From Situations of Dependency to Globalized Social Democracy

President Cardoso's recent assessment of the prospects for “globalized social democracy” raises, once again, the question of what space for agency exists within the global political economy for actors in the South, which was central to the analysis Cardoso and Faletto presented in Dependency and Development 40 years ago. Dependency and Development's “historical–structural” approach balanced belief in the possibility of political agency with a keen appreciation of structural constraint. Cardoso's current exploration of global possibilities carries forward both tradition of the historical–structural method, arguing that social democracy is an option in the South and that the globalized social democrats in the South will play a growing role in shaping global political institutions. He does not explore the possibility that social democrats in the South may need to play a role in shaping global economic rules. This paper argues that reconstructing global market rules is crucial to the long-run success of “globalized social democracies” in the South and that such reconstruction, however difficult, lies within the realm of the historically viable.     

Culture,Sustainability, and Medicine in the Twenty-first Century. Re-grounding the Focus of Medicine Amidst the Current “Global Systemic Shift” and the Forces of the Market: Elements for a Contemporary Social Philosophy of Medicine

This article analyzes the role and the status of medicine within the “post-modern” culture(s) of the West. As we know, culture is a major factor that influences the perception, the interpretation, and the expectations toward medicine, medical institutions, medical politics, and the persons involved with them. When culture changes, the social construct called “medicine” changes. Today, the Western condition of “post-modernity” finds itself in a process of rapid change due to the “global systemic shift” that is manifesting since a couple of years within all four main systemic logics and discoursive patterns of Western societies: in culture, religion, politics, and economics. In this situation, the article tries to elaborate on crucial questions about how a contemporary social philosophy of medicine can be delineated within the current “global systemic shift” and what some consequences and perspectives could be. It pleas for an integrative philosophy of medicine which has to strive to re-integrate the “(de) constructivist” patterns of “nominalistic” post-modern thought (dedicated primarily to freedom and equality) with the “idealistic” patterns of “realistic” neo-humanism (dedicated primarily to the “essence” of human dignity and the possibility of intersubjective morality). Only the institution of a balanced “subjective-objective” paradigm can ensure medicine its appropriate place, role, and status within our rapidly changing society.     

Cultural and economic prerequisites of democracy: Reassessing recent evidence

The purpose of this article is to reassess two influential theories of democratic development: the theory of democratic culture and the theory of economic development. The leading predecessors in each domain—Ronald Inglehart and Adam Przeworski—are the prime targets of analysis. We take issue with recent evidence presented by these authors on three grounds: the evidence (1) confuses “basic” criteria of democracy with possible “quality” criteria (Inglehart); (2) conceptualizes democracy in dichotomous rather than continuous terms (Przeworski); and (3) fails to account for endogeneity and contingent effects (Inglehart). In correcting for these shortcomings, we present striking results. In the case of democratic culture, the theory lacks support; neither overt support for democracy nor “self-expression values” affect democratic development. In the case of economic development, earlier findings must be refined. Although the largest impact of modernization is found among more democratized countries, we also find an effect among “semi-democracies.” Axel Hadenius is professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is the author ofDemocracy and Development (Cambridge University Press, 1992) andInstitutions and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2001). Jan Teorell is associated professor of political science at Uppsala University. His articles on intra-party democracy, social capital, and political participation appear in international journals.     

Will Information Technology Reshape the North-South Asymmetry of Power in the Global Political Economy?

Digital technologies are sufficiently disruptive to current ways of doing things to call into question assumptions about the “inevitability” or “natural state” of many economic processes and organizational principles. In particular, the impact of digital technologies on our conceptions of property rights has potentially dramatic implications for the North-South divide and the distribution of power in the global political economy. Drawing on recent experiences with open-source property rights regimes, we present two scenarios, the “imperialism of property rights” and the “shared global digital infrastructure,” to highlight how debates over property-rights could influence the development of the global digital infrastructure and, in turn, contribute to significantly different outcomes in global economic power. Steve Weber is director of, the Institute of International Studies and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book,The Success of Open Source, was published in April 2004 by Harvard University Press. Jennifer Bussell is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on the political determinants of information and communication technology access in developing countries.     

