essay about change in society

Essay on the Impacts of Shopping

by Vishav (Punjab)

I scored 6 in my writing, but I need minimum 7 band. Please check my essay, it will be very helpful for me. Shopping is becoming more and more popular as a leisure activity. However, some people feel that this has both positive and negative effects. Why is shopping so popular? What effects does its increase in popularity have on individuals and on society? In free time, people spend most of the time in purchasing something in showrooms or markets. Although, every person have different opinion on shopping and some believe that shopping works as a stress buster and it helps in keeping us up-to-date in market. But, I believe shopping leads to a problem because people buy lot more Unnecessary things and till the end they stuck in financial problems. On the one hand, Shopping is very much famous in terms of passing time. There are many reasons behind this, like weather conditions in these days are very unpredictable. So, people spend most of the time in window shopping in multi-brand malls where air conditions works for 24 by 7 in case of summers and heaters in season of winters. In recent research,it was found that every weekend cloths outlets are earning 5 times more than weekdays. On the other hand, increment in popularity of shopping has effected tragically to the many people and leads to weaken the social life of individuals. Earlier people used to meet each other in free time; So, that time they were socially very much active. But, now people spend time in purchasing things on their credit cards which turns out to be another problem for them. According to an article of New York times, 20% of suicide cases were due to financial crises which arisen because of loans taken for person needs. In conclusion, I believe we should not spend our precious time into shopping and instead of that an individual can go out for travel and spend less time and money in shopping. In this way, people will be able to make better social life yet money will spent in traveling but it will also release stress and motivate to work more and earn.

Essay on Change

by Svetlana (Russian Federation)

Some people prefer to spend lives doing the same things and avoiding change. Others, however, think that change is always a good thing. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion. It is true that people perceive change in different ways. Some members of the community believe that change is always for the better, while others think otherwise. Those who are in favor of change may argue that it poses a possibility for a particular person to improve him- or herself, both mentally and socially. From the mental perspective, changes relating to traveling and receiving education help one broaden one's mind and learn something new. As for the social perspective - it is empathy for others that he or she may acquire after suffering changes in his or her private life, because it is known that those who experienced various changes in relationships with their family or acquaintances may then better understand other people's feelings. This way, change improves not only person's mental, but also social and private aspect. In contrast, those who avoid changes point out the difficulties to readapt to them that many people experience. For instance, some large companies, Finnair for example, practice giving professional psychological and medicine support to those employees who were sacked due to companies' structural changes. Apparently, such policies infer that a spate of people may suffer from the difficulty to accustom to the changes and find their new way in life. In addition, it can be pointed out that changes regarding private affairs not always make a person better. For many people such changes simply cause a nervous breakdown, and, again, may jeopardize their health, since psychological aspect of a person is tightly connected to his or her general well-being. In conclusion, my view of the problem is that change is an indispensable part of our lives, so people should accept this fact and try to learn how to tackle it rather than avoid it, which is impossible. Please give me feedback for my essay on change

A Country's Problems Essay

by vishal (India)

Countries around the world will be facing significant challenges relating not only to the environment, but population and education as well. What problems will your country face in the next ten years? How can these problems be overcome? Time 5.06 pm Human being and related problems are such issue which is globally spread around the globe. The major issues are related to the welfare of human kind, for example , Poverty , Rise in population and Illiteracy are the least but not last , prevails in human society globally. This essay will highlight such issues and associated reasons with them. It also emerges with solution for such crisis. Beginning with the point of such issue which are being faced by an every realm is Poverty, Population and Education. The rising population around the world is producing the need of money which is the big reason for any nation. Increasing number of people establishing the scarcity of resources. The further problems; like, Education and environment are dependent on population. This is very clear to understand that more people need more food , education, homes which can be bought by money is earned by the people . But more people and less jobs does not give opportunity to earn enough money. That is the reason, people could not think for education and environment and in next 10 years possibly my country will not have miserable condition . Considering the possible way out economics suggests in my country is to break vicious circle of poverty by introducing investment, so that more jobs could be created and people can survive in the world peacefully. Many organisations like “International Monetary fund” evaluates the performance of each nation and provides fund to the nation so that Poverty and other crucial problems, Environment and Poverty can be resolved. Home country’s government also generates revenues, from the Industry, taxes and penalties, which is used by the authority to invest and generate earning sources for the people. This is the one authentic solution which proves it best. Based upon the above paragraph, it can be said that yes each nation struggles more or less the common problems like Poverty, Education and Environment. But it is not impossible and unsolved problems. The appropriate investment and right use of money can easily resolve it. Time ends 5.40

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• Introduction

Historical background

• Cyclic change
• One-directional change
• Combined patterns of change
• Natural environment
• Demographic processes
• Technological innovations
• Economic processes
• Social movements
• Political processes
• Mechanisms of one-directional change: accumulation, selection, and differentiation
• Mechanisms of curvilinear and cyclic change: saturation and exhaustion
• Conflict, competition, and cooperation
• Tension and adaptation
• Diffusion of innovations
• Planning and institutionalization of change

social change

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• BCcampus Open Publishing - Introduction to Sociology – 1st Canadian Edition - Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Sciences LibreTexts Library - Understanding Social Change
• Roger Williams University Open Publishing - Social Change
• Frontiers - Toward a Psychology of Social Change: A Typology of Social Change
• University of Minnesota Libraries - Open Textbooks - Understanding Social Change
• Table Of Contents

social change , in sociology , the alteration of mechanisms within the social structure , characterized by changes in cultural symbols, rules of behaviour, social organizations, or value systems.

Throughout the historical development of their discipline , sociologists have borrowed models of social change from other academic fields. In the late 19th century, when evolution became the predominant model for understanding biological change, ideas of social change took on an evolutionary cast, and, though other models have refined modern notions of social change, evolution persists as an underlying principle.

Other sociological models created analogies between social change and the West’s technological progress. In the mid-20th century, anthropologists borrowed from the linguistic theory of structuralism to elaborate an approach to social change called structural functionalism . This theory postulated the existence of certain basic institutions (including kinship relations and division of labour) that determine social behaviour. Because of their interrelated nature, a change in one institution will affect other institutions.

Various theoretical schools have emphasized different aspects of change. Marxist theory suggests that changes in modes of production can lead to changes in class systems, which can prompt other new forms of change or incite class conflict. A different view is conflict theory, which operates on a broad base that includes all institutions. The focus is not only on the purely divisive aspects of conflict, because conflict, while inevitable, also brings about changes that promote social integration . Taking yet another approach, structural-functional theory emphasizes the integrating forces in society that ultimately minimize instability.

Social change can evolve from a number of different sources, including contact with other societies (diffusion), changes in the ecosystem (which can cause the loss of natural resources or widespread disease), technological change (epitomized by the Industrial Revolution , which created a new social group , the urban proletariat), and population growth and other demographic variables. Social change is also spurred by ideological, economic, and political movements.

The changing social order

Social change in the broadest sense is any change in social relations. Viewed this way, social change is an ever-present phenomenon in any society. A distinction is sometimes made then between processes of change within the social structure, which serve in part to maintain the structure, and processes that modify the structure (societal change).

The specific meaning of social change depends first on the social entity considered. Changes in a small group may be important on the level of that group itself but negligible on the level of the larger society. Similarly, the observation of social change depends on the time span studied; most short-term changes are negligible when examined in the long run. Small-scale and short-term changes are characteristic of human societies, because customs and norms change, new techniques and technologies are invented, environmental changes spur new adaptations , and conflicts result in redistributions of power.

This universal human potential for social change has a biological basis. It is rooted in the flexibility and adaptability of the human species—the near absence of biologically fixed action patterns (instincts) on the one hand and the enormous capacity for learning, symbolizing, and creating on the other hand. The human constitution makes possible changes that are not biologically (that is to say, genetically) determined. Social change, in other words, is possible only by virtue of biological characteristics of the human species, but the nature of the actual changes cannot be reduced to these species traits.

Several ideas of social change have been developed in various cultures and historical periods. Three may be distinguished as the most basic: (1) the idea of decline or degeneration, or, in religious terms, the fall from an original state of grace, (2) the idea of cyclic change, a pattern of subsequent and recurring phases of growth and decline, and (3) the idea of continuous progress. These three ideas were already prominent in Greek and Roman antiquity and have characterized Western social thought since that time. The concept of progress, however, has become the most influential idea, especially since the Enlightenment movement of the 17th and 18th centuries. Social thinkers such as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and the marquis de Condorcet in France and Adam Smith and John Millar in Scotland advanced theories on the progress of human knowledge and technology .

Progress was also the key idea in 19th-century theories of social evolution, and evolutionism was the common core shared by the most influential social theories of that century. Evolutionism implied that humans progressed along one line of development, that this development was predetermined and inevitable, since it corresponded to definite laws, that some societies were more advanced in this development than were others, and that Western society was the most advanced of these and therefore indicated the future of the rest of the world’s population. This line of thought has since been disputed and disproved.

Following a different approach, French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte advanced a “ law of three stages ,” according to which human societies progress from a theological stage, which is dominated by religion, through a metaphysical stage, in which abstract speculative thinking is most prominent, and onward toward a positivist stage, in which empirically based scientific theories prevail.

The most encompassing theory of social evolution was developed by Herbert Spencer , who, unlike Comte, linked social evolution to biological evolution. According to Spencer, biological organisms and human societies follow the same universal, natural evolutionary law: “a change from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent , heterogeneity.” In other words, as societies grow in size, they become more complex; their parts differentiate , specialize into different functions, and become, consequently, more interdependent.

Evolutionary thought also dominated the new field of social and cultural anthropology in the second half of the 19th century. Anthropologists such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan classified contemporary societies on an evolutionary scale. Tylor postulated an evolution of religious ideas from animism through polytheism to monotheism. Morgan ranked societies from “savage” through “barbarian” to “civilized” and classified them according to their levels of technology or sources of subsistence, which he connected with the kinship system. He assumed that monogamy was preceded by polygamy and patrilineal descent by matrilineal descent .

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels too were highly influenced by evolutionary ideas. The Marxian distinctions between primitive communism , the Asiatic mode of production, ancient slavery , feudalism , capitalism , and future socialism may be interpreted as a list of stages in one evolutionary development (although the Asiatic mode does not fit well in this scheme). Marx and Engels were impressed by Morgan’s anthropological theory of evolution, which became evident in Engels’s book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884).

The originality of the Marxian theory of social development lay in its combination of dialectics and gradualism. In Marx’s view social development was a dialectical process: the transition from one stage to another took place through a revolutionary transformation, which was preceded by increased deterioration of society and intensified class struggle. Underlying this discontinuous development was the more gradual development of the forces of production (technology and organization of labour ).

Marx was also influenced by the countercurrent of Romanticism , which was opposed to the idea of progress. This influence was evident in Marx’s notion of alienation , a consequence of social development that causes people to become distanced from the social forces that they had produced by their own activities. Romantic counterprogressivism was, however, much stronger in the work of later 19th-century social theorists such as the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies . Tönnies distinguished between the community ( Gemeinschaft ), in which people were bound together by common traditions and ties of affection and solidarity, and the society ( Gesellschaft ), in which social relations had become contractual, rational, and nonemotional.

