Rural development,technical knowledge and shifting boundaries: the shaping of “progress” and “crisis” in developing countries

Abstract

This paper has two aims. (i) It demonstrates how a constitutionist understanding of the relation of socially induced change to the transformation of third-world rural society overcomes the limitations of outcome-centred approaches, which concentrate on the manifest phenomena of the “progress and crisis of development”, when it makes the processes of transformation themselves the central target of inquiry. (ii) It illustrates the approach by an empirical analysis of the Indian experience of the technologies of cereal seed development and deployment, as an example of socially induced change based on the production and use of technical knowledge. The constitutionist perspective is identified as an analytical position from which to explore how the dynamics and mechanisms of change are generated and become organized within society to produce consequences and secondary effects. Drawing from recent advances in the sociology of science and technology, a concept of the construction and actuation of seed technologies is formulated. An application of the combined conceptual-analytical scheme makes it possible to examine, in sequence: the character, positioning and results of the dynamics of cereal seed technologies in four distinguishable contexts - local, state, world-scale, and knowledge-led micro-settings; the course of transformation in terms of outcomes, technology spread and reach, the nature of “progress” and “crisis” produced; and finally, the expansion and contraction of the different dynamics and the direction of these shifts. In conclusion, the explanatory potential of the perspective is identified and a view of technological determinism formed.