The Department of Development Sociology prides itself in having a unique program profile that is unmatched by any other departments of sociology in the nation. The integrated package of scholarship on development, environment, population and community is its distinguishing characteristic and comparative advantage. The department is shaped by a concern for understanding the determinants and consequences of societal development, and driven by a desire to produce knowledge and educational programs that contribute to the alleviation of social problems, both local and global.
Our institutional location in a college of agriculture within a major research university demands that our scholarship be responsive to both disciplinary concerns and to the social issues of particular interest to the College. Our guiding principle is to produce theoretically grounded and practical scholarship. Both motivations—disciplinary and mission-oriented—are of equal importance in shaping our scholarship. They have resulted in a program profile unmatched by any other department of sociology. This integrated package of scholarship on development, environment, population, and community is our distinguishing characteristic, and our comparative advantage among American departments of sociology.
The Department's teaching, research, and extension programs address the determinants and consequences of societal development, with particular reference to the areas of environment, community, governance and population. Hence, there is a logic to our faculty recruitment, research problem choices, and graduate and undergraduate curricula. We are an academic unit that has developed over time in response to both theoretical and methodological issues in the discipline of sociology, applied issues of concern to Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and our mission as a global land grant university.
Department Intellectual Project
The Department's core intellectual orientation, development sociology, is as central to the discipline of sociology as it is to the mission of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Development Sociology is rooted substantively in classical sociological theory. Sociology emerged in nineteenth century Europe as a disciplinary concern with the social conditions attending the transition from agrarian to industrial society. As peasantries and rural craftspeople, undermined by commercial forces, migrated into industrial towns, new social arrangements and pathologies arose, demanding social analysis and reform. These theoretical and applied dimensions of social change together define the lineages of the sociological project. The Department of Development Sociology addresses both dimensions in its programmatic thrusts.
Societal modernization is a master narrative of recent European history. It is framed by the concept of 'development.' Development involves questions concerning the direction, organization, and cohesion of market society. As a model of European social change, the concept of development emerged through comparison with the non-European and/or colonial world, understood to be at an earlier phase on a continuum of development (giving rise to the current lexicon of 'developed' and 'developing societies'). Through this comparison, the concept of development came to describe local change within a global or comparative context. And this is precisely the kind of orientation that governs the intellectual discourse and purpose of the faculty in the Department of Development Sociology.
Our faculty distribute across the local and global dimensions of development with a variety of foci, such as community sustainability, agricultural reorganization, population dynamics, life course transitions, labor market transformations, gender relations, institutional restructuring, and environmental change.