Émile Durkheim and Max Weber , sociologists who began their careers at the end of the 19th century, showed ambivalence toward the ideas of progress. Durkheim regarded the increasing division of labour as a basic process, rooted in modern individualism , that could lead to “ anomie ,” or lack of moral norms. Weber rejected evolutionism by arguing that the development of Western society was quite different from that of other civilizations and therefore historically unique. The West was characterized, according to Weber, by a peculiar type of rationality that had brought about modern capitalism, modern science, and rational law but that also created, on the negative side, a “disenchantment of the world” and increasing bureaucratization.

The work of Durkheim, Weber, and other social theorists around the turn of the century marked a transition from evolutionism toward more static theories. Evolutionary theories were criticized on empirical grounds—they could be refuted by a growing mass of research findings—and because of their determinism and Western-centred optimism. Theories of cyclic change that denied long-term progress gained popularity in the first half of the 20th century. These included the theory of the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto on the “circulation of elites” and those of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee on the life cycle of civilizations. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Russian American Pitirim Sorokin developed a cyclic theory of cultural change in the West, describing repetitions of change from the ideational to the idealistic and sensate and back again.

Although the interest in long-term social change never disappeared, it faded into the background, especially when, from the 1920s until the 1950s, functionalism , emphasizing an interdependent social system, became the dominant paradigm both in anthropology and in sociology. “Social evolution” was substituted for the more general and neutral concept of “social change.”

The study of long-term social change revived in the 1950s and continued to develop through the 1960s and ’70s. Neoevolutionist theories were proclaimed by several anthropologists, including Ralph Linton , Leslie A. White , Julian H. Steward , Marshall D. Sahlins, and Elman Rogers Service . These authors held to the idea of social evolution as a long-term development that is both patterned and cumulative . Unlike 19th-century evolutionism, neoevolutionism does not assume that all societies go through the same stages of development. Instead, much attention is paid to variations between societies as well as to relations of influence among them. The latter concept has come to be known by the term acculturation . In addition, social evolution is not regarded as predetermined or inevitable but is understood in terms of probabilities. Finally, evolutionary development is not equated with progress.

Revived interest in long-term social change was sparked by attempts to explain the gaps between rich and poor countries. In the 1950s and ’60s, Western sociologists and economists developed modernization theories to help understand the problems of the so-called underdeveloped countries . Some modernization theories have been criticized, however, for implying that poor countries could and should develop—or modernize—in the manner of Western societies. Modernization theories have also been criticized for their lack of attention to international power relations, in which the richer countries dominate the poorer ones. These relations were brought to the centre of attention by later theories of international dependency, typified by the “world capitalist system” described by the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein . His world systems theory , however, was attacked for empirical reasons and for its failure to account for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes of eastern Europe and their subsequent movement toward capitalism and democracy . Wallerstein’s theory also drew criticism for failing to explain significant economic growth in developing countries such as South Korea and Singapore as well as in Hong Kong .

Social Change: Definition, Characteristics, Causes, Types, and Examples

Humans are social beings. We exist in a social world and observe norms, rules and traditions that are all social constructs. Therefore social change is a concept that is threaded to the very root of society. Similar to the Earth completing a strenuous rotation around the Sun every year, society undergoes social change. It shapes and shifts how we perceive the world and its social interactions. Comparing society from the 19th century to the current 21st will present itself with drastic changes. For starters, women’s rights was a concept a majority of men refused to believe in and blatant racism towards people of colour was an accepted part of one’s daily routine. Social change is what has brought about so many alterations to the functioning of society.

What does Social Change mean?

According to M. E Jones, social change occurs when social processes, social patterns, social interactions or social organisations encounter modifications from their everyday functioning. Marx, on the other hand, looked at social change as the consequence of class struggle- the conflict was the primary means for change. He believes that the economy is the most significant causing factor for change. Many sociologists have correlated the relationship between technology and social change. In earlier years, societies were largely nomadic and depended on manual human labour to hunt and gather for food on a daily basis. As humans evolved and built contraptions that eased the process of cultivation and agricultural production, societies began to claim land and mark territories. Lenski believed that these technological advancements are what caused societies to shift, and it is possible to observe how technological advancements affect the very thread of society to this day.

Theories of Change

Characteristics of Social Change

            Idrani (1998) and Anele (1999) observed and attributed certain characteristics to social change.

Advancements in technology also led to the improvement of the medical and agricultural world, both of which have multitudes of benefits. High-tech medical equipment now makes it easier for doctors to treat critically ill patients and have also eased the process of childbirth,  greatly reducing the number of deaths during childbirth. The development of large agricultural fields and equipment have made it easier to grow to produce in bulk for commercial purposes. Food scientists are also finding ways to create hybrid fruits and vegetables which are packed with nutrients. The impact of technology extends towards culture as well. Different cultures come into contact with and influence each other. Globalisation is a key example of how technology has brought about cultural change.

However, it is important to observe how technology has created a digital divide and is furthering the inequalities faced by marginalised and underprivileged sections of society. Those with access to the internet and digital resources can arm themselves with information while the rest are left to their own devices or a lack of one.

Natural disasters can uproot societies and it takes a while to build them back to what it was before. These disasters also highlight the importance of environmental activism and urge individuals to show more care and support to the land they live in. Activists such as Greta Thunberg have immensely contributed to creating awareness of environmentalism. It has put large organisations and industries under the spotlight and expose how the present way of functioning is causing immense damage to the earth. It has also led to smaller changes such as switching from plastic bags to cloth bags and plastic straws to metal ones.

Social conflict is perhaps the most easily observable cause for social change and usually results in large-scale protests and public demonstrations. With the help of the internet, social change exists and can be executed in the digital world as well. Social conflict can occur due to class-based struggles, gender issues, racism and ethnic discrimination. It all highlights how the majority is in dominance and exploits and harasses the marginalised. Wars are major events that are discussed when talking about social conflicts in the past.

Types and examples of social change

            Revolutionary change, on the other hand, occurs like rapid-fire and its results can be viewed over a short period of time. These kinds of changes are more present today in the digital world because of how accessible news and platforms to share information are. The Arab Spring is an example of revolutionary change. It began in 2010 and the movement lasted till 2013. The Arab Spring is a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and demonstrations that fought and challenged authoritarian regimes. It began in Tunisia and spread to almost every Arab nation and it can be argued to have caused the most significant change in the middle east since it was decolonised. The #MeToo movement is another social movement that brought about a revolutionary change as it led to bills and laws being passed to be more stringent about the persecution of harassers on-site. Similarly, the BLM caused an international uproar and demanded those who were guilty of committing such treacherous acts of racism be punished.

            Change can manifest as a positive or negative reaction depending on the context. As mentioned earlier, technological advancements have brought about immense development but at the same time, has created a vast digital divide. It is important to look at social change from a holistic perspective and understand how social change can occur at a micro-and macro-level simultaneously. Change is inevitable so it would be futile to halt the process. Moreover, with how fast-paced the 21st century is, change is required. This ensures that social institutions and structures are kept in check and help with the growth of society and all its people.

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20.1 Understanding Social Change

Learning objectives.

• Understand the changes that accompany modernization.
• Discuss the functionalist and conflict perspectives on social change.

Social change refers to the transformation of culture, behavior, social institutions, and social structure over time. We are familiar from Chapter 5 “Social Structure and Social Interaction” with the basic types of society: hunting-and-gathering, horticultural and pastoral, agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial. In looking at all of these societies, we have seen how they differ in such dimensions as size, technology, economy, inequality, and gender roles. In short, we have seen some of the ways in which societies change over time. Another way of saying this is that we have seen some of the ways in which societies change as they become more modern. To understand social change, then, we need to begin to understand what it means for a society to become more modern. We considered this briefly in Chapter 5 “Social Structure and Social Interaction” and expand on it here.

Modernization

Modernization refers to the process and impact of becoming more modern. More specifically, it refers to the gradual shift from hunting-and-gathering societies to postmodern societies, as outlined in Chapter 5 “Social Structure and Social Interaction” , and perhaps especially to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.

The terms modern and modernization have positive connotations; it sounds good to modernize and to be modern. Modernization implies that progress has been made and is continuing to be made, and who would not want progress? Yet modernization also has a downside, as we will see in this section and in the later discussion of the environment.

A related problem with the terms and concepts of modern and modernization is that many people think of Western nations when considering the most modern nations in the world today. This implies that Western society is the ideal to which other societies should aspire. While there are many good things about Western societies, it is important to avoid the ethnocentrism of assuming that Western societies are better because they are more modern. In fact, one reason that many people in the Middle East and elsewhere dislike the United States is that they resent the “Westernization” of their societies from the influence of the United States and other wealthy Western nations. When they see Coca-Cola and Pepsi logos and the McDonald’s golden arches in their nations, they fear Western influence and the loss of their own beliefs and traditions.

These caveats notwithstanding, societies have become much more modern over time, to put it mildly. We thus cannot fully understand society and social life without appreciating how societies have changed as they have become more modern. Not surprisingly, sociologists have recognized the importance of modernization ever since the discipline of sociology began in the 19th century, and much of the work of sociology’s founders—Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and others—focused on how and why societies have changed as they became more modern.

We can draw on their efforts and related work by later sociologists and by anthropologists to develop an idea of the differences modernization has made for societies and individuals. Several dimensions and effects of modernization seem apparent (Nolan & Lenski, 2009).

First, as societies evolve, they become much larger and more heterogeneous . This means that people are more different from each other than when societies were much smaller, and it also means that they ordinarily cannot know each other nearly as well. Larger, more modern societies thus typically have weaker social bonds and a weaker sense of community than small societies and place more of an emphasis on the needs of the individual.

As societies become more modern, they begin to differ from nonmodern societies in several ways. In particular, they become larger and more heterogeneous, they lose their traditional ways of thinking, and they gain in individual freedom and autonomy.

Thomas Hawk – Big City Turn Me Loose and Set Me Free – CC BY-NC 2.0.

We can begin to appreciate the differences between smaller and larger societies when we contrast a small college of 1,200 students with a large university of 40,000 students. Perhaps you had this contrast in mind when you were applying to college and had a preference for either a small or a large institution. In a small college, classes might average no more than 20 students; these students get to know each other well and often have a lot of interaction with the professor. In a large university, classes might hold 600 students or more, and everything is more impersonal. Large universities do have many advantages, but they probably do not have as strong a sense of community as is found at small colleges.

A second aspect of modernization is a loss of traditional ways of thinking. This allows a society to be more creative and to abandon old ways that may no longer be appropriate. However, it also means a weakening or even ending of the traditions that helped define the society and gave it a sense of identity.

A third aspect of modernization is the growth of individual freedom and autonomy. As societies grow, become more impersonal, and lose their traditions and sense of community, their norms become weaker, and individuals thus become freer to think for themselves and to behave in new ways. Although most of us would applaud this growth in individual freedom, it also means, as Émile Durkheim (1895/1962) recognized long ago, that people feel freer to deviate from society’s norms and thus to commit deviance. If we want a society that values individual freedom, Durkheim said, we automatically must have a society with deviance.

