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Cultural Patterns of Labor and Latin-American Industrialization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2018
Extract
Social and cultural patterns in under-developed areas are being altered as industrialization occurs. For most of the peoples in these areas, industrialization means not only a new economic system, but also new patterns of non-economic behavior often sharply divergent from the old. Thus, the problem of economic development is not confined to establishing improved sources of productivity. It also concerns the ways in which a society will react and accommodate itself to the exigencies of economic change.
Until the end of World War Two, very little consideration was given to the implications of industrial development on the structure of society. The disregard of variables such as political systems, value systems, etc., has meant a change in the relationship between economic and social life, causing old cultures and social systems to collapse, and a rise in the resistance of the members of these societies to the advances of industrialization. The end result was that general improvement in living standards was not attained and a profound dislike for the foreigner was developed.
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- Copyright © University of Miami 1963
References
1 The rural population of Latin America ranges from 38 per cent of the total population in Argentina to 82 per cent in the Caribbean. In most other countries the per cent of rural population accounts for more than 60 per cent of the total. Demographic Yearbook, United Nations, 1950.
2 Parsons, Talcott, The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1951).Google Scholar The concept of social systems is similar to the concept of systems in the physical sciences, where there is more concern with the relationships between the units than with the internal structure of the unit. What a unit does in relation to the other units in context of the structure of the system is called the unit's role. The differentiation of role types also reflects differentiations among cultural patterns.
3 Parsons, pp. 66-67.
4 Ibid., p. 177.
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6 “Indigenous persons are descendants of the aboriginal population living in a given country at the time of the settlement or conquest by some ancestors of the non-indigenous groups in whose hands political and economic power at present lies … In general, these descendants tend to live more in conformity with the social, economic and cultural institutions which existed before the conquest … they do not fully share in the national economy and culture owing to barrier of language, customs, creed, prejudice … they lead a tribal or semi-tribal existence.” ILO Conference, Living and Working Conditions of Indigenous Populations in Independent Countries, Geneva, 1955, p. 47.
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8 When we analyze the social structure of this group we must take into consideration not only the group itself but other people who do not belong to the group, yet who shape the behavior of those who are subordinated to them. We refer here to the landlord's family and administrative staff.
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18 Strong kinship ties are the cause of the great rate of absenteeism. People leave their work to visit their homes or return to their communities to observe religious holidays.
19 John Collier, op. cit.