This is a short excerpt out of a paper on modernization. What I find interesting is that most of the factors listed at the end of the quote can also be associate with individualistic societies and those associated with "traditional" societies can be associated with collectivist societies.
Tipps, Dean C. (1973). “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(2), 199-226 (Citations omitted, emphasis added)Most modernization theorists have opted instead for a second method, choosing to set their definitions within the larger conceptual framework provided by the ‘dichotomous’ approach. Nowhere is the influence of nineteenth century evolutionary theory more evident than here. Through the device of ideal-type contrasts between attributes of tradition and modernity, modernization theorists have done little more than to summarize with the assistance of Parsons’ pattern variables and some ethnographic updating, earlier efforts by men such as Maine, Tönnies, Durkheim, and others in the evolutionary tradition to conceptualize the transformation of societies in terms of a transition between polar types of the status-contract, Gemeinshaft-Gesellschaft variety. Modernization, then, becomes a transition, or rather a series of transitions from primitive, substance economies to technology-intensive, industrialized economies; from [political] subject to participant political cultures; from closed, ascriptive status systems to open, achievement oriented systems; from extended to nuclear kinship units; from religious to secular ideologies; and so on. Thus conceived, modernization is not simply a change, but one which is defined in terms of the goals toward which it is moving.
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