More and more often, we tend to affirm, or in some instances deny the importance of "the social aspects" of development planning. But what do—and should—we really mean by that expression? So often, recently, I have been invited to talk "in general" usually about "the social aspect" that sometimes I find myself responding by saying: I don't believe there is such a thing so why should we waste our time discussing it? By this, I do not wish to do myself or my disciplinary--and other--colleagues in development sociology out of a job. Least of all, would I wish the field to be yielded to another single discipline, that is devoted to "the economic aspects."
If economics has been more fruitful of generalizations about behavior that can be put to practical use than, say, has sociology or political science, this may be, as it has been considered locally, because the sectors in which economics has made the greatest advance "...are precisely (those which are) the least human. Economics stands at the point of man's interaction with nature, not other men, and it borrows its predictability from the inanimate side of its subject matter." However, postures of this kind, whatever their truth, smack also of the kind of disciplinary partisanship which they decry. The other social sciences, as well as economics, also study human relationships and their manipulations and exploitations of scarce, and not so scarce, resources--such as physical space, communal property, social prestige, and not least, human organisms themselves and their sensual and other attributes.