Is modernization good or bad? This is a simplistic question about a very complex concept, but a quick answer is that it is both good and bad. We see evidence for both responses in the views of sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies, Weber, and Durkheim. As Chapter 5 “Social Structure and Social Interaction” discussed, Tönnies (1887/1963) said that modernization meant a shift from Gemeinschaft (small societies with strong social bonds) to Gesellschaft (large societies with weaker social bonds and more impersonal social relations). Tönnies lamented the loss of close social bonds and of a strong sense of community resulting from modernization, and he feared that a sense of rootlessness begins to replace the feeling of stability and steadiness characteristic of small, older societies.

Weber (1921/1978) was also concerned about modernization. The hallmarks of modernization, he thought, are rationalization, a loss of tradition, and the rise of impersonal bureaucracy. He despaired over the impersonal quality of rational thinking and bureaucratization, as he thought it was a dehumanizing influence.

Durkheim (1893/1933) took a less negative view of modernization. He certainly appreciated the social bonds and community feeling, which he called mechanical solidarity , characteristic of small, traditional societies. However, he also thought that these societies stifled individual freedom and that social solidarity still exists in modern societies. This solidarity, which he termed organic solidarity , stems from the division of labor, in which everyone has to depend on everyone else to perform their jobs. This interdependence of roles, Durkheim said, creates a solidarity that retains much of the bonding and sense of community found in premodern societies.

We have already commented on important benefits of modernization that are generally recognized: modernization promotes creativity and individual freedom and autonomy. These developments in turn usually mean that a society becomes more tolerant of beliefs and behaviors that it formerly would have disapproved and even condemned. Modern societies, then, generally feature more tolerance than older societies. Many people, undoubtedly including most sociologists, regard greater tolerance as a good thing, but others regard it as a bad thing because they favor traditional beliefs and behaviors.

Beyond these abstract concepts of social bonding, sense of community, and tolerance, modern societies are certainly a force for both good and bad in other ways. They have produced scientific discoveries that have saved lives, extended life spans, and made human existence much easier than imaginable in the distant past and even in the recent past. But they have also polluted the environment, engaged in wars that have killed tens of millions, and built up nuclear arsenals that, even with the end of the Cold War, still threaten the planet. Modernization, then, is a double-edged sword. It has given us benefits too numerous to count, but it also has made human existence very precarious.

Sociological Perspectives on Social Change

Sociological perspectives on social change fall into the functionalist and conflict approaches. As usual, both views together offer a more complete understanding of social change than either view by itself (Vago, 2004). Table 20.1 “Theory Snapshot” summarizes their major assumptions.

Table 20.1 Theory Snapshot

The Functionalist Understanding

The functionalist understanding of social change is based on insights developed by different generations of sociologists. Early sociologists likened change in society to change in biological organisms. Taking a cue from the work of Charles Darwin, they said that societies evolved just as organisms do, from tiny, simple forms to much larger and more complex structures. When societies are small and simple, there are few roles to perform, and just about everyone can perform all of these roles. As societies grow and evolve, many new roles develop, and not everyone has the time or skill to perform every role. People thus start to specialize their roles and a division of labor begins. As noted earlier, sociologists such as Durkheim and Tönnies disputed the implications of this process for social bonding and a sense of community, and this basic debate continues today.

Several decades ago, Talcott Parsons (1966), the leading 20th-century figure in functionalist theory, presented an equilibrium model of social change. Parsons said that society is always in a natural state of equilibrium, defined as a state of equal balance among opposing forces. Gradual change is both necessary and desirable and typically stems from such things as population growth, technological advances, and interaction with other societies that brings new ways of thinking and acting. However, any sudden social change disrupts this equilibrium. To prevent this from happening, other parts of society must make appropriate adjustments if one part of society sees too sudden a change.

Functionalist theory assumes that sudden social change, as by the protest depicted here, is highly undesirable, whereas conflict theory assumes that sudden social change may be needed to correct inequality and other deficiencies in the status quo.

Kashfi Halford – More Riot Police – CC BY-NC 2.0.

The functionalist perspective has been criticized on a few grounds. The perspective generally assumes that the change from simple to complex societies has been very positive, when in fact, as we have seen, this change has also proven costly in many ways. It might well have weakened social bonds, and it has certainly imperiled human existence. Functionalist theory also assumes that sudden social change is highly undesirable, when such change may in fact be needed to correct inequality and other deficiencies in the status quo.

Conflict Theory

Whereas functional theory assumes the status quo is generally good and sudden social change is undesirable, conflict theory assumes the status quo is generally bad. It thus views sudden social change in the form of protest or revolution as both desirable and necessary to reduce or eliminate social inequality and to address other social ills. Another difference between the two approaches concerns industrialization, which functional theory views as a positive development that helped make modern society possible. In contrast, conflict theory, following the views of Karl Marx, says that industrialization exploited workers and thus increased social inequality.

In one other difference between the two approaches, functionalist sociologists view social change as the result of certain natural forces, which we will discuss shortly. In this sense, social change is unplanned even though it happens anyway. Conflict theorists, however, recognize that social change often stems from efforts by social movements to bring about fundamental changes in the social, economic, and political systems. In his sense social change is more “planned,” or at least intended, than functional theory acknowledges.

Critics of conflict theory say that it exaggerates the extent of social inequality and that it sometimes overemphasizes economic conflict while neglecting conflict rooted in race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and other sources. Its Marxian version also erred in predicting that capitalist societies would inevitably undergo a socialist-communist revolution.

Key Takeaways

• As societies become more modern, they become larger and more heterogeneous. Traditional ways of thinking decline, and individual freedom and autonomy increase.
• Functionalist theory favors slow, incremental social change, while conflict theory favors fast, far-reaching social change to correct what it views as social inequalities and other problems in the status quo.

For Your Review

• If you had to do it over again, would you go to a large university, a small college, or something in between? Why? How does your response relate to some of the differences between smaller, traditional societies and larger, modern societies?
• When you think about today’s society and social change, do you favor the functionalist or conflict view on the kind of social change that is needed? Explain your answer.

Durkheim, É. (1933). The division of labor in society . London, England: The Free Press. (Original work published 1893).

Durkheim, É. (1962). The rules of sociological method (S. Lukes, Ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1895).

Nolan, P., & Lenski, G. (2009). Human societies: An introduction to macrosociology (11th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Parsons, T. (1966). Societies: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Tönnies, F. (1963). Community and society . New York, NY: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1887).

Vago, S. (2004). Social change (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1921).

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What is Social Change and Why Should We Care?

Social change is a concept many of us take for granted or don't really even understand. No society has ever remained the same. Change is always happening. We accept change as inevitable, and it is, end of story, right? Well, not exactly.

Sociologists define social change as changes in human interactions and relationships that transform cultural and social institutions. These changes occur over time and often have profound and long-term consequences for society. Well-known examples of such change have resulted from social movements in workers’ rights, civil rights, women's rights and LGBTQIA+ rights, to name just a few. Relationships have changed, institutions have changed, and cultural norms have changed as a result of these social change movements. That's pretty heady stuff. Don't you think?

What interests me, and what I hope interests you, is our collective power to influence social change.

What is the Main Purpose of Social Change?

While we accept that change is constant, we do not have to accept that we are powerless in its wake. It is the extent to which we care about the direction of social change that we can try to shape it and help to create the kind of "change we wish to see in the world." Whether or not Gandhi actually uttered these words doesn't matter. What matters is that the phrase begs the question, what kind of change do we wish to see in the world?

One person’s opinion about what is good or positive social change might well be another person’s idea of bad or negative social change. For example, those who believe in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a fetus to term fight fervently for that right and believe wholeheartedly that it is a decision to be made between a woman and her doctor, while those who oppose abortion believe firmly in the righteousness of their cause, too, and have built a movement that can claim victory in the overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade.

Institutions have changed, cultural and political norms have changed, and personal relationships have changed as a result of the collective power of people determined to make what they believe to be positive social change. Not all agree, but there can be no denying that it has been an activist movement powered by citizens working together to make change.

As executive director of the 50-year-old nonprofit, Global Citizens Circle  (GCC), I think every day about the question of what kind of change I want to see in the world as I work to carry forward the mission of the organization to foster constructive change in our communities, our nation and our world.

I imagine that our partner and host institution, Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), also thinks about this question on a daily basis as it seeks to "transform the lives of students." And surely, our Belfast-based partner, The Social Change Initiative (SCI), thinks about it as it strives "to improve the effectiveness of activism for progressive social change."

We, all three institutions, care and understand that we can influence social change for the better. We may exercise our power to influence change in different ways. GCC does it through discussion among people of diverse opinions and backgrounds. SNHU does it by offering affordable and innovative educational social science degree programs  online and similar campus majors, and now even in refugee camps in Kenya, Lebanon, Malawi, Rwanda and South Africa. SCI exercises its influence by bringing together social activists and philanthropists around the world.

These are lofty goals to be sure, and they demand our constant attention and unrestricted imagination to envision a better world. You may think that's great, but wonder why you should care, why you should take time out of your incredibly busy schedule to take action and more importantly, how you can even go about helping to create positive social change.

I'd like to suggest that it's not that hard if we begin at the most basic level, that of relationship building.

Find Your Program

Change begins with how and when we interact with others.

When we listen respectfully to others who have different opinions and life experiences than our own, we take the first step in listening; we accept that there are myriad perspectives and points of view on most issues of concern.

If we truly want to be a participant in real change, we cannot stop at acceptance. We must have conversations that push and pull, that ask us to give and take. And if we are willing to do that, we can find those points of agreement and come together on them. We needn't concede those points that define our values but find ways to work together towards positive change that reflects our shared values. It is the art of principled compromise that has the power to create a more lasting change.

We are living in turbulent times, though one could argue that has always been true. The increasing polarization of populations throughout the world that hear “the truth” from entirely different media sources is something new, making the art of principled compromise more difficult. The level of incivility in political dialogue has risen throughout the world, and it’s as if we’ve collectively forgotten our shared humanity.

We can surely claim that technology is to blame, and it is, but it has also fueled positive social change movements when used to bring people together for the betterment of a society. A non-political example of this is the Ice Bucket Challenge that brought millions together to learn about and support the research for a cure of the devastating disease of ALS.

Global Citizens Circle has for five decades brought together diverse groups of people for challenging discussions on issues ranging from conflict resolution and reconciliation to education reform and economic equality. We've seen Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland sit down together and discuss their shared hope for peace. We've hosted South African exiles who were once labeled "terrorists" in their own country and who later became leaders of that country. At our discussion circles, we've seated powerful businesspeople next to the homeless and disenfranchised, and activists next to academics, and we have borne witness to the change that has occurred.

Through the pandemic, we gathered people globally online and brought the same principles and values of respect and dignity to dialogue on difficult issues such as racial justice after the murder of George Floyd, the hard realities of police reform and youth vulnerability and resilience in times of conflict.

Have these programs spurred social change? They have in ways we don’t always see; but with intentional nurturing of connections made during these programs, we plant the seeds.

Building Relationships to Foster Constructive Social Change

The conversation topics were often difficult, but listening and learning from others was not. Change begins this way. We must nurture civil discourse and work with intentionality to bring together people with different perspectives.

