ABSTRACT
In the discourse of development, until recently, more often than not, development has been viewed as other-centered, i.e., development is more of a concern that pertains to the developing world. Historically, in the development field, societies were viewed from a deficit perspective as opposed to from a strength perspective. Societies were classified as developed, underdeveloped, and least developed; or first world, second world, and third world. As suggested by Ramanathan and Link (1999, 2004), language is power. There is a definite need to rethink categorizing nation-states in value-laden terms that devalue a whole group of people. This is true when we categorize groups of people living in a particular human condition as “Third World.” This classification is based on certain indicators and a political decision was arrived at by leaving out other indicators to classify people. We may want to question the rationale we use to classify societies based on gross national product (GNP), leaving aside per capita deaths as a result of domestic violence and/or hand gun deaths. Further, when GNP alone is used as an indicator it excludes unpaid contributions of millions of women across the globe who are working in informal labor markets, such as home, village, farming, and markets, devaluing their labor disproportionately to that of men (Ramanathan & Link, 1999). Therefore, we believe that continuing to classifysocieties solely based on GNP could be attributed to latent neo-colonial tendencies among policies of some advanced economies, encouraging social technology flow was viewed with a unidirectional perspective, from advanced economies to developing economies. Therefore, it may be useful to reflect on the purpose of classifying societies.
