state or other political institutions employ their power in liberating ways as well as to oppress, and how such orientations are achieved. Arendt’s (1958) conceptual- ization of politics as involving a communicative process of arriving at some kind of collective action needs to be taken more seriously as an aspect of the political process.

This brings me to a final fundamental failure of the commoditization literature: a failure of practice. The neo-Marxist literature on development began - and, for the most part, remains - as an external critique outside the major development agencies. As a critique, writers have focussed on the negative aspects of the development process. But while purporting to correct the history of the modernization theorists, most writers who use the commoditization approach have neglected to consider how the approach might be put into practice. This failing can be accounted for in several ways.

Modernization theorists tended to identify themselves with the state and its ‘development’ efforts, without attention to the self-interested aspect of states, or of the state as an organization of domination. Marxist approaches, by reducing everything to class or economics, took in the last analysis an instrumentalist view of the state, the major locus of intervention of the modernization literature. The result among Marxists has been a self-defeating cynicism with regard to most applied development efforts, and theoretical blindness to potentially liberating aspects of ‘modernization’ and development.

A unique aspect of ‘development’ theory is that it incorporates two aspects of sociological inquiry: theory and practice. Where these are brought together in a dialectical relationship, there is the possibility for liberating practice and penetrating theory (Freire 1970; Gaventa 1980). But on one hand, the modernization and the commercialization of agriculture schools, while legitimizing a clear agenda for practice, failed to get their theory right, and therefore in many ways failed to achieve their agenda. This failure can be attributed largely to the origins of the agenda in cold war politics. O n the other hand, the neo-Marxist critique, including the commoditization school, failed to deal with practice at all - to the detriment of its theory.

Booth (1985) writes that the present crisis in Marxist development theory has an epistemological cause. The crisis is at the same time, I would submit, a crisis of practice, of applicability. The practical problem is in a sense epistemological - how to account for the structures which underlie poverty without falling into the structuralist trap where nothing is possible, and how to account for an ability to change structures of domination actively without falling into voluntarism.

The failure of practice can be traced in part to epistemology, and the

26

shortcomings of the theory can be traced in part to the failure of practice. The lacunae identified above could only arise from a heavily deductive approach which does not encourage researchers get their hands dirty in any inductive way. It has been exactly those who are the exceptions who have come up with the most cogent critiques of the tradition. The same critique can be applied to members of much of the commercialization school, in that they attempted to implement aprogram based on deductive reasoning which had little to do with reality. As important for a new theory as any of the more esoteric notes which I have discussed above is the need to begin from empirical work, and to take seriously what people say.

NOTES

1. As summed up by Giddens (1981): Neo-Marxist theory has been functionalist and class reductionist, it ascribes ‘needs’ to systems, and does not account for the action of knowledgeable human beings as reasoning agents.

2. See the articles in the special issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of Bert F. Horelitz (Nash 1977), especially that by Wilbert Moore.

3. See Finh’s contribution to the important collection edited by Clifton Whanon (1969), in which he warns against generalizing any features of a specific peasant society.

4. See Giddens’ (1984:263-274) critical notes with respect to the later Parsons on evolution. 5. See, for example, Rogers (1969). 6. The criteria of the purchase of factors of production was more likely to be included by

economists, as indicated by the writers in Wharton’s (1969) edited text Subsistence Agriculture and Economic Development. This text includes contributions from most of the influential theorists of the time, and is an excellent source of views of the commercialization writers.

7. ‘To illustrate the influence of families and communities on farmers use the example of a tree which is bent by the prevailing winds, and which is modified by other climatic and growing conditions’ (Mosher, 1966b:24).

8. Paul Baran’s (1957) The Political Economy of Growth may be regarded as an initial statement of the new Marxist ‘political economy’ and theories of dependency and stagnation.

9. See also Long (1984).

REFERENCES

ARENDT, H. (1958), The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) BARAN, P.A. (1957), The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Prometheus Books) BWL, G.M. k J.M. BOHLEN (1962). The DiffsMn Process, Special Report 18, Iowa Stare

Cooperative Extension Services BENNHOLT-THOMSEN (1981), Subsistence production and extended reproduction, in K.