Convening gatherings of people, educating students in classrooms and online, and supporting activists who put themselves in the forefront of advocating for social change are how Global Citizens Circle, Southern New Hampshire University and The Social Change Initiative use their influence and power to direct change toward a more equitable and inclusive society.

Ultimately, however, it is not the programs that each of our organizations offer that create lasting change, but it is the relationships of trust and respect that do. That takes time and a sustained willingness to be open to the possibility that we might learn something from those with whom we disagree.

Building those kinds of relationships, even when, no, especially when, it seems impossible, is the key to cultivating constructive social change. So, take the lead, start now and stay at it.

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About southern new hampshire university.

SNHU is a nonprofit, accredited university with a mission to make high-quality education more accessible and affordable for everyone.

Founded in 1932, and online since 1995, we’ve helped countless students reach their goals with flexible, career-focused programs . Our 300-acre campus in Manchester, NH is home to over 3,000 students, and we serve over 135,000 students online. Visit our about SNHU  page to learn more about our mission, accreditations, leadership team, national recognitions and awards.

A collapsed dike near Papendrecht, Netherlands during the 1953 North Sea flood disaster. Courtesy the Dutch National Archives

The disruption nexus

Moments of crisis, such as our own, are great opportunities for historic change, but only under highly specific conditions.

by Roman Krznaric   + BIO

Polycrisis. Metacrisis. Omnicrisis. Permacrisis. Call it what you like. We are immersed in an age of extreme turbulence and interconnected global threats. The system is starting to flicker – chronic droughts, melting glaciers, far-Right extremism, AI risk, bioweapons, rising food and energy prices, rampant viruses, cyberattacks.

The ultimate question hanging over us is whether these multiple crises will contribute to civilisational breakdown or whether humanity will successfully rise to such challenges and bend rather than break with the winds of change. It has been commonly argued – from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman to Steve Jobs – that it is precisely moments of crisis like these that provide opportunities for transformative change and innovation. Might it be possible to leverage the instability that appears to threaten us?

The problem is that so often crises fail to bring about fundamental system change, whether it is the 2008 financial crash or the wildfires and floods of the ongoing climate emergency. So in this essay, based on my latest book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity (2024), I want to explore the conditions under which governments respond effectively to crises and undertake rapid and radical policy change. What would it take, for instance, for politicians to stop dithering and take the urgent action required to tackle global heating?

My motives stem from a palpable sense of frustration. Around two decades ago, when I first began to grasp the scale of the climate crisis, especially after reading Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature (1989), I thought that, if there were just a sufficient number of climate disasters in a short space of time – like hurricanes hitting Shanghai and New York in the same week as the river Thames flooded central London – then we might wake up to the crisis. But in the intervening years I’ve come to realise I was mistaken: there are simply too many reasons for governments not to act, from the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry to the pathological fear of abandoning the goal of everlasting GDP growth.

This sent me on a quest to search history for broad patterns of how crises bring about substantive change. What did I discover? That agile and transformative crisis responses have usually occurred in four contexts: war, disaster, revolution and disruption. Before delving into these – and offering a model of change I call the disruption nexus – it is important to clarify the meaning of ‘crisis’ itself.

L et’s get one thing straight from the outset: John F Kennedy was wrong when he said that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ ( wēijī, 危机) is composed of two characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. The second character, jī (机), is actually closer to meaning ‘change point’ or ‘critical juncture’. This makes it similar to the English word ‘crisis’, which comes from the ancient Greek krisis , whose verb form, krino , meant to ‘choose’ or ‘decide’ at a critical moment. In the legal sphere, for example, a krisis was a crucial decision point when someone might be judged guilty or innocent.

The meaning and application of this concept has evolved over time. For Thomas Paine in the 18th century, a crisis was a threshold moment when a whole political order could be overturned and where a fundamental moral decision was required, such as whether or not to support the war for American independence. Karl Marx believed capitalism experienced inevitable crises, which could result in economic and political rupture. More recently, Malcolm Gladwell has popularised the idea of a ‘tipping point’ – a similar moment of rapid transformation or contagion in which a system undergoes large-scale change. In everyday language, we use the term ‘crisis’ to describe an instance of intense difficulty or danger in which there is an imperative to act, whether it is a crisis in a marriage or the planetary ecological crisis.

Overall, we can think of a crisis as an emergency situation requiring a bold decision to go in one direction rather than another. So what wisdom does history offer for helping us to understand what it takes for governments to act boldly – and effectively – in response to a crisis?

T he most common context in which governments carry out transformative and effective crisis responses is during war. Consider the United States during the Second World War. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the US government instigated a seismic economic restructuring to put the country on a war footing. Despite fierce opposition from industry, there was a ban on the manufacture of private cars, and petrol was rationed to three gallons per week. The president Franklin D Roosevelt increased the top rate of federal income tax to 94 per cent by the end of the war, while the government borrowed heavily and spent more between 1942 and 1945 than in the previous 150 years. And all of this state intervention was happening in the homeland of free market capitalism. Moreover, the wartime crisis prompted the US to throw the political rulebook out the window and enter a military alliance with its ideological arch enemy, the USSR, to defeat their common enemy.

Gasoline rationing on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, 1942. Courtesy the Library of Congress

A second context in which governments take radical crisis action is in the wake of disasters. Following devastating floods in 1953 , which killed almost 2,000 people, the Dutch government embarked on building a remarkably ambitious flood-defence system called the Delta Works, whose cost was the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP at the time. No government today is doing anything close to this in response to the climate crisis – not even in the Netherlands, where one-quarter of the country is below sea level and flooding has been a critical threat for centuries.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides another example. In response to the public health emergency, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party introduced a series of radical policy measures that would be generally considered inconceivable by a centre-Right government: they shut schools and businesses, closed the borders, banned sports events and air travel, poured billions into vaccination programmes and even paid the salaries of millions of people for more than a year. It was absolutely clear to them that this was a problem that markets would be unable to solve.

The reality is that the climate emergency is the wrong kind of crisis

A third category of rapid, transformative change is in the context of revolutions, which can generate upheavals that create dramatic openings in the political system. The Chinese Communist Party, for instance, introduced a radical land redistribution programme during the civil war in the late 1940s and following the revolution of 1949, confiscating agricultural property from wealthy landlords and putting it into the hands of millions of poor peasant farmers.

Similarly, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 provided an opportunity for Fidel Castro’s regime to launch the Cuban National Literacy Campaign. In early 1961, more than a quarter of a million volunteers were recruited – 100,000 under the age of 18, and more than half of them women – to teach 700,000 Cubans to read and write. It was one of the most successful mass education programmes in modern history: within a year, national illiteracy had been reduced from 24 per cent to just 4 per cent. Whatever your views on Castro’s Cuba, there is no doubt that revolutions can drive radical change.

These three contexts – war, disaster and revolution – help explain the overwhelming failure of governments to take sufficient action on a crisis such as climate change. The reality is that it is the wrong kind of crisis and doesn’t fit neatly into any of these three categories. It is not like a war, with a clearly identifiable external enemy. It is not taking place in the wake of a revolutionary moment that could inspire transformative action. And it doesn’t even resemble a crisis like the Dutch floods of 1953: in that case the government acted only after the disaster, having ignored years of warnings from water engineers (in fact, unrealised plans for the Delta Works already existed), whereas today we ideally need nations to act before more ecological disasters hit and we cross irreversible tipping points of change. Prevention rather than cure is the only safe option.

D oes that mean there is little hope of governments taking urgent action in response to a crisis like the ecological emergency or other existential threats? Is human civilisation destined to break rather than successfully bend in the face of such critical challenges? Fortunately, there is a fourth crisis context that can jumpstart radical policy change: disruption.

By ‘disruption’ I am referring to a moment of system instability that provides opportunities for rapid transformation, which is created by a combination or nexus of three interlinked factors: some kind of crisis (though typically not as extreme as a war, revolution or cataclysmic disaster), which combines with disruptive social movements and visionary ideas. These three elements are brought together in a model I have developed called the Disruption Nexus (see graphic). Here is how it works.

Let’s begin with the top corner of the triangular diagram labelled ‘crisis’. The model is based on a recognition that most crises – such as the 2008 financial meltdown or the recent droughts in Spain – are rarely in and of themselves sufficient to induce rapid and far-reaching policy change (unlike a war). Rather, the historical evidence suggests that a crisis is most likely to create substantive change if two other factors are simultaneously present: movements and ideas.

Public meetings and pamphlets were not enough to tip the balance against the powerful slave-owning lobby

Social movements play a fundamental role in processes of historical change. Typically, they do this through amplifying crises that may be quietly simmering under the surface or that are ignored by dominant actors in society. As Naomi Klein writes in her book This Changes Everything (2014):

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

Her view – which I think is absolutely right – is that today’s global ecological movement needs to do exactly the same thing and actively generate a sense of crisis, so the political class recognises that ‘climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response’.

Multiple historical examples, which I have explored in detail in my book History for Tomorrow (and where you can find a full list of references), bear out this close relationship between disruptive movements and crisis.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in Britain provides a case in point. There was certainly a generalised sense of political crisis in the country in the early 1830s. Urban radicals were pressuring the government to widen the electoral franchise, and impoverished agricultural workers had risen up in the Captain Swing Riots. On top of this, antislavery activists were continuing their decades-long struggle: more than 700,000 people remained enslaved on British-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Yet their largely reformist strategy – such as holding public meetings and distributing pamphlets – was still not enough to tip the balance against the powerful slave-owning lobby.

The turning point came in 1831 in an act of disruption and defiance that created shockwaves in Britain: the Jamaica slave revolt. More than 20,000 enslaved workers rose up in rebellion, setting fire to more than 200 plantations. The revolt was crushed but their actions sent a wave of panic through the British establishment, who concluded that if they did not grant emancipation then the colony could be lost. As the historian David Olusoga points out in Black and British (2016), the Jamaica rebellion was ‘the final factor that tipped the scales in favour of abolition’. In the absence of this disruptive movement, it might have taken decades longer for abolition to enter the statute books.

The Destruction of the Roehampton Estate (1832) by Adolphe Duperly, during the Jamaica rebellion. Courtesy Wikimedia

Another case concerns the granting of the vote to women in Finland in 1906. During the political crisis of the general strike of 1905 – an uprising against Russian imperialism in Finland – the Finnish women’s movement took advantage of the situation by taking to the streets along with trade unionists. The League of Working Women, part of the growing Social Democratic movement, staged more than 200 public protests for the right of all women to vote and run for office, mobilising tens of thousands of women in mass demonstrations. By magnifying the existing crisis, they were able to finally overcome the parliamentary opposition to female suffrage.

More recently, the mass popular uprisings in Berlin in November 1989 amplified the political crisis that had been brewing over previous months, with turmoil in the East German government and destabilising pro-democracy protests having taken place across the Eastern Bloc, partly fuelled by the reforms of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Their actions made history on 9 November when the Berlin Wall was finally breached and the system itself visibly came tumbling down.

