Development and Social Change : A Global Perspective

DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE, Fifth Edition

In his Fifth Edition, author Philip McMichael examines the project of globalization and its instabilities (climate, energy, food, financial crises) through the lens of development. The book continues to help students make sense of a complex world in transition and explains how globalization became part of public discourse. Filled with case studies, this text makes the intricacies of globalization concrete, meaningful, and clear for students and moves them away from simple social evolutionary views, encouraging them to connect social change, development policies, global inequalities and social movements. The book challenges students to see themselves as global citizens whose consumption decisions have real social and ecological implications.

Philip McMichael grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, completing undergraduate degrees in economics and in political science at the University of Adelaide. After traveling in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and doing community work in Papua New Guinea, he pursued his doctorate in sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has taught at the University of New England (New South Wales), Swarthmore College, and the University of Georgia, and he is presently Emeritus Professor of Global Development at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. Other appointments include Visiting Senior Research Scholar in International Development at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College) and Visiting Scholar, School of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Queensland.

His book Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia (1984) won the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial Award in 1985. In addition to authoring Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), McMichael edited The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (1994), Food and Agrarian Orders in the World Economy (1995), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (2005) with Frederick H. Buttel, Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010), The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change (2011) with Jun Borras and Ian Scoones, and Finance or Food? The Role of Cultures, Values and Ethics in Land Use Negotiations, with Hilde Bjørkhaug and Bruce Muirhead (2020).