ABSTRACT
The content and theoretical orientation of undergraduate geography courses tackling 'Third World' development issues have been transformed considerably over recent years. The end of the Cold War and the continuing struggles over the direction of the New World Order now emerging from its ashes, together with the much discussed, if seldom specified, phenomena of globalization, have fundamentally transformed the international political and economic environment within which developing societies find themselves. This chapter focuses initially upon a range of Marxist-influenced perspectives which came to dominate geographical discussion of development from the early 1970s. The fundamental ideas about development that underpinned this new academic and political interest in the non-Western world were largely derived from two bodies of theory. Sociological modernization theory owes much to Talcott Parsons' theories of evolutionary social change that were based around the ideas of adaptive specialization and changing value systems.