In all the above cases, however, a third element alongside movements and crisis was required to bring about change: the presence of visionary ideas. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), the economist Milton Friedman wrote that, while a crisis is an opportunity for change, ‘when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’. From a different perspective, Hannah Arendt argued that a crisis was a fruitful moment for questioning orthodoxies and established ideas as it brought about ‘the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgement’, such that ‘traditional verities seem no longer to apply’. Dominant old ideas are in a state of flux and uncertainty, and fresh ones are potentially ready to take their place. In these three historical examples, disruptive ideas around racial equality, women’s rights and democratic freedoms were vital inspiration for the success of transformational movements.

The 2008 financial crash illustrates what happens in the absence of unifying ideas. Two corners of the triangle were in place: the crisis of the crash itself and the Occupy Movement calling for change. What was missing, though, were the new economic ideas and models to challenge the failing system (exemplified by the Occupy slogan ‘Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing’). The result was that the traditional power brokers in the investment banks managed to get themselves bailed out and the old financial system remained intact. This would be less likely to happen today, when new economic models such as ‘doughnut economics’, degrowth and modern monetary theory have gained far more public prominence.

I s the disruption nexus a watertight theory of historical change? Absolutely not. There are no iron laws of history, no universal patterns that stand outside space and time. I’m a firm believer in the statistician George Box’s dictum that ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’.

Several caveats are worth noting. I’m certainly not claiming that transformative change will always take place if all three elements of the disruption nexus are in place: sometimes, the power of the existing system is simply too entrenched (that’s why US peace activists were unable to stop the Vietnam War in the late 1960s – although they certainly managed to turn large swathes of the public against it). My argument is rather that change is most likely when all three ingredients of the nexus are present.

Occasionally, crisis responses can come into conflict with one another, making it difficult to take effective action: in 2018, when the French government attempted to increase carbon taxes on fuel to reduce CO 2 emissions, it was met with the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement, which argued that the taxes were unjust given the cost-of-living crisis that had been pushing up energy and food prices.

Furthermore, at times, other factors apart from disruptive movements or visionary ideas will come into play to help create change, such as the role of individual leadership. This was evident in the struggle against slavery, with important parts played by figures including Samuel Sharpe, Elizabeth Heyrick and Thomas Clarkson. The full story of abolition cannot be told without them.

The interplay of the three elements creates a surge of political will, that elusive ingredient of change

Finally, it is vital to recognise that crises can be taken in multiple directions. The Great Depression of the 1930s may have contributed to the rise of progressive Social Democratic welfare states in Scandinavia, but it equally aided the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. When it comes to crises, be careful what you wish for. Those who desire an avalanche of crises to kickstart change are playing with fire.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of the disruption nexus model – in which movements amplify crisis, crisis makes ideas relevant, and ideas inspire movements – is that it provides a substantive role for collective human agency. During a wartime crisis, military and political leaders typically take charge. In contrast, a disruption nexus provides opportunities for everyday citizens to organise and take action that can potentially shift governments to a critical decision point – a krisis in the ancient Greek sense – where they feel compelled to respond to an increasingly turbulent situation with radical policy measures. The interplay of the three elements creates a surge of political will, that elusive ingredient of change.

History tells us that this is our greatest hope for the kind of green Marshall Plan that a crisis such as the planetary ecological emergency calls for. This is not a time for lukewarm reform or ‘proportionate responses’. ‘The crucial problems of our time no longer can be left to simmer on the low flame of gradualism,’ wrote the historian Howard Zinn in 1966. If we are to bend rather than break over the coming decades, we will need rebellious movements and system-changing ideas to coalesce with the environmental crisis into a Great Disruption that redirects humanity towards an ecological civilisation.

Will we rise to the challenge? Here it is useful to make a distinction between optimism and hope. We can think of optimism as a glass-half-full attitude that everything will be fine despite the evidence. I’m far from optimistic. As Peter Frankopan concludes in The Earth Transformed (2023): ‘Much of human history has been about the failure to understand or adapt to changing circumstances in the physical and natural world around us.’ That is why the great ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Yucatán peninsula have disappeared.

On the other hand, I am a believer in radical hope, by which I mean recognising that the chances of success may be slim but still being driven to act by the values and vision you are rooted in. Time and again, humankind has risen up collectively, often against the odds, to tackle shared problems and overcome crises.

The challenge we face as a civilisation is to draw on history for tomorrow, and turn radical hope into action.

Food and drink

The joy of foraging

Offering an escape from industrial foods, foraging nourishes the soul and body, but it needs democratic access to the land

Design and fashion

When luxury is good

The waste and exploitation of fast fashion shouldn’t blind us to the joys of making beautiful clothing with care

Roger Tredre

Race and ethnicity

The forging of countries

Two distinct and conflicting forms of nationalism – civic and ethnic – helped create the nation-states of Europe

Luka Ivan Jukić

Thinkers and theories

The value of our values

When Nietzsche used the tools of philology to explore the nature of morality, he became a ‘philosopher of the future’

Alexander Prescott-Couch

Film and visual culture

The risk of beauty

W Eugene Smith’s photos of the Minamata disaster are both exquisite and horrifying. How might we now look at them?

Joanna Pocock

History of ideas

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Your Article Library

Essay on social change: meaning, characteristics and other details.

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Here is your essay on Social Change! 

Introduction:

Change is the internal law. History and science bear ample testimony to the fact that change is the law of life. Stagnation is death. They tell us stories of man’s rise and growth from the Paleolithic age to the Neolithic age, then to the Stone Age and next to the copper age etc. On the stage of the world, scenes follow scenes, acts follow acts, and drama follows drama. Nothing stands still.

Image Courtesy : 2.bp.blogspot.com/_1-xvEOICRwA/SHQeR5CcI3I/AAAAAAAAAVs/OUtRL2GLZXg/s1600-h/PontmorlaisWest_CircusParade_1948-49_CliveArthur.jpg

The wheel of time moves on and on. The old dies and the young steps into the world. We ring out the old and ring in the new. A child changes into a boy, a boy into a youth and then into a man. The bud changes into a flower. The dawn turns into morning, morning into noon, noon into afternoon and afternoon into night.

It is said, “Today is not yesterday, we ourselves change. No change is permanent, it is subject to change. This is observed in all spares of activity. Change indeed is painful, yet needful”. Flowing water is wholesome, and stagnant water is poisonous. Only when it flows through and alters with changes, it is able to refresh and recreate.

Change is an ever-present phenomenon. It is the law of nature. Society is not at all a static phenomenon, but it is a dynamic entity. It is an ongoing process. The social structure is subject to incessant changes. Individuals may strive for stability, yet the fact remains that society is an every changing phenomenon; growing, decaying, renewing and accommodating itself to changing conditions.

The human composition of societies changes over time, technologies expand, ideologies and values take on new components; institutional functions and structures undergo reshaping. Hence, no society remains complete static. Incessant changeability is very inherent nature of human society.

A social structure is a nexus of present relationships. It exists because social beings seek to maintain it. It continues to exist because men demand its continuance. But the existing social structure is influenced by many factors and forces that inevitably cause it to change. Society is thus subject to continuous change.

The change of man and society has been the central and quite dominant concern of sociology right from the time when it emerged as branch of learning. The concern for social change is of great importance not only in studying past changes but also in investigating ‘future’ developments.

Meaning of Social Change :

Change implies all variations in human societies. When changes occur in the modes of living of individuals and social relation gets influenced, such changes are called social changes.

Social change refers to the modifications which take place in life pattern of people. It occurs because all societies are in a constant state of disequilibrium.

The word ‘change’ denotes a difference in anything observed over some period of time. Hence, social change would mean observable differences in any social phenomena over any period of time.

Social change is the change in society and society is a web of social relationships. Hence, social change is a change in social relationships. Social relationships are social processes, social patterns and social interactions. These include the mutual activities and relations of the various parts of the society. Thus, the term ‘social change’ is used to describe variations of any aspect of social processes, social patterns, social interaction or social organization.

Social change may be defined as changes in the social organization, that is, the structure and functions of the society.

Whenever one finds that a large number of persons are engaged in activities that differ from those which their immediate forefathers were engaged in some time before, one finds a social change.

Whenever human behaviour is in the process of modification, one finds that social change is occurring. Human society is constituted of human beings. Social change means human change, since men are human beings. To change society, as says Davis, is to change man.

Theorists of social change agree that in most concrete sense of the word ‘change’, every social system is changing all the time. The composition of the population changes through the life cycle and thus the occupation or roles changes; the members of society undergo physiological changes; the continuing interactions among member modify attitudes and expectations; new knowledge is constantly being gained and transmitted.

Defining Change:

The question to what social change actually means is perhaps the most difficult one within the scientific study of change. It involves the often neglected query of what ‘kind’ and degree of change in what is to be considered social change.

Most analysts of social change deal with this question implicitly somewhere in their theoretical system or in the context of the latter’s application to some empirical case. For the present purpose it should suffice to examine definitions that are frequently used to conceptualise change.

According to Jones “Social change is a term used to describe variations in, or modifications of any aspect of social processes, social patterns, social interaction or social organization”.

As Kingsley Davis says, “By Social change is meant only such alternations as occur in social organization – that is, the structure and functions of society”.

According to Maclver and Page, “Social change refers to a process responsive to many types of changes; to changes the man in made condition of life; to changes in the attitudes and beliefs of men, and to the changes that go beyond the human control to the biological and the physical nature of things”.

Morris Ginsberg defines, “By social change, I understand a change in social structure, e.g., the size of the society, the composition or the balance of its parts or the type of its organization”.

P. Fairchild defines social change as “variations or modifications in any aspects of social process, pattern or form.

B. Kuppuswamy says, “Social change may be defined as the process in which is discernible significant alternation in the structure and functioning of a particular social system”.

H.M. Johnson says, “Social change is either change in the structure or quasi- structural aspects of a system of change in the relative importance of coexisting structural pattern”.

According to Merrill and Eldredge, “Change means that large number of persons are engaging in activities that differ from those which they or their immediate forefathers engaged in some time before”.

Anderson and Parker define, “Social change involves alternations in the structure or functioning of societal forms or processes themselves”.

According to M.D. Jenson, “Social change may be defined as modification in ways of doing and thinking of people.

As H.T. Mazumdar says, “Social change may be defined as a new fashion or mode, either modifying or replacing the old, in the life of people or in the operation of a society”.

According Gillin and Gillin, “Social changes are variations from the accepted modes of life; whether due to alternation in geographical conditions, in cultural equipment, composition of the population or ideologies and brought about by diffusion, or inventions within the group.

By analyzing all the definitions mentioned above, we reach at the conclusion that the two type of changes should be treated as two facts of the same social phenomenon. Two type of changes are e.g. (i) changes in the structure of society, (ii) changes in the values and social norms which bind the people together and help to maintain social order. These two type of changes should not, however, be treated separately because a change in one automatically induces changes in the other.

For example, a change in the attitude of the people may bring about changes in the social structure. Towards the close of the 19 century, there was a tendency in the countries of Western Europe for families to grow smaller in size. There is a general agreement that this has been brought about mainly by voluntary restriction of births”.

In this case, a change in the attitude of the people is mainly responsible for change in the social structure. On the other hand, a change in the social structure may bring about attitudinal change among the members of the society. Transformation of rural society into industrial society is not simply a change in the structure of society. For example, industrialisation has destroyed domestic system of production.

