Introduction

Problems of development have always looked quite different from the perspective of the economists' fraternity than from the sociologists'. There are many reasons for this; not least important is the fact that the real world's decision-makers have always turned to economists for diagnosis of their countries' ills and for advice on how to overcome them. 'Applied economics' is a good deal more respectable (and popular) than 'applied sociology', and outside the field of the social services and industrial relations not many professional sociologists are concerned with practical problems. While development economists have often incorporated their own 'do-it-yourself' sociology, ¹ little attention has been paid to sociological models of development, and sociologists have been conspicuously absent from planning offices, certainly at the higher levels.