International assistance and democracy: Assessing efforts to assist post-communist development

This article surveys political development frameworks for analyzing the post-Communist transition to political democracy. Parallels with postcolonial events in Third World countries should caution against overoptimism about the prospects for mutually reinforcing economic and political development. In general, the study of Third World political development suggest that rapid regime transition with low mass participation is unlikely to result in sustainable democratic politics, especially where severe economic dislocations are present. High rates of participation during regime change may lead to rapid disillusionment with the performance of postrevolutionary government. It is thus argued that states wishing, for various reasons, to assist in smoothing the transition from communism should pay heed to the cautionary experience of Third World development assistance and monitor the political dimensions of the transformation, such as the stability of coalition governments, electoral turnout, ethnonationalism, as well as the orthodox economic indicators like inflation and rates of domestic investment. With respect to international assistance to the former Communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe, the article shows that the capacity of the Group of Twenty Four (G-24) donors to aid economic recovery is well below what is requested, or needed. Despite hosting a donor summit, the United States is taking a far less prominent role in the post-Cold War donor community than was the case in the analogous program for post-World War II recovery. This is having an impact on both volume and coordination of assistance. Finally, a strong, possibly ideological, preference among donors for finding private sector recipients for the bulk of assistance may erode the capacity of the post-Communist states to provide both infrastructure and political stability needed for investor confidence. Those making decisions about levels and modes of Western assistance should look beyond economic indicators of privatization as criteria for continued support and retain, where possible, political development objectives in both financial and project assistance. While we must not assume that the record of supporting democracy in Central and Eastern Europe will prove to be any better than in many Third World regimes, the greater security salience of Eastern Europe’s stability adds urgency to the task of applying political development lessons to the post-Communist experience. Malcolm J. Grieve specializes in political development and international political economy and in his current research is exploring the connections between the two fields with regard to analysis of the post-Communist transition. Recent publications include “Economic Imperialism”, in D. Haglund and M. Hawes, eds.,World Politics: Power, Interdependence and Dependence (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990) and “Debt and Imperialism: Perspectives on the Debt Crisis,” in S. Riley ed.,The politics of global debt (Macmillan 1993). ...in Central and eastern Europe, we are seeking to demonstrate in practice the idea that free government can mean good and stable government, and that free enterprise can mean economic opportunity for all.U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, 27 February 1991. There is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through, than to initiate a new order of things.Machiavelli, The Prince     

Grassroots development where no grass grows: Small-scale development efforts on the peruvian coast

“Grassroots Development Where No Grass Grows: Small-Scale Development Efforts On The Peruvian Coast” reports site visits to several low-budget development projects: one in a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Lima, three in the agricultural area near Chiclayo, and one in the small provincial city of Ilo. The article describes a style of development assistance referred to as “accompaniment” and contrasts its requirements and potential benefits with those of more standard practices. In a philosophical vein, the article examines the advantages of emphasizing how development assistance is carried out as opposed to a focus on outcomes. It suggests that much is to be gained by supporting the small-scale activities of local Non-Governmental Development Organizations. Everything nced not be done at once, but something must be done… John Francis Kavanaugh, S.J. Richard L. Clinton is professor of political science at Oregon State University, where he teaches international relations, Americna foreign policy, alternative futures, and Latin American politics. His most recent book wasPoblación y desarrollo en el Perú (University of Lima, 1985).     

Resistance and Creativity in Social Interaction: For and Against Memory in Poland, Israel–Palestine, and the United States

In this paper, I present an analysis of Adam Michnik’s notion of “Amnesty without Amnesia”. His was a wise political judgment presented at a critical moment in the struggle to constitute a democratic polity in Poland. Mine is an appreciation of his political position, along with a sociological analysis that highlights the empirical difficulties of its realization in practical action. I will show how at critical moments of social change creative political action works to erase memories of the relevant past, which act as a repressive force, while “re-remembering” (to use Toni Morrison’s formulation). Three cases will be compared, Michnik’s, after the fall of the communist regime in east central Europe, and cases drawn from the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the American presidential campaign. A paper prepared for presentation at Cerisy, France, Summer, 2008.     