The destruction of domestic system of production has brought women from home to factory and office. The employment of women gave them a new independent outlook. The attitude of independence instead of dependence upon men has become the trait of women’s personally. Hence, these two type of changes should not be treated separately but both of them should be studied together.

The problem of social change is one of the central foci of sociological inquiry. It is so complex and so significant in the life of individual and of society that we have to explore the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of social change in all its ramifications.

Characteristics of Social Change :

The fact of social change has fascinated the keenest minds and still poses some of the great unsolved problems in social sciences. The phenomenon of social change is not simple but complex. It is difficult to understand this in its entirety. The unsolved problems are always pressurising us to find an appropriate answer. To understand social change well, we have to analyse the nature of social change which are as follows:

1. Social Change is Social:

Society is a “web of social relationships” and hence social change obviously means a change in the system of social relationships. Social relationships are understood in terms of social processes and social interactions and social organizations.

Thus, the term social change is used to describe variation in social interactions, processes and social organizations. Only that change can be called social change whose influence can be felt in a community form. The changes that have significance for all or considerable segment of population can be considered as social change.

2. Social Change is Universal:

Change is the universal law of nature. The social structure, social organization and social institutions are all dynamic. Social change occurs in all societies and at all times. No society remains completely static.

Each society, no matter how traditional and conservative, is constantly undergoing change. Just as man’s life cannot remain static, so does society of all places and times. Here adjustment take place and here conflict breaks down adjustment. Here there is revolution and here consent. Here men desire for achieving new goals, and here they return to old ones.

3. Social Change occurs as an Essential law:

Change is the law of nature. Social change is also natural. Change is an unavoidable and unchangeable law of nature. By nature we desire change. Our needs keep on changing to satisfy our desire for change and to satisfy these needs, social change becomes a necessity. The truth is that we are anxiously waiting for a change. According to Green, “The enthusiastic response of change has become almost way of life.

4. Social Change is Continuous:

Society is an ever-changing phenomenon. It is undergoing endless changes. It is an “ongoing process”. These changes cannot be stopped. Society is subject to continuous change. Here it grows and decays, there it finds renewal, accommodates itself to various changing conditions.

Society is a system of social relationship. But these social relationships are never permanent. They are subject to change. Society cannot be preserved in a museum to save it from the ravages of time. From the dawn of history, down to this day, society has been in flux.

Social change manifests itself in different stages of human history. In ancient times when life was confined to caves (Stone Age), the social system was different from that of the computer age today. There is no fixity in human relationships. Circumstances bring about many a change in the behaviour patterns.

5. Social Change Involves No-Value Judgement:

Social change does not attach any value judgement. It is neither moral nor immoral, it is amoral. The question of “what ought to be” is beyond the nature of social change. The study of social change involves no-value judgement. It is ethically neutral. A correct decision on what is empirically true is not the same as correct decision on what ought to be.

6. Social Change is Bound by Time Factors:

Social change is temporal. It happens through time, because society exists only as a time-sequences. We know its meaning fully only by understanding it through time factors. For example, the caste system which was a pillar of stability in traditional Indian society, is now undergoing considerable changes in the modern India.

There was less industrialisation in India during 50s. But in 90s, India has become more industrialized. Thus, the speed of social change differs from age to age. The reason is that the factors which cause social change do not remain uniform with the changes in time.

7. Rate and Tempo of Social Change is Uneven:

Though social change is a must for each and every society, the rate, tempo, speed and extent of change is not uniform. It differs from society to society. In some societies, its speed is rapid; in another it may be slow. And in some other societies it occurs so slowly that it may not be noticed by those who live in them. For example, in the modern, industrial urban society the speed and extent of change is faster than traditional, agricultural and rural society.

8. Definite Prediction of Social Change is Impossible:

It is very much difficult to make out any prediction on the exact forms of social change. A thousand years ago in Asia, Europe and Latin America the face of society was vastly different from that what exists today. But what the society will be in thousand years from now, no one can tell.

But a change there will be. For example, industrialisation and urbanisation has brought about a series of interrelated changes in our family and marriage system. But we cannot predict the exact forms which social relationships will assume in future. Similarly, what shall be our ideas, attitudes and value in future, it is unpredictable.

9. Social Change Shows Chain-Reaction Sequences:

Society is a dynamic system of interrelated parts. Changes in one aspect of life may induce a series of changes in other aspects. For example, with the emancipation of women, educated young women find the traditional type of family and marriage not quite fit to their liking.

They find it difficult to live with their parents-in-law, obeying the mother-in-law at every point. They desire separate homes. The stability of marriages can no longer be taken for granted. The changing values of women force men to change their values also. Therefore, society is a system of interrelated parts. Change in its one aspect may lead to a series of changes in other aspects of the society.

10. Social Change takes place due to Multi-Number of Factors:

Social change is the consequence of a number of factors. A special factor may trigger a change but it is always associated with other factors that make the triggering possible. Social change cannot be explained in terms of one or two factors only and that various factors actually combine and become the ’cause’ of the change. M. Ginsberg observes: “A cause is an assemblage of factors which, in interaction with each other, undergo a change”. There is no single master key by which we can unlock all the doors leading to social change. As a matter of fact, social change is the consequence of a number of factors.

11. Social Changes are Chiefly those of Modifications or of Replacement:

Social changes may be considered as modifications or replacements. It may be modification of physical goods or social relationships. For example, the form of our breakfast food has changed. Though we eat the same basic materials such as meats, eggs corn etc. which we ate earlier, their form has been changed.

Ready-to-eat cornflakes, breads, omelets are substituted for the form in which these same materials were consumed in earlier years. Further, there may be modifications of social relationships. For example, the old authoritarian family has become the small equalitarian family. Our attitudes towards women’s status and rights, religion, co-education etc. stand modified today.

12. Social Change may be Small-scale or Large-scale:

A line of distinction is drawn between small-scale and large scale social change. Small-scale change refers to changes within groups and organizations rather than societies, culture or civilization.

According W.E. Moore, by small-scale changes we shall mean changes in the characteristics of social structures that though comprised within the general system identifiable as a society, do not have any immediate and major consequences for the generalised structure (society) as such.

13. Short-term and Long-term Change:

The conceptualization of the magnitude of change involves the next attribute of change, the time span. That is to say, a change that may be classified as ‘small-scale from a short-term perspective may turn out to have large-scale consequences when viewed over a long period of time, as the decreasing death rate since the 1960 in India exemplifies.

14. Social Change may be Peaceful or Violent:

At times, the attribute ‘peaceful’ has been considered as practically synonymous with ‘gradual’ and ‘violent’ with ‘rapid’. The term ‘violence’ frequently refers to the threat or use of physical force involved in attaining a given change. In certain sense, rapid change may ‘violently’ affect the emotions, values and expectations of those involved.

According to W.E. Moore, “A ‘true’ revolution, a rapid and fundamental alternation in the institutions or normative codes of society and of its power distribution, is rapid and continuous by definition and is likely to be violent, but may well be orderly as opposed to erratic”.

‘Peaceful’ has to do with the changes that take place by consent, acceptance or acquisition and that are enforced by the normative restraints of society.

15. Social Change may be Planned or Unplanned:

Social change may occur in the natural course or it is done by man deliberately. Unplanned change refers to change resulting from natural calamities, such as famines and floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruption etc. So social change is called as the unchangeable law of nature. The nature is never at rest.

Planned social change occurs when social changes are conditioned by human engineering. Plans, programmes and projects are made by man in order to determine and control the direction of social change.

Besides that by nature human beings desire change. The curiosity of a man never rests; nothing checks his desire to know. There is always a curiosity about unknown. The needs of human beings are changing day by day. So to satisfy these needs they desire change.

16. Social Change may be Endogenous or Exogenous:

Endogenous social change refers to the change caused by the factors that are generated by society or a given subsystem of society. Conflict, communication, regionalism etc. are some of the examples of endogenous social change.

On the other hand, exogenous sources of social change generally view society as a basically stable, well-integrated system that is disrupted or altered only by the impact of forces external to the system (e.g., world situation, wars, famine) or by new factors introduced into the system from other societies. For example, technological transfer and brain drain, political and cultural imperialism may lead to the diffusion of cultural traits beyond the limits of single societies.

17. Change Within and Change of the System:

The distinction between kinds of change has been developed by Talcott Parsons in his analysis of change ‘within’ and change ‘of the system, i.e., the orderly process of ongoing change within the boundaries of a system, as opposed to the process resulting in changes of the structure of the system under consideration. Conflict theorists draw our attention to the fact that the cumulative effect of change ‘within’ the system may result in a change ‘of’ the system.

To conclude, some of the attributes most frequently used in describing change are: magnitude of change (small-scale, large-scale changes), time pan, direction, rate of change, amount of violence involved. These dimensions should not be taken as either/or attributes but rather as varying along a continuum from one extreme to another (e.g., revolutionary vs evolutionary).

Other categorization that have been devised involve division of changes on the basis of such characteristics as continuous vs spasmodic, orderly vs erratic and the number of people (or roles) affected by or involved in change.

Although no hard and fast categories have yet been developed into which we can fit different types of change, the use of the foregoing distinctions, may be helpful in clarifying one’s conceptualization of any type of change or at least, they can help one to understand the complexities involved in developing a definition of the subject of social change.

Social Evolution :

In explaining the concept of social change, sociologists from time to time used words and expressions like evolution, growth, progress, development, revolution, adaptation etc. discarding one in preference to the other.

Though the concept of evolution was known to the generation preceding the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, the notion of social evolution was taken directly from the theories of biological evolution. Evolution in biological science means the developing of an organism.

It is a process by which a thing continuously adopts itself to its environment and manifests its own nature. Consequently it is a change which permeates the whole character of the object. Many social theorists from Herbert Spencer to Sumner applied this conception of ‘organic evolution’ in various ways to the explanation of social change.

The term ‘evolution’ is borrowed from biological sciences to Sociology. The term ‘organic evolution’ is replaced by ‘social evolution’ in sociology. Whereas the term ‘organic evolution’ is used to denote the evolution of organism, the expression of ‘social evolution is used to explain the evolution of human society.

It was hoped that the theory of social evolution would explain the origin and development of man. Anthropologists and Sociologists wanted to find a satisfactory and significant explanation of how our society evolved.

They were very much impressed by the idea of organic evolution which explain how one species evolves into another, and wanted to apply the same to the social world. Hence, the concept of social evolution is quite popular in sociological discussion.

Sociologists adopted the word ‘evolution’ to convey the sense of growth and change in social institutions. Social institutions are the result of evolution. They began to work to trace the origin of the ideas, institutions and of the developments.

The term ‘evolution’ is derived from the Latin word ‘evolvere’ which means to ‘develop’ or ‘to unfold’. It is equivalent to the Sanskrit word ‘Vikas’. Evolution literally means gradually ‘unfolding’ or ‘unrolling’. It indicates changes from ‘within’ and not from ‘without’. The concept of evolution applies more precisely to the internal growth of an organism.

Evolution means more than growth. The word ‘growth’ connotes a direction of change but only of quantitative character e.g., we say population grows, town grows etc. But evolution involves something more intrinsic; change not merely in size but also in structure.

