This paper extends theory and research concerning cultural models of development beyond family and demographic matters to a broad range of additional factors, including government, education, human rights, daily social conventions, and religion. Developmental idealism is a cultural model—a set of beliefs and values—that identifies the appropriate goals of development and the ends for achieving these goals. It includes beliefs about positive cause and effect relationships among such factors as economic growth, educational achievement, health, and political governance, as well as strong values regarding many attributes, including economic growth, education, small families, gender equality, and democratic governance. This cultural model has spread from its origins among the elites of northwest Europe to elites and ordinary people throughout the world. Developmental idealism has become so entrenched in local, national, and global social institutions that it has now achieved a taken-for-granted status among many national elites, academics, development practitioners, and ordinary people around the world. We argue that developmental idealism culture has been a fundamental force behind many cultural clashes within and between societies, and continues to be an important cause of much global social change. We suggest that developmental idealism should be included as a causal factor in theories of human behavior and social change.
Lay people around the world are aware of many global cultural scripts, but the specific pathways through which they are exposed to global and competing scripts remain abstract. I address this theoretical issue through an analysis in contemporary Malawi. I show how transnational organizations promoted media content laden with global scripts denouncing violence against women, while foreign media entertainment organizations spread and inspired content that normalized violence. Exposure to these unique media sources influenced people’s attitudes in opposite directions. Global and competing scripts both may be diffused within the same general source of information and have distinct effects.
This study focuses on attitudes related to fulfilling family obligations and their relationships to migration behavior. We hypothesize that men who highly value fulfilling family obligations will be more likely to migrate in order to fulfill material obligations while women who highly value fulfilling family obligations will be less likely to migrate in order to fulfill care obligations. The empirical analysis examines data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study, located in south-central Nepal. We test whether variation in how much individuals value putting family needs before individual needs and caring for their adult parents matter for whether they migrate at all and if so, to which specific destinations. Our results provide only moderate support for these hypotheses but uncover patterns in how these attitudes toward family obligations are related to migration destinations. Men with strong attitudes toward family obligations are more likely to migrate internationally but especially to nearby India, sacrificing some level of economic returns for proximity. For women, the effect of attitudes is consistent: putting family needs first is negatively related to migration, while caring for adult parents is positively related to migration to India but not domestic or other international destinations. The findings suggest that our conventional typology of gendered labor and gender expectations for masculine breadwinning and feminine care might too strictly dichotomize the reality of how people actually care and provide for their families, obfuscating how they negotiate these competing demands.
In this article, we investigate the influences of material aspirations on migration in Nepal, positing that material aspirations may have important influences on decisions to migrate and where to locate. We discuss a theoretical model explaining how these aspirations might be key influences in the migration decision. Using detailed continuous migration histories from the 2008-2012 Chitwan Valley Family Study, we estimate logistic and alternative-specific conditional logit models to examine how material aspirations in Nepal influence migration rates and destinations. Our empirical analyses provide strong evidence that material aspirations have large effects on overall rates of migration and affect destination-specific migration rates, particularly for relatively wealthy Western and Asian destinations. We also show an interaction effect between material aspirations and destination-specific expected earnings in influencing people's migration choices. It is the people with high aspirations who migrate to destinations with high earning potentials.
The study of social capital has been one of the strongest areas of recent advance in migration research, but there are still many questions about how it works and why it has varying effects in studies of different places. In this article, we address the contextual variation in social capital’s effects on migration by considering migration brokers. We argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers, in turn, substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks. Our empirical tests in Nepal support this narrative, showing that social networks matter for migration to destinations where brokers are not available and have little discernible effect on migration to brokered destinations. Our results suggest that migration research should consider the growing role of brokerage agencies, that theorizations of social capital more broadly must contend with how it is delimited by brokers, and that social scientists might also consider other consequences that can arise from these migration brokers that are increasingly common in many countries and provide a marketized replacement for social capital in some cases.
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