ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by segregating models and approaches into very broad categories having their modern theoretical and philosophical roots in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cultural causation may well be the most common assumed or explicit explanation for differential reward and punishment in multicultural societies—local, national, or global. It predates the heyday of development and modernization theory and underpins much of the latter. The concept of "interdependence" appears to encapsulate the tempered perspectives of the contemporary current in the harmonic interest approach. The great debate between those who assume harmonic interests—that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander—and those who see the gander getting more than his share little by little acquired a forum. The field of international political economy (IPE) has been said to constitute a synthesis of modernization and dependency approaches. The IPE agenda recaptures the scope of nineteenth-century social concerns for the purpose of addressing contemporary policy issues.