According to Maclver and Page, “Evolution involves something more intrinsic, a change not merely in size but at least in structure also”.

Ogburn and Nimkoff write, “Evolution is merely a change in a given direction”.

Ginsberg says, “Evolution is defined as a process of change which results in the production of something new but revealing “an orderly continuity in transition”. That is to say, we have evolution when” the series of changes that occur during a period of time appear to be, not a mere succession of changes, but a ‘continuous process’, through which a clear ‘thread of identity runs’.

Evolution describes a series of interrelated changes in a system of some kind. It is a process in which hidden or latent characters of a thing reveal themselves. It is a principle of internal growth. It shows not merely what happens to a thing but also what happens within it. “What is latent becomes manifest in it and what is potential is made actual.”

Evolution is an order to change which unfolds the variety of aspects belonging to the nature of changing object. We cannot speak of evolution when an object or system is changed by forces acting upon it from without. The change must occur within the changing unity.

Characteristics of Social Evolution :

According to Spencer, “Evolution is the integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.” Society, according to his view, is also subject to a similar process of evolution; that is, changing from a state of ‘incoherent homogeneity’ to a state of ‘coherent heterogeneity.’

Evolution is, thus, a gradual growth or development from simple to complex existence. The laws of evolution which were initially fashioned after the findings of charters. Darwin, came to be known as social Darwinism during the nineteenth century.

Spencer’s point of view can best be illustrated by an example. In the beginning, the most primitive stage, every individual lived an individualistic life, trying to know and do things about himself alone.

Every man was more or less similar, in so far as his ignorance about organized social life was concerned. In this sense, the people were homogenous. At that stage, neither they were able to organize their social life, nor could they work together. There was no system; nothing definite, expect their incoherent or loose-group-formations.

Thus, they formed “an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity,” But gradually, their experiences, realizations and knowledge increased. They learnt to live and to work together. The task of social organisation was taken on, division of labour was elaborated; and each found a particular type of work which he could do best. All worked in an organized and definite way towards a definite goal. Thus, a state of “definite, coherent heterogeneity” was reached.

Herbert Spencer has prescribed four important principles of evolution. These principles are:

1. Social evolution is on cultural or human aspect of the law of change of cosmic evolution.

2. Hence, social evolution take place in the same way at all places and progress through some definite and inevitable stages.

3. Social evolution is gradual.

4. Social evolution is progressive.

In addition to this characteristics, other features of social evolution are clearly evident which are discussed below.

Evolution is a Process of Differentiation and Integration:

The concept of evolution as a process of differentiation cum-integration was first developed by the German Sociologists Von Baer and subsequently by Spencer and many others.

(i) In order to understand this statement, i.e. evolution takes place through differentiation and Integration; we have to study the history of a society over a long, period of time. Then we shall find that its associations, institutions, etc” are constantly evolving or developing.

In social evolution, new and ever newer circumstances and problems are constantly appearing. In order to cope with them, new associations and institutions are evolved. For example, a community in a town previously. When the town had been a small community, its management was the responsibility of a Panchayat or a town area committee.

Now that the town has become a big commercial centre, its management is in the hands of a dozer different committees. One of them looks after the educational facilities, another looks after the sanitation, a third is deputed to look after the octroi, while a fourth manages the markets and so on. In this way, this differentiation increases with the evolution of the town.

(ii) But without Integration, this differentiation cannot take one anywhere. Hence, synthesis along with differentiation is necessary. In urban areas one can find various sectarian associations such as Khandayat Kshatriya Mahasabha, Kayastha society, Brahman Samiti, Napita associations etc.

At the same time, one also can find institutions: ‘Arya Samaj’,” etc. which synthesize and compromise associations based on various caste and class distinctions. Today, while new nations are coming into being in the human society, equally strong efforts are being made to create a world society by compromising these nations.

(iii) By virtue of this double processes of differentiation and integration, the efficiency of the society is being constantly increased. Division of labour is the magic word of modern economic evolution. By an increase in the number of associations and institutions in society, work in various spheres is performed more successfully. And because of the process of synthesis, various spheres take advantage of each other’s efficiency also.

Maclver points it out in a very systematic manner. According to him, evolution or differentiation manifests itself in society by (a) a greater division of society by labour, so that thereby a more elaborate system of cooperation, because the energy of more individuals is concentrated on more specific tasks, a more intricate nexus of functional relationships, is sustained within the group; (b) an increase in the number and the variety of functional associations and institutions, so that each is more defined or more limited in the range or character of its service; and (c) a greater diversity and refinement in the instruments of social communication, perhaps above all in the medium of language.

Various sociologists have laid stress on one or another of these aspect of evolution. Thus, Emile Durkheim has insisted on the preeminent importance of the social division of labour as a criterion of social development. Other writers have taken the various aspects together and sought to show that society passes through a definite series of evolutionary stages.

Social Evolution does not always proceed by Differentiation:

Morris Ginsberg writes, “The notion that evolution is a movement from the simple to the complex can be and has been seriously disputed.” In every field where we find the forces of differentiation at work, there the opposite trends are also manifested. For example in the development of languages, where the process of differentiation has been stressed, we have many disconnecting facts.

The modern languages derived from Sanskrit Like Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu and Tamil cannot be compared in their structure with the richness and diversity of their origin. Here the process is not towards differentiation but towards simplification.

In the development of religion too, the transition from fusion to differentiation is difficult to see. On the whole we find that social evolution does not always proceed by differentiation.

However in spite of the various difficulties, the concept of evolution still retains its usefulness. Maclver has strongly supported the principle of social evolution. He has criticised the practice of believing social evolution to be imaginary. Social evolution is a reality. Maclver has given some arguments in favour of the reality of social evolution.

He emphasizes, if we open the pages of History, we find that in the beginning there was no differentiation of institutions within human society or the performance of diverse functions. But latter on, as culture and civilization progressed, differentiation increased and it is even now increasing. This historical fact is an evidence of the extent and element of reality in the principle of social evolution.

Social Evolution and Organic Evolution :

Though ‘social evolution’ is borrowed from the biological concept of ‘organic evolution’, still then these two terms are not one and the same. There are some basic differences between the two which are as follows:

Firstly, organic evolution implies the differentiation in the bodily structure, which is generally in the form of new organs to use for different purpose. But social evolution does not imply this. Man is the centre of social evolution.

He need not have to develop new organ to adjust himself with changed conditions of life. Because man has the capacity of inventing tools, making instruments and devising techniques to control the forces of nature and to adjust himself with the natural conditions. He can look before and after.

Secondly, in organic evolution, the transmission of qualities takes place through biological heredity, i.e. through ‘genes’. But social evolution takes place through ideas, discoveries, inventions and experiences. Here the changes are transmitted mostly through the mental ability and genius of man.

Thirdly, in case of organic evolution only the descending generation is affected by the structural modification, alterations. But in social evolution even the old as well as the new generations are affected by it. For example, invention of new techniques and devices is influencing the present as well as the future generations.

Lastly, the organic evolution is continuous. There can be no break in it. It is continuous because of the irresistible pressure within the organisation and of environment or natural forces. But such a continuity may not be observed in the case of social evolution. It is subject to disruption. It is an intermittent. It lacks continuity.

Social Change and Social Evolution :

Social change is an ever-present phenomenon everywhere. When we speak of social change, we suggest so far no law, no theory, no direction, even no continuity. Social change occurs in all societies and at all times. No society remains completely static. The term ‘social change’ itself is wholly neutral, implying nothing but differences that take place in human interactions and interrelations.

In explaining this concept of social change, modern sociologists from time to time used different words and expressions. Evolution is one of them. Many social theorists form Herbert Spencer to Sumner applied this conception of evolution in various ways to the interpretation of social change. But many modern theorists, particularly American, have abandoned the idea that social change takes place by evolutionary stages.

Evolution describes a series of interrelated changes in a system of some kind. It is a process in which hidden or latent characters of a thing reveal themselves. It shows not merely what happens to a thing but also what happens within it.

Evolution is an order of change which unfolds the variety of aspects belonging to the nature of changing object. We cannot speak of evolution when an object or system is changed by forces acting upon it from without.

The change must occur within the changing unity. Evolution is a process involving a changing adaptation of the object to its environment and a further manifestation of its own nature. Consequently, it is a change permeating the whole character of the object, a sequence in which the equilibrium of its entire structure undergoes modification.

According to Maclver, evolution is not mere change. It is an immanent process resulting in increased complexity and differentiation. He writes, “the Kernel of organic evolution is differentiation, a process in which latent or rudimentary characters take a distinct and variable form within the unity of the organism.”

Maclver further says, evolution or differentiation manifests itself in society by (a) a greater division of labour resulting in great specialization (b) an increase in the number and variety of functional associations, (c) a greater diversity and refinement in the means of social communication. “When these changes are proceeding, society is evolving”, concludes Maclver.

The concept of progress found notable expression in the writings of the French Philosophers such as Turgot, Condorcent and Fancis Bacon of the 18th century and has been a dynamic agent in the social activity of modern man. Sociologists such as Saint Simon, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were the earlier exponents of the idea of progress. According Comte, it was the intellectual elite who could bring about an era of progress.

Etymologically, the word progress means “moving forward.” But moving forward or backward, progress or regress are relative terms. If it be remarked that such and such country has progressed, no meaningful information can be extracted from such a statement unless the direction towards which progress has been made be known.

In this way, progress is not mere change. It is a change in particular direction. The word progress cannot be appended to change in every direction. For example, if the condition of agriculture in a particular country worsens and a famine results, it is undeniably a change, but it will not be called progress. Progress means moving forward in the direction of achievement of some aim.

Different thinkers have defined progress in different ways. The important definitions are as follows:

Maclver writes, “By progress we imply not merely direction, but direction towards some final goal, some destination determined ideally not simply by the objective consideration at work.

Lumely defines, “Progress is a change, but it is a change in a desired or approved direction, not in any direction.”

Ginsberg defines progress as “A development or evolution in a direction which satisfies rational criterion of value”.

According to Ogburn, “Progress is a movement towards an objective thought to be desirable by the general group for the visible future.

Burgess writes, “Any change or adoption to an existent environment that makes it easier for a person or group of persons or other organized from of life to live may be said to represent progress”.

Progress means an advance towards some ideally desirable end. Since progress means change for the better it definitely implies a value judgement of highly subjective character. For value, like taste, has no measuring rod.

A particular social change may seem to be progressive to one person to another it may seem retrogression, because they have different values. The concept of social progress is, therefore, subjective but it has reference to an objective condition.

Criteria of Progress :

It is difficult to explain the criteria of progress which are relative to their temporal context. Social values determine progress. Whether any change will be considered as progress or not depends upon the social values. Social values change with time and place. The criteria of progress change with the change of social values. Hence, it is difficult to formulate a universally acceptable criterion of progress. However, the following can be tentatively suggested.

Health and Longevity of Life:

Average length of life is one index of progress whether the world is growing better. But it does not necessarily follow from this that a longer life must be more pleasurable and better.

In the opinion of some persons, wealth or economic progress is a criterion of progress.

Population:

Some people are of the view that an increase in population is a sign of progress. But over-population cannot be a sign of progress.

