Title:	Counting Populations, Understanding Societies
Authors:	Véronique Petit
Keywords:	Understanding Societies
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The discipline of population studies is at a crossroads. This challenges the way it has accumulated its corpus of knowledge – what has become its ‘conventional wisdom’. Over the post-war decades, we had gained a reasonably systematic and robust picture of macro-demographic trends, focusing on the causes and consequences of rapid population growth. To this end, the discipline also built a massive empirical and theoretical knowledge base on a key driver of natural increase, fertility and family formation. But, swept to one side, relatively speaking, were other critical questions that throw more light on processes covarying with demographic change, namely, the transformation of cultures, societies and economies. Even within demography itself, there was far less focus on population structures than on dynamics. As a net result, there was a relative neglect of many aspects of population and development. Furthermore, it has become clear that the classical population and development models are too often unidirectional and deterministic and assume almost an unchanging initial state. But critical historical analyses, including new studies in historical demography in Africa and elsewhere, are eroding those comfortable but unrealistic assumptions. In reality populations, technology, politics, societies and economies have always been dynamic, not just awaiting the muni fi cence of colonialism or, post-colonially, of the ‘Washington Consensus’ agencies. The reason that this now provides a challenge for researchers is simple and driven by its subject matter: people, in both the developing and developed world, are not behaving the way they had over recent decades. So, the universe that demography has been measuring, mapping and explaining for the decades since 1945 must be complemented by new agendas and methodologies grounded in new paradigms. This book is the fi rst in a series that takes up this challenge. The series offers a seminal platform on which empirical results representative of emerging paradigms, as well as the leading-edge methodologies and theories that underpin them, can be communicated to a wider scholarly community. Broadly speaking, it provides the vehicle for the exposition of new paradigms – and new substantive knowledge – about population and development. These could range from macro-level approaches that focus on aspects of composition, such as those on the demographic dividend, to anthropological and other micro-level approaches that show, inter alia , how decision-making occurs. Moreover, the series recognises that the traditional boundaries between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ are becoming increasingly blurred, so, though this series is oriented towards the latter, it cannot exclude populations in developed countries and in former Soviet societies in transition. It thus implicitly accepts the effects of globalisation on individuals and communities, perhaps most manifest in those migrating between different global regions.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51343
ISBN:	978-94-007-5046-3
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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