Social structure and transformation: changing relations within the Malayan social formation

Abstract

As the call for the New International economic order takes an important role among third world countries, the United Nations enter the development decade of the 80's and the country Malaysia about to embark its fourth development plan, the developmentalist perspective in social science and development studies which provides the predominant mode of interpreting social change and social structure in todays world has come in for increasing criticism. This perspective is simply the latest variant of the classic debates on inequality which during the 18 century Enlightenment, picked up by most 19th and 20th century thought-systems, was centered on the assumption of progress, reformulated later as evolution. Evolution was interpreted as the process of moving from an imperfect unequal allocation of privileges and resources to some version of equality, Eventhough there was agreement on how to define equality, it was not the case for who or what were the obstacles to this desired state of equality. until today the fundamental discord about how to restructure, reconstruct or transform (1) society to the desired future takes the form of either gradualism or revolution.