ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on exactly the importance of structure-building for development-oriented activities. Quite often, modernization of traditional agricultural societies is interpreted as if it were reducible to technological progress. Rapid economic and social progress is expected to occur as an immediate consequence of “introducing” a modern “technical package” into a subsistence type of agriculture. Social development is essentially a continuous process through which humanity has invented new forms of social organization. Various groups have developed their organizations at different speeds, thus achieving different degrees of productive capabilities and cultural complexity, and have reached corresponding levels of historical progress. In the final analysis, the difference between informal and formal peasant organizations is largely a matter of the degree of organizational complexity and of the social awareness and social ability of the prospective members to organize themselves in order to achieve definite production (and other) goals.