Moral Conduct:

According to some thinkers, moral conduct is the criterion of progress.

Since life has many facets, it is not possible to formulate any one criterion of progress. But is stated that the integrated development of society is the criterion of progress. Integrated development comprehends all mental, physical and spiritual aspects including above criteria.

Nature of Progress :

By analysing above definitions, we find that progress is a change, a change for the better. When we speak of progress, we simply not merely direction, but direction towards some final goal. The nature of the progress depends upon two factors, the nature of the end and the distance of which we are from it.

The modern writers today speak of social progress though they do not have a single satisfactory explanation of the concept. In order to have a better understanding of the meaning of progress, we have to analyse the following attributes.

1. Progress is Dependent upon Social Values:

Progress dependent upon and is determined by social values. It means that progress does not have precisely the same meaning at all times and places, because values change from time to time. There is no object which can uniformly or eternally be considered valuable irrespective of time and place.

Due to this reason, Maclver and Page have written, “The concept of progress is a chameleon that take on the colour of the environment when we feel adjusted to that environment, and some contrasting colour when we feel maladjusted.

2. There is a Change in Progress:

Change is one of its essential attributes. The concept of progress presupposes the presence of change. Without change, there can be no progress.

3. In Progress the Desired End is Achieved:

The progress is not mere change. It is a change in a particular direction. Broadly speaking, progress means an advance towards some ideally desirable end. It always refers to the changes that leads to human happiness. Not all changes imply progress.

4. Progress is Communal:

Progress from its ethical point of view, may be personal but from the sociological point of view, is communal since sociology is that science of society. In it, the individual is taken into consideration only as a part of society. Only that change, whose influence can be felt on entire community or society for its betterment or welfare, can be called social progress.

5. Progress is Volitional:

Progress does not come about through inactivity. Desire and volition are needed for progress. Efforts have to be made and when these efforts are successful it is called progress. It is an uphill task. It must be remembered that every effort is not progressive.

6. Progress is Variable:

The concept of progress varies from society to society, place to place and from time to time. It does not remain constant in all times and of all places. That which is today considered as the symbol or progress may tomorrow be considered and treated as a sign of regress. For example, in India, free mixing of young boys and girls may be interpreted as an indication of regress, whereas the same may symbolise progress in the Western Countries.

7. Criteria of Progress are Variable:

As stated earlier criteria of progress are relative to their temporal context. Social values determine progress. But social values change with time and place. Therefore, criteria of progress vary from place to place. Further, different scholars have prescribed different criteria of progress. For example, health and longevity have been considered as criteria of progress by some, while other have taken economic security, moral conduct as the criteria of progress.

8. Progress does not have a Measuring Rod:

The term progress is very much subjective and value-loaded. It is not demonstrable with a degree of certainty. We cannot show it to others unless they first accept our evaluations. We may or may not agree that there is progress, but we cannot prove it. Progress is a reality which is immeasurable and undemonstrable. Anything that cannot be demonstrated and measured scientifically cannot be rejected socially. It is especially true in the case of progress.

To conclude, progress conveys the sense of something better and improved. The advancement in technology was opposed to contribute to progress. But, these developments did not carry the sense of progress. It was advancement only in a particular direction.

The comprehensiveness of progress was missing. The extremes of poverty and health, of ignorance and enlightenment had continued to coexist as ever before. Progress as conceived over the ages past, is now considered to be illusive. The end of progress, it has come to be accepted, cannot be determined.

The ‘progress’ in the West did not meet all its ends. It did not bring the fulfillment, that was taken to be its true aim. For this, the use of the term progress was considered inappropriate. The application of the term fell into disfavour. More so, the growing belief that sociology should be value-free also discouraged the use of this expression.

Social Change and Social Progress :

Change is the basic content of both evolution and progress. But the term change is wholly neutral, only suggesting variation in a phenomena over, a period of time. The moment the specifications like direction, desirability, and value-judgement are added to change, another terminology ‘progress’ becomes necessary to describe the process of change.

Progress is not mere change. It is a change in particular direction. It cannot be appended to change in every direction. The word progress means moving forward in the direction and achievement of some desired goal. It is certainly a change, a change for the better not for the worse. The concept of progress always involves and implies value judgement. It is not possible to speak of progress without reference to standards. Not all changes imply progress.

But social change is a generic term, an objective term describing one of the fundamental processes. There is no value-judgement attached to it. It is true that some changes are beneficial to mankind and some are harmful.

But social change is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. The study of social change involves no value-judgement, while the concept of social progress implies values judgement. Social progress means improvement, betterment, moving to a higher level from a lower level.

Social Evolution and Social Progress :

In the earlier theories of biological evolution, the concept of social evolution was intimately connected with social progress. For the social evolutionists of the nineteenth century from Auguste Comte to Herbert Spencer and Lester F. Ward, social evolution was, in effect, social progress. Modern sociologists, particularly Americans, do not hold this proposition.

They point out that evolution does not mean progress, because when a society is more evolved it does not necessarily follow that it is more progressive. If it would have been progressive, Maclver and Page remark that people in the more evolved society are better or better fitted to survive or more moral or more healthy than those we call primitive. Even if the opposite were true, it would not refute the fact that their society is more evolved.”

Social evolution should also be distinguished from social progress. Firstly L.T. Hobhouse says, evolution means a sort of growth while .social progress means the growth of social life in respect of those qualities to which human beings attach or can rationally attach value. The relation between the two is thus a ‘genus-species’ relation.

Social progress is only one among many possibilities of social evolution; any or every form of social evolution is not a form of social progress. For example, caste system in India is a product of social evolution. But it does not signify progress. Hobhouse concludes, “that it is good, the fact that society has evolved is no proof that it progressed.

Secondly, evolution is merely change in a given direction. It describes a series of interrelated changes in a system of some kind. It refers to an objective condition which is not evaluated as good or bad. On the contrary, progress means change in a direction determined ideally. In other words, it can be said, progress means change for the better not for the worse.

It implies a value-judgement. The evolutionary process may move in accordance with our notion of desirable change, but there is no logical necessity that it should. The concept of progress necessarily involves a concept of end. And the concept of end varies with the mentality and experience of the individual and the group.

The affirmation of evolution “depends on our perception of objective evidences, whereas the affirmation or denial of progress depends on our ideals.” It follows that evolution is a scientific concept and progress is an ethical concept. Evolution is a demonstrable reality; out the term progress is very much subjective and value-loaded and is not demonstrable with a degree of certainty.

While social evolution is clearly distinguished from social progress, we must not loose sight of their relationships. Ethical valuations or ideas (Progress) are socially determined and hence determine the objective phenomena (Evolution) of society. They have always been powerful in shaping and moving the world. In some manner they are active in every process of social change. “All social change has this double character.”

From the above analysis we find, though the above three concepts, social change, social evolution and social progress share many common reference points, they have different intellectual framework. They all articulate same consequential effects.

In all the three processes, one cause produces a number of effects, the effect and cause get intermixed to produce other new effects, again new connections between cause and effect are established and so on goes the process.

Factors of Social Change :

A sociological explanation of change refers not only to the structure that changes but also the factors that effect such a change. Social change has occurred in all societies and in all periods of time. We should, therefore, know what the factors are that produce change. Of course there is little consensus among the representatives of theoretical proposition on the sources.

Besides, the linear as well as the cyclical theorists paid little attention to the determinations of factors involved in social change. Morris Ginsberg has made a systematic analysis of the factors which have been invoked by different writers to explain social change.

Here, our analysis is confined to sociological implantation of the origins and causes of change. Cause will be defined here as set of related factors which, taken together, are both sufficient and necessary for the production of a certain effect.

Attempt has been made to take up each factors of social change by itself and find out the way in which it effects social change. These factors are treated independently, purely for purpose of understanding and we are not of the view that they can influence social change independent of other factors.

Technological Factor :

Technological factor constitute one important source of social change. Technology, an invention, is a great agent of social change. It either initiates or encourages social change. Technology alone holds the key to change. When the scientific knowledge is applied to the problems of life, it becomes technology. In order to satisfy his desires, to fulfill his needs and to make his life more comfortable, man builds civilisation.

The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes. It is the central event, the key to the understanding of the years immediately ahead. We have already crossed the first wave (agricultural revolution). We are now the children of the next transformation i.e. the third wave.

We go forward to describe the full power and reach of this extraordinary change. Some speak of a “Looming Space Age”, “Information Age”, “Electronic Era”, or “Global ‘ Village”. Brezezinski has told us, we face a “Technetronic Age”. Sociologist Daniel Bell describes the coming of a “Post-Industrial Society”. Soviet futurists speak of the STR-‘The Scientific-Technological Revolution”. Alvin Toffler has written extensively about the arrival of a “Super Industrial Society”.

Technology is fast growing. Every technological advance makes it possible for us to attain certain results with less effort, at less cost and at less time. It also provides new opportunities and establishes new conditions of life. The social effects of technology are far-reaching.

In the words of W.F. Ogburn, “technology changes society by changing our environment to which we in turn adapt. This change is usually in the material environment and the adjustment that we make with these changes often modifies our customs and social institutions”.

Ogburn and Nimkoff have pointed that a single invention may have innumerable social effects. According to them, radio, for example, has influenced our entertainment, education, politics, sports, literature, knowledge, business, occupation and our modes of organisation. They have given a list consisting of 150 effects of radio in U.S.A.

The pace of change in the modern era is easily demonstrated by reference to rates of technological development. The technological revolution enabled human kind to shift from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture and later to develop civilizations.

Technological revolutions enabled societies to industrialize urbanize, specialize, bureaucratize, and take on characteristics that are considered central aspects of modern society. “Modern technology,” remarks the economic historian David Landes, “produces not only more, faster; it turns out objects that could not have been produced under any circumstances by the craft methods of yesterday.

Most important, modern technology has created things that could scarcely have been conceived in the pre-industrial era the camera, the motor car, the aeroplane, the whole array of electronic devices from the radio to the high speed computer, the nuclear power plant, and so on almost adinfinitum…. The result has been an enormous increase in the output and variety of goods and services, and this alone has changed man’s way of life more than anything since the discovery of fire…”

Every technological revolution has brought about increase in the world population. Development and advancement of agriculture resulted in the increase of population in the agricultural communities; rise of commerce gave birth to the populous towns, international trade and international contact and the industrial revolution set the human society on the new pedestal.

Technological changes have influenced attitudes, beliefs and traditions. The factory system and industrialization, urbanization and the rise of working class, fast transport and communication have demolished old prejudices, dispelled superstitions, weakened casteism, and has given rise to the class based society.

Ogborn even goes to the extent of suggesting that the starter in motor car had something to do with the emancipation of women in the America and Western Europe. Development in transport and communication has changed the outlook of the people.

Railways in India have played tremendous role in bringing about social mixing of the people. It has helped people to move out of their local environments and take up jobs in distant corners of the country. Movement of people from East to West and North to South has broken social and regional barriers.

There have come into existence new vocations and trades. People have begun to give up their traditional occupations and are taking to work in the factories and in the offices-commercial as well as Government. This has also made possible the vertical mobility.

A person can now aspire to take up an occupation with higher status than he could have ever thought of in the pre-technological days. Technology has brought about