Rethinking political development: A look backward over thirty years,and a look ahead

The article analyzes the rise of the political development approach in comparative politics and the reasons for it. It traces the history of the political development literature and its emergence as the dominant paradigm in the field. It then presents and assesses the critiques, that have been levelled against political development. It also assesses the various alternative approaches that came to supplant political development. The article next presents the factors that have led to a renaissance in political development. It concludes by suggesting that while the political development approach was based on some erroneous assumptions in the short term, from a longer-term perspective that approach looks considerably better. Howard J. Wiarda is Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst; associate of the Center for International Affairs. Harvard University; adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; and associate of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. This article is based on a paper presented at the Fourteenth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 28–September 1, 1988. A somewhat revised version of this article was presented at the Conference on “Comparative Politics: Research Perspectives for the Next Twenty Years,” sponsored byComparative Politics and the Ph.D. Program of the City University of New York, September 7–9, 1988. It will also be published under the title “Concepts and Models in Comparative Politics: Political Development Reconsidered-and Its Alternatives” in Kenneth Paul Erickson and Dankwart Rustow (eds.),Comparative Political Dynamics: Research Perspectives for the Turn of the Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).     

Exploring the three varieties of East Asia's state-guided development model: Korea,Singapore, and Taiwan

In the postwar era, the East Asian state-guided development model has worked well to create successive economic miracles in the region. However, the enduring variances of the individual economies in East Asia still remain. This article explores the empirical diversities hidden behind the intra-regional commonalities. In particular, on the “growthstability-equity” spectrum, the East Asian development paradigm could be sub-divided into three categories: South Korea's “growth-obsessed” pattern (G); Singapore's “growth-with-stability” model (G-S); and Taiwan's “equity-and-stability-based growth” model (G-S-E). Largely derived from the deliberate political choice of a particular strategic path, each model of East Asia has materialized on the basis of strong developmentalist states. However, unlike the multi-goal options (G-S/G-S-E), as in Singapore and Taiwan, the mono-goal options ((G), as in Korea, could gain the chosen objective at considerable cost to the neglected dimensions. As a result, given a set of necessary political conditions, the multi-goal options are a better choice for Third World policy practitioners than are the mono-goal options.     

Dominance and change in the global computer industry: Military, bureaucratic, and network state developmentalisms

This article examines the conditions under which firms in different economies were able to emerge as significant actors in the global computer industry during different time periods. To achieve this, the article divides into three periods the history of the industry in terms of the three major policy regimes that have supported the dominant firms and regions. It argues that these policy regimes can be thought of as state developmentalisms that take significantly different forms across the history of the industry. U.S. firms’ dominance over their European counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s was underpinned by a system of “military developmentalism” where military agencies funded research, provided a market and developed infrastructure, but also demanded high quality products. The “Asian Tigers”—Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea—in the 1970s and 1980s were able to eclipse their Latin American and Indian rivals due in large part to the significant advantages offered by a highly effective system of “bureaucratic developmentalism,” where bureaucratic elites in key state agencies and leading business groups negotiated supports for export performance. The 1990s saw the emergence of a system of “network developmentalism” where countries such as Ireland and Israel were able to emerge as new nodes in the computer industry by careful economic and political negotiation of relations to the United States, reestablished at the center of the industry, and by more decentralized forms of provision of state support for high-tech development. Finally, the conditions under which new regimes can emerge are a consequence of the unanticipated global consequences of previous regimes. While state developmentalisms have been shaped by existing global regimes, they have promoted further and different rounds of industry globalization. Seán ó Riain is professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research has been primarily on the political economy of high-tech growth in Ireland and elsewhere, and on work and class politics among software developers. He is the author ofThe Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network, States in the Global Economy (Cambridge, 2004).     

