Breaking down the question
This twelve-mark note asks you to discuss two concepts that are usually posed against each other in the sociology of change: development and dependency. The phrasing invites you to explain how the dependency perspective reframed the very idea of development. Where modernisation theory treated development as a stage every society climbs towards, dependency theorists argued that the poverty of the periphery is actively produced by its relationship with the rich core.
The examiner wants conceptual clarity and a sense of the intellectual debate. A good answer contrasts the two paradigms, presents the core claims of dependency theory, and shows awareness of its critics. Because this belongs to the study of social change, you should present dependency not merely as an economic argument but as a sociological account of unequal global relationships.
How to approach it
Begin by stating the modernisation view of development so that dependency has something to react against. Then define dependency theory and its central proposition — that underdevelopment is a created condition, not an original one. Introduce Frank's metropolis–satellite chains and the striking phrase development of underdevelopment, then broaden to Wallerstein's world-systems framing of core and periphery. Note the critiques and close with an assessment. Link this discussion to your wider notes on the theories of social change.
Model answer
Development, in the dominant post-war framework of modernisation theory, was understood as a progressive movement from tradition to modernity — an internal transition that every society could accomplish by adopting rational institutions, industrial technology and achievement-oriented values. Underdevelopment was seen as an original state of backwardness that development would gradually cure.
Dependency theory, emerging from Latin American scholarship in the 1960s, inverted this picture. Its central claim is that underdevelopment is not an original condition but a produced one — the direct outcome of the way poor regions have been incorporated into the world capitalist economy. Andre Gunder Frank argued that the world is organised into chains of metropolis and satellite relationships through which the metropolis extracts economic surplus from the satellite. The same regions that appear underdeveloped are in fact actively underdeveloped by this drain, giving us his celebrated formulation, the development of underdevelopment. Paul Baran had earlier shown how colonial extraction blocked the emergence of an autonomous capitalist path in the colonies.
Immanuel Wallerstein reworked these insights into world-systems theory, dividing the global economy into core, periphery and semi-periphery, bound together by unequal exchange. The prosperity of the core and the poverty of the periphery are, on this view, two faces of a single integrated system rather than separate national conditions.
Dependency theory has been criticised for economic determinism, for underplaying internal class structures, and for pessimism about growth, since several East Asian economies later industrialised while remaining deeply linked to the world market. Yet it retains real sociological force. It shifted attention from internal cultural deficits to external structural relationships, and it insists that development and underdevelopment are relational — the wealth of some societies is historically tied to the impoverishment of others.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner is testing whether you grasp the paradigm clash rather than merely reciting definitions. Answers that oppose modernisation and dependency directly, and then name Frank's metropolis–satellite chain and Wallerstein's core–periphery, read as informed and current. Including at least one crisp critique — the East Asian counter-example is the strongest — demonstrates balance and prevents the note from becoming a partisan tract. Within twelve marks, the winning strategy is a taut contrast plus one memorable phrase precisely attributed.