4.2.6 - Education, Employment and Health in Development
Development is not just about how much money a country produces. Sociologists are interested in whether people can gain education, find secure and meaningful work, and live long, healthy lives. The topic brings together theory, inequality, global power and evaluation: education, employment and health can drive development, but they can also reproduce dependency and social inequality.
Education and development
Modernisation theory treats education as a major engine of development. From this view, schooling does more than teach reading and writing. It helps create a workforce with the skills needed for economic growth, spreads values such as achievement and planning, and prepares people for participation in a modern economy.
Human capital
The skills, knowledge, and training that individuals gain through education and experience, which can increase productivity and economic growth.
Parsons — argued that education helps move societies towards universalistic standards, where people are judged more by achievement than by ascribed status. Modernisation theorists see this as important because industrial and post-industrial economies need literate, trained, adaptable workers rather than labour organised only by tradition or kinship. In this sense, education is tied to both economic change and value change.
This helps explain why education appears so prominently in development policy and in the Sustainable Development Goals. Expanding literacy, universal primary schooling, and access to education for girls are seen as ways to increase life chances, raise productivity, and strengthen citizenship. Sen (1999) pushes this further by arguing that education is a capability in itself: it expands people’s freedom to make choices, not just their usefulness to employers.
Dependency theory is much more critical. It argues that education systems in poorer countries have often been shaped by colonial histories and global inequalities. Rather than simply promoting development, schooling can reproduce dependence by rewarding Western languages, Western knowledge, and qualifications linked to global labour markets.
Cultural imperialism
The process through which the values, ideas, and institutions of powerful societies are imposed on less powerful societies, often making Western ways of thinking seem normal or superior.
From this perspective, Western-style schooling may weaken local cultures, create local elites who identify more with global institutions than with their own communities, and channel the most successful students out of the country altogether. That is where the idea of brain drain becomes important: if a country funds the education of doctors, engineers, and teachers who later migrate to richer states, the gains from education are partly transferred abroad.
Gender also matters here. Access to schooling is never evenly distributed. Where girls are more likely to be withdrawn from school early, expected to do domestic labour, or married young, education cannot play the same developmental role. So sociologists do not just ask whether schools exist. They ask who gets access, what quality of education is available, and whose interests the curriculum serves.
A government may increase girls’ school enrolment and improve literacy rates, which can later support lower infant mortality, delayed marriage, and higher earnings. However, if the best-qualified graduates then leave for work abroad, or if rural schools remain badly resourced, the developmental gains are uneven and fragile.
Employment and globalisation
Employment is another key aspect of development because it affects income, status, identity, and the tax base that funds public services. Modernisation approaches often describe development as a structural shift from agricultural work to industrial production and then towards service-sector employment. In principle, this suggests rising productivity and a more complex economy.
In practice, the pattern is less smooth. Many developing countries have seen growth in insecure urban work rather than stable industrial employment. A large share of workers survive through the informal economy rather than through secure, regulated jobs.
Informal economy
Economic activity that is not covered, or is insufficiently covered in law or practice, by formal arrangements such as registration and social protection. Street vending or casual work may be examples; informal does not mean every activity lacks all legal rights.
The informal economy can provide livelihoods where formal jobs are scarce, but it also exposes workers to insecurity, low pay, and little legal protection. This means that employment growth on paper does not automatically mean rising life chances.
Globalisation has intensified this problem. Transnational corporations can divide production across countries, placing the labour-intensive stages where wages are lowest. This is the global assembly line. It includes factory sweatshops, outsourced office work, and logistics systems that rely on tightly controlled, low-cost labour. Supporters argue that such jobs may still be better than subsistence agriculture or no paid work at all. Critics respond that workers often enter them from a position of weak bargaining power, so the jobs reproduce exploitation rather than overcoming underdevelopment.
Guy Standing (2011) — argued that a growing share of workers now belong to the precariat rather than to a stable working class.
Precariat
A group of workers in insecure, low-paid, short-term employment, with little social protection, few employment rights, and weak long-term career prospects.
Standing’s concept is useful because it shifts attention from the quantity of jobs to their quality. A country can report rising employment while many workers still have unstable hours, unsafe conditions, and no predictable future. Feminist sociology adds that women are often concentrated in the lowest-paid export and care work, while also carrying unpaid domestic labour, so employment patterns can deepen gender inequality even when labour-force participation rises.
An export-processing zone may bring foreign investment and thousands of factory jobs for young women. Yet if those jobs involve long hours, low wages, anti-union rules, and dismissal when workers become pregnant, employment growth is being built on precarious labour rather than on equal and secure development.
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