Ideas in Exile: Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Failure to Transplant Historical Sociology into the United States

This paper examines the reasons for the variable incidence and differing forms of historical sociology in several different historical periods, with a focus on Germany and the USA. It examines the flows of social scientists between those two countries due to forced exile from Nazi Germany, the American military occupation after 1945, and the voluntary exchange of scholars. The article focuses on extrascientific determinants such as political support for historical scholarship and macrosocial crisis or stability, as well as determinants that are more proximate or internal to the scientific field, such as the ongoing struggle between different epistemologies and the ability of historical sociology to sequester itself into a protected subfield. Historical sociology was one of the two poles of German sociology before 1933, whereas historical sociology had only a handful of proponents in the USA at that time. After 1933, the majority of German historical sociologists went into exile, most of them to the USA. For reasons explored here, the historical orientation of these exiled intellectuals had little resonance in the USA until the 1970s. Rather than being epistemologically “domesticated” in the 1980s, as Calhoun (1996) argued, historical sociology established itself as a subfield that is large enough to produce an internal polarization between an autonomous pole that relates mainly to history and other external allies and a heteronomous pole that mimics the protocols that dominate the sociological discipline as a whole, including a neopositivist epistemology of “covering laws” and at attraction to rational choice theory and quantitative methods, or qualitative simulacra of multivariate statistical analysis. In Germany, historical sociology failed to survive the Nazi period. Several leading Weimar-era historical sociologists stayed in Germany after 1933 but were unable to reestablish their prominence either because of their Nazi collaboration or because their work was dismissed by a new generation trained during the Nazi period for presentist, policy-oriented, “American-style”, or else trained in the USA after the war. The handful of exiled historical sociologists who returned to Germany after 1945 were marginalized, stopped working historically, or moved into other disciplines like Political Science. The explanation of these trends has to be multicausal and conjunctural. The influx of historical sociologists to the USA from Germany was unable to produce a historicization of the discipline until 1970s, when positivist hegemony was challenged for other reasons. The crisis of Fordism undermined the social regularities that had made positivist “constant conjunctions” seem plausible and at the same time rendered historicist ontologies more plausible. The neo-Marxist historical sociology gave rise to a neo-institutionalist counter-trend, which was itself eventually countered by a culturalist and conjuncturalist turn (Adams et al. 2005). In Germany, however, the society-wide destabilization of Fordism did not lead to a historicization of sociology. The extinguishing of the Weimar-era historical school in sociology meant that only high theory and “American-style” empirical social research remained as vital options. As a result, the crisis of Fordism and the ensuing social discontinuities and complexities did not give rise to historical sociology but were felt mainly within theory (e.g., the “risk society” theory of Ulrich Beck).     

Reverse brain drain in South Korea: State-led model

Korea’s reverse brain drain (RBD) has been an organized government effort, rather than a spontaneous social phenomenon, in that various policies and the political support of President Park, Chung-Hee were instrumental in laying the ground work for its success. Particular features of Korea’s RBD policies are the creation of a conducive domestic environment (i.e., government-sponsored strategic R & D institution-building, legal and administrative reforms), and importantly, the empowerment of returnees (via, i.e., exceptionally good material benefits, guarantees of research autonomy). President Park played the cardinal role in empowering repatriates at the expense of his own civil bureaucracy, and his capacity for such patronage derived from Korea’s bureaucratic-authoritarian political system. Returning scientists and engineers directly benefited from this political system as well as Park’s personal guardianship. For Park, empowerment of returning “brains” was necessary to accomplish his national industrialization plan, thereby enhancing his political legitimacy in domestic politics. An alliance with the R & D cadre was functionally necessary to successfully consolidate strong presidential power, and politically non-threatening due to the particular form of “pact of domination” in Korea’s power structure. RBD in Korea will continue in the near future given Korea’s drive for high technology, and the remarkable expansion of local industrial and educational sectors. Korea’s future RBD, however, needs to pay closer attention to the following four problems: research autonomy; equality issues; skill-based repatriation of technicians and engineers rather than Ph.D.’s; and subsidies to small and medium industry for RBD. Bang-Soon L. Yoon is assistant professor of political science, Central Washington University. She is currently working onWorld Bibliographical Series: South Korea, to be published by Clio Press, Ltd., Oxford, England, co-edited with Michael A. Launius. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 18–20, 1991.     

