Tanisha Trehan, IILM University, Gurugram
ABSTRACT
Social change has historically been linked to "development challenges" that took place in "developing nations" in the social and communication sciences. Social transformation has only recently become a major concern on a worldwide scale, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because of this, there have been several paradigmatic shifts in the study of communication for development and social change. The new traditions of discourse are characterised by a shift towards local communities as targets for research and debate, on the one hand, and the quest for understanding the nuanced relationships between globalisation and localization, on the other. This is true of everything from the modernization and growth theory to the dependency approach and the multiplicity or participatory model. The "global" world of the early twenty-first century, in general, as well as its unique regional, national, and local entities, is facing crises on many different fronts, including economic and financial, social, cultural, intellectual, moral, political, ethnic, ecological, and security. Because of the increasing interdependence of regions, nations, and communities in a globalised world, previously held traditional modernization and dependency attitudes have become more challenging to uphold. We can conclude from the reconceptualizations and reorientations of development and social change that took place in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that while income, productivity, and gross national product (GNP) are still crucial components of human development, they do not constitute the entirety of human existence. This not only has significant consequences for how we view societal change and development, but it also offers potential for how we view the function of communication in these processes.
Keywords: development, developing nations, developing challenges, globalization, modernization.