YOUNG et al, eds., 41-54 BENVENUTI, B. (1985), On the dualism between sociology and rural sociology: Some hinu

from the case of modernization. Sociologia Ruralis XXV (3/4), 214-230 BERARDI, G.M. dr CH.C. GEISLER, eds. (1984), The Social Consequences and Challenges of

New Agricultural Technologies (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Piess) BERNSTEIN, H. (1977). Notes on capital and peasantry,jouml ofAf*ican Political Economy,

10,60-73

27

BOOTH, D. (1985), Marxism and development sociology: Interpreting the impasse, World Development, 13(7), 761-787

BORTON, R.E., ed., (1966), Selected Readings To Accompany Getting Agriculture Moving (New York: The Agricultural Development Council)

BORTON, R.E. (1967), Case Studies to Accompany Getting Agriculture Moving (New York: The Agriculture Development Council)

BOURDIEU, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

BRENNER, R. (1977), The origins of capitalist development: A critique of neo-Smithian Marxism, New Left Review, 104 Uuly-Aug), 25-92

BUSCH, L. ~r W.B. LACY (1983), Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Research (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press)

CHEVALIER, J.M. (1982), Civilization and the Stolen Gijt: Capital, Kin, and Cult in Eastern Peru (Toronto: University of Toronto Press)

CHEVALIER, J.M. (1983), There is nothing simple about simple commodity production, Journal ofPeasant Studies, 10(4), 153-186

JANVRY, A. DE (1981), The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press)

FRIEDMANN, H. (1978), World market, state and family farm: Social bases of household production in the era of wage labour, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20

FRIEDMANN, H. (1980), Household production and the national economy: Concepts for the analysis of agrarian formations, Journal of Peasant Studies, 7(2), 158-184

FRIEDMANN, H. (1986), Patriarchy and property: A reply to Goodman and Redclift, Sociolo- gia Ruralis, XXVI(2), 186-193

F O S ~ R , G.M. (1962), Traditional Cultures and the Impact of Technological Change (New York: Harper and Brothers)

FREIRE, P. (1970), Pedagogy ofthe Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press) GAVENTA, J. (1980), Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian

GIDDENS, A. (1981), A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: Uni-

GIDDENS, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press) GOODMAN, D. L M. REDCLIFT (1985), Capitalism, petty commodity production and the farm

GRIFPIN, K. (1979), The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green

HARRIS, 0. (1981), Households as natural units, in K. YOUNG et al, eds.. 136-156 HAYAMI, Y. L V.W. RWITAN (1985), Agricultural Development: An International Perspec-

tive (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press) HOOKS, G.M., T.L. NAPIERIM.L. CARTER( 1983), Correlates of adoption behaviors:Thecase

of farm technologies, Rural Sociology, 4(2), 308-323 HOSELITZ, B.F. (1960), Sociological Factors in Economic Development (Chicago: The Free

Press) JOHNSTON, B.F. L J.W. MELLOR (1961), The role of agriCUlNre in economic development,

American Economic Review, 51,566-93 M N , J . (1982), From peasants to commodity production in Southeast Asia, Bulletin of

Concerned Asian Scbolars, 14,3-14 LONG, N. (1984), Introduction, in N. LONG, ed., Family and Work in Rural Societies:

Perspectives on Non-wage Labour (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd) LONG, N. (1986a), Commoditization: Thesis and antithesis, in N. LONG et al, eds., 8-23 LONG, N. (1986b). The socidrcproduction of petty commodity enterprise in Central Peru, in

LONG, N, J.D. V ~ D B R PLOEG, C. CURTIN a L. Box (1986), The Commoditization Debate:

Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press)

versity of California Press)

enterprise, Sofiologia Ruralis, XXV(3/4), 231-247

Revolution (London: Macmillan)

