ABSTRACT
The time is past in social science when the spread of industrialization and its social concomitant of modernization meant the turning of the world's cultural variety into a single gray mass of industrialized workers in a bureaucratic state. The significant and theoretically interesting questions about modernization have grown from a considerable body of research literature. Modern society is necessarily an unfinished business and continues to change, and different societies change in differing aspects and sequences over time. Modernization is viewed in many new nations of Asia and Africa as too important and urgent a transformation to be left to historical change or to the vagaries of cultural diffusion. The spheres of technology and economic organization, even more divergence between modern and modernizing societies may be confidently expected. The professional standards of occupation groups are generalized across national boundaries, and the technocratic definition of how to modernize, along with supranational ideologies for the shape of modern society will conduce to convergence.
