Critical Issues in Community Development

About the Book

The book is a critical analysis of fundamental issues in Urban and rural community development. It aims at filling the gap in the paucity of books in Rural and urban Sociology hence its subtitle “An introduction to urban and Rural Sociology”. It approaches the issue from the area of stratification and social inequality and dwelt in large part on the human variables in the rural and urban communities. The major aim is to lay bare the impediments to the development of the rural dwellers and the urban poor. It carefully find a correlation between the activities of Elites in the fields of politics,intellectuals and the power class and the plight of the urban poor, women,and rural dwellers. Though it did not produce a chapter on “what is to be done” but this is implied in the text in every chapter that the solution to the problem is not an appeal to the benevolence of the elites to allow the poor to have access to the crumbles falling from their tables, but that the affected should take the bull by the horns and develop themselves through many methods - political independence, economic emancipation through cooperatives and the like.

About the Author

Dr Ogunnika obtained his doctorate degree from the prestigious New School for Social Research where he was introduced to critical thinking and social analysis by the renowned professors Stanford Lyman and Arthur Vidich. He also attended the New York University where he obtained the Masters degree in Sociology. He benefited a lot from his long time professor and friend, Professor Akinsola Akiwowo, who imbibed in him the sprit of unification of the ideographic and nomothetic methodologies in social science through the"indigenism" (Akiwowo's project) method of sociological perspective. Dr Ogunnika believes in methodological hybridization in opposition to methodological monism in the positivistic sense. He is presently a full professor at Virginia State University, Petersburg. He has published widely in the ares of Methods, Theories,Organization Ethnic and Race, Urban and Rural, Stratification and Inequality. He is presently the Editor of "International Journal for Social Science Research and Practice" and has served in the editorial board of "International Journal for Culture, Politics and Society".