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The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society, by Hemant Shah. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011. 218pp. $69.50 cloth. ISBN: 9781439906248.
Widely known as "the Bible of moderniza- tion theory," Daniel Lerner's 1958 book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, continues to haunt academic and political debates. In The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society, Hemant Shah explains why that is the case, in an account grounded in thorough and exten- sive research, drawing on a variety of insti- tutional, archival, and personal sources.
The book is well written and clearly orga- nized. Four chapters tackle Lemer's ideas and work in the various institutional settings of his career, with Chapter Two exploring Lerner's work at the Psychological Warfare Division, Chapter Three his work at Stanford, Chapter Four his tenure at Columbia, and Chapter Five his years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The concluding and sixth chapter explains the remarkable lon- gevity of Lerner's ideas. The book's central contribution is its deep and nuanced telling of "how Passing of Traditional Society came together-historically, intellectually, geopo- litically, culturally-... and then considers the extent to which Lerner's ideas influ- enced development communication as an academic field" (p. 8).
Based on approximately three hundred surveys conducted in 1951 and 1952 in each of Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Syria, Lerner elaborated a social-psychologi- cal theory of modernization in which people were classified in one...