N. LONQ etd., 77-99

28

Labour Process, Strategy and Social Network (Agricultural University Wagen- ingen: Papers of the Departments of Sociology 17)

MOORE, W.E. (1977), Modernization as rationalization: Processes and restraints, inM. NASH, ed., 29-42

MOSHER, A.T. (1966a), Getting Agriculture Moving (New York: Praeger) MOSHER, A.T. (1966b), Training Manual For Group Study of Getting Agriculture Moving

(New York: The Agricultural Development Council, Inc.) MELLOR, J.W. (1966), The Economics of Agricultural Development (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press) NASH, M., ed., (1977), Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of

Bert F. Hoselitz (Economic Development and Cultural Change, Volume 25, Supplement)

PARSONS, T. (1 964), Evolutionary universals in society, American Sociological Review, 29, 339-357

PLOEG, J.D. VAN DER (1986), The agricultural labour process and comrnoditization, in N . LONG et al.

POLANYI, K. (1944), The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press) POPKINS, S. (1979). The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press) ROGERS, E.M. (1962), Dzffssion of Innovations (New York: The Free Press) ROGERS, E.M. (1969), Modernization Among Peasants (New York: Holt, Rinehart and

Winston) ROLING, N.G., J. ASCROFT F.W. CHEGE (1976), The diffusion of innovations and the issue

of equity in rural development, Communication Research, 3, 155-170 ROSTOW, W.W. (1960), The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,

(New York: Cambrid e University Press) RYAN, B. & N.C. GROSS (1943), ‘he diffusion of hybrid seed corn in two Iowa communities,

SCHULTZ, TH.W. (1964), Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven: Yale Uni-

SCOIT, J.C. (1976) The Moral Economy ofthe Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press) SCOIT, J.C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistunce (New

SHANIN, T. (1986), Introduction, in THORNER et al, eds. SMITH, C. (1984a), Local history to global context: Social and economic transitions in

WesterqGuatemala, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26, 193-228 SMITH, C. (1984b), Forms of production in practice: Fresh approaches to simple commodity

production, Journal of Peasant Studies, 11(4), 201-221 SMITH, C. (1984c), Does a commodity economy enrich the few while ruining the masses?,

Jowrnul of Peasant Studies. 11(4), 60-95 SUMMERS, G.F., ed. (1983), Technology and Rural Social Change: Festschrift for Eugene A.

Wilkening (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press) TAYLOR, J.G. (1979), From Modernization to Modes of Production (New York: The Mac-

Miflan Press) THORNER, D., B. KERBLAY & R.E.F. SMITH (1986),A.V. Chayanov on The Theory ofPeasant

Economy (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press; first published in 1966)

Rural S O ~ ~ O ~ O ~ V , 8, 15-24

versity Press)

Haven: Yale University Press)

WARREN, B. (1980), Imperialism; Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books) W A ~ S , M. (1983), O n the poverty of theory: Natural hazards research in context, in K.

WHARTON, C.R.. ed. (1969), Subsistence Agriculture and Economic Development (Chicago:

WHATMORE,S.,R.MUMON,J. LITTLE~T. M~~~~~~(1986),Internalandexternalrelationsin

HEWITT, ed., Interpretations of Calamity (Boston: Allen and Unwin)

Aldine)

the transformation of the farm family, Sociologiu Rurulis, XXVI(3/4), 396-398

29

WHYTE, W.F. sr D. BOYNTON, eds. (1983), Higher- Yielding Human Systems forAgriculture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press)

WILLIS, P.E. (1977), Learning to Labour: HOW Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Aldershot, Hampshire, U.K.: Gower)

WOLF, E.R. (1982), Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press)

YOUNG, K., C. WOLKOWITZ sr R. MCCULLAGH (1981), O f Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination Internationally and its Lessons (London: Routledge a Kegan Paul)

COMMERCIALIZATION AND COMMODITIZATION: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN PERSPECTIVES

Documents

Transcript of COMMERCIALIZATION AND COMMODITIZATION: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN PERSPECTIVES