Traveling with the GDP Through Early Development Economics' History
In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by travelling with the GDP through this discourse. The GDP has been contested as an indicator of economic development ever since it was first put to use in the 1940s. However, the specific mode of knowledge which is expressed in this abstraction has opened up a quite universally shared frame of reference in which a North-South-Divide became operational. The paper argues that GDP figures have become facts that travel easily across the globe because constant work is being undertaken to uphold the conditions for their mobility. Based on this observation the development endeavour can be located historically in a manifold constellation of the statistical acquisition of economic insight, political utopia, state intervention, the emerging prospect of economic planning in capitalist and noncapitalist systems and the quest for the international standardization of economic knowledge production.
'On a Mission' with Mutable Mobiles
The task of economic planning in the new nation of Nigeria in the early 1960s tested the limits of economic technologies: its recipes for development, its possibilities of measurement, and from differences in political economy. These dimensions of the problem beset not only the Nigerian politicians and civil servants but an array of international experts: each on their own mission to make the new economy. This story of mutable mobiles is revealed in the detailed diary entries of the economist Wolfgang Stolper - a man “on a mission”, for he was charged with making “the plan”. This first Nigerian economic plan was a mobile document that cycled around a changing circle of civil servants and politicians and only gathered powerful allies amongst them because of the mutability its elements. This mutability rested on a combination of decentralized knowledge and on regional democratic preferences. And, to make a plan that would gain acceptance outside the centre of calculation, these local facts and choices had to be made consistent with each other and with the projected future of the economy as a whole. This is where economic theory came in: it created a consistency between the current and future economy so that future facts - fictions - and current facts made good travelling companions for each other in their circulations around the political and economic community.
Comparative Industrial Sociology and the Convergence Hypothesis
Industrial sociology grew spectacularly after World War II, concentrating on three areas: workers' relations with each other, their managers, and their unions; the social organization of the factory; and the impact of technology on social systems extending from the factory to the society. Unable to sus­ tain leadership in all of these areas, industrial sociology shrivelled as other fields invaded its domains. Human relations became the ideological property of the business schools; labor economics maintained its grip on industrial relations; industry-community relations waned as interest in community power soared; industrial organizations were absorbed into the study of com­ plex organizations; occupational sociology maintained research impetus in labor force analysis; and the sociology of the economy dominated the study of industry's institutional relationships. Industrial sociology survived on remnants: worker-machine relationships (job satisfaction, alienation, un­ employment), organizational responses to technological changes. and a bit of working-class ethnology. Enduring interest in technology, however, en­ abled industrial sociology to take part in sociology's expanding interest in comparative studies.