Overcoming the past: De-communization and reconstruction of post-communist societies

In several of the central and eastern European nations, the fall of Communism has initiated a new round of political intolerance that threatens to destroy the foundations of their fragile democratic regimes. Campaigns of lustration (political “cleansing”) have imposed ideological tests for employment and political participation in the Balkan countries and in parts of the former Soviet Union. The small, poor nation of Albania has been especially seriously impacted by this atmosphere of vengeacean against ex-Communists and their families. Justified by the principles of destructive entitlement—reminiscent of ancient cultural rituals of blood retribution—journalists have been arrested, members of the opposition have been imprisoned, and University programs have been suspended. In response to Albania’s plight, and to a similar pattern of civil rights abuses in neighboring countries, social scientists have begun to analyze the powerful role played by the “past-in-the-present” in current reconstruction efforts. As Jurgen Habermas, Adam Michnik, Seymour Martins Lipset, and others have noted, a new “culture of forgiveness” may well be a necessary condition for the development of stable and authentic democratic societies in the region. Fatos Tarifa is currently at the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Tirana in 1985. He is director of the New Sociological Research Center (NSRC) in Tirana, Albania, and is the author of several books and journal articles, including a 1991 bookIn Search of the Sociological Fact (published in Albanian). Jay Weinstein is a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He has travelled widely in the Third World and in Central and Eastern Europe. Author of numerous books, journal articles, and chapters, he is currently working on a volume entitledSocial and Cultural Change: Social Science for a Dynamic World (forthcoming in 1997 by Allyn & Bacon Publishers).     

Compressed Development

In this paper we argue that the path of economic development for would-be developers has changed fundamentally since the 1980s. Focusing on East Asia, and taking a broad perspective that spans the economic and social dimensions of development, we contend that the path charted by the “late development” model has become all but impassible. The path is now better conceived as one of “compressed development.” Key differences are 1) the extent and consequences of compression; 2) the primary mode of engagement with the world economy—via global value chains; and 3) the interaction of these. Compressed development forces states to address a number of simultaneous challenges, resulting in “policy stretch.” We identify key features of an “adaptive state” suited to navigating the path of compressed development.     

Worlds Apart: Social Policy Regimes in Latin America

The region of Latin America exhibits significant diversity with regard to the size and scope of social protection programs. In this article, I propose a new way of measuring a country’s “social policy regime,” moving past expenditure-based conceptions of welfare provision to incorporate the coverage of programs. Employing this new measure, I use cluster analysis to demonstrate that Latin American social policy regimes cluster into four distinct categories. I then employ the comparative historical method to test a theory of why countries fall into each of these four categories. The analysis provides evidence that a country’s record of industrialization, the nature of political incorporation, and levels of ethnic and racial diversity are key determinants of the size and scope of Latin America’s social policy regimes.     

Luring,learning, and lobbying: The limits to capital mobility in the Dominican Republic

While Third World governments are advised and expected to establish their export processing zones (EPZs) near low-cost labor markets and modern transportation centers, the Dominican Republic’s oldest and most successful zones are located in the country’s relatively remote, high-cost interior. In this article I use qualitative and quantitative data: first, to explain the seemingly irrational EPZ location decision; second, to account for the seemingly paradoxical success of the country’s relatively high-cost secondary city EPZs; and third, to explore the puzzle’s implications for debates on industrial location, globalization, and the political economy of development policy. Andrew Schrank is an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University. He is currently completing a book on export diversification in the Dominican Republic. He is also collaborating on projects on the software industry in Mexico and a study of intellectual property rights in cross-national perspective. I would like to thank Stephen Bunker, Lawrence King, Marcus Kurtz, Denis O’Hearn, Kenneth Shadlen, members of the University of Chicago’s “Organizations and State-Building” workshop, participants in the Social Science Research Council’s “Rethinking Social Science Research on the Developing World” conference, and SCID’s reviewers for helpful comments. The research was undertaken with the assistance of the Institute of International Education.     

Incompetence, Noise, and Fear in Central-Local Relations in China

In this article, I analyze how the structure of the Chinese state affects the probability that local cadres will comply with the directives of the center. Because the Chinese state consists of a five-level hierarchy of dyadic principal-agent relationships, the existence of even moderate levels of routine incompetence and noise ensures that compliance will be less than perfect due to simple error. Moreover, because the center cannot perfectly differentiate between simple incompetence and willful disobedience, the structure of the state enables cadres to engage in strategic disobedience. I thus conclude that the complexity of the linkages between center and locality are a major factor in the observed persistence of corruption and institutional malfeasance. Andrew Wedeman is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His research focuses on the political economy of reform in China and specifically on the effects of corruption on development, both in China and elsewhere in the developing world. Recent publications include: “Budgets, Extra-Budgets, and Small Treasuries: The Utility of Illegal Monies”,Journal of Contemporary China; “Agency and Fiscal Dependence in Central-Provincial Relations in China”,Journal of Contemporay China; “Stealing from the Farmers: Institutional Corruption and the 1992 IOU Crisis”.China Quarterly and “Looters, Rent-Scrappers, and Dividend-Collectors: Corruption and Growth in Zaire, South Korea, and the Philippines”,The Journal of Developing Areas.     

Geopolitics and geoculture in world-systems theorizing: A review essay

This article discusses the strengths and weakness of world-system theorizing in the light of recent geopolitical changes and the emergence of new “shatter zones” in the world economy. It also examines the relationship between hegemonic social sciences and the crisis of the world-system. Thus, it argues, the idiographic tradition that emerged in the nineteenth century pushed us in the direction of specialization and micro-analysis at a time when a global perspective and comparative, interdisciplinary analysis could have offered deeper insights into the nature and direction of social and geopolitical change in the modern world. It also suggests that the nomothetic tradition which emerged in the 1960s is being revived in order to push us away from structuralist explanation and in the direction of atheoretical and quantitative analysis. The article concludes with a brief discussion on the organization and political problems confronting antisystemic movements in the modern world. Dr. James Mac laughlin is on the faculty of the geography department at University College, Cork, Ireland. His most recent publications include “Defending the Frontiers: The Political Geography of Race and Racism in the European Community” (1993) andEmigration and the Peripheralization of Ireland in the World Economy: A World-Perspective on Irish Emigration (1993).     

The institutional logic of small-firm economies in Italy and Taiwan

This article compares the small-firm economies of Taiwan and Italy, utilizing an institutional oganizational approach in the analysis of economic structures. It is divided into three sections. First, there is a presention of the main features of the Italian and the Taiwanese economies to draw out their distinctive similarities. The second part identifies a set of institutional factors which help us understand the similarities observed in the two economies, and classifies them along two analytical headings: individual values and social structure. The third section explores the significance of the author's crossnational comparison of small-firm economies for improving the status of an institutional theory of economic structures. By, emphasizing the role of institutional factors and the social embeddedness of economic activities in Italy and Taiwan, the article provides a corrective to the unilateral emphasis on an East versus West model of economic action and shows the obvious inadequacies of restrictively cultural, political, or economic interpretations of national economies. Marco, Orrù is assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Florida. Recent publications include “Patterns of Inter-Firm Control in Japanese Business” (Organization Studies, December 1989, 549–74) and “Organizational Isomorphism in East Asia” inThe New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis P. Dimaggio and W. Powell, eds., (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Dr. Orrù's research has also appeared inThe British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Forum, Japan'sFinancial Economic Review, and other professional journals. He is currently working on a monograph,Patterns of Asian Capitalism, co-authored with Gary G. Hamilton and Nicole Woolsey Biggart.     

The application of a reconnaissance strategy for identifying long-term problems for a Tanzanian farming systems project

Africa’s population is growing faster than its locally produced food supply. While some regions of the world wallow in production surpluses, neither the Green Revolution nor other production boosting strategies have sunk deep roots in Africa. As a result, there is an increasing food production shortfall and an ever larger dependence on outside food aid. In response, international development agencies are developing new strategies for tackling the seemingly intractable problems of African agriculture. One of these strategies is called the farming systems research and extension approach. This approach starts with the understanding that “African agriculture has probably been less affected by technology change in the past twenty years than agriculture on any other continent” (A.I.D., 1985). It continues by developing technical interventions which are advantageous within particular “recommendation domains” defined by both social and environmental conditions.