Tradition and change in a Turkish town

Descripción

Modernization is the stated theme of this book, employing "a general orientation to the study . .. which has been borrowed from Smelser (1968)." The town is Susurluk in the Aegean region of Turkey, a subprovincial seat in the province of Balikesir. Two periods of the town's past are described: the first, the years from Ataturk's revolution in the 1920s to the introduction of the government-owned beet sugar refinery in the middle 1950s, and the second, the period since the building of the refinery. In the tradition of Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society, the first period is used as a baseline and modernization is seen as the changes which have taken place in occupation, social roles, family life, educational institutions, and religious beliefs largely during the second period. A year of fieldwork, a working knowledge of Turkish, and previous study of the history, economics, and politics of Turkey give Magnarella a background from which to describe the changes he sees and to illustrate the tragedy he feels for the developing "Culture of Discontent" brought on by these same changes. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Dec. 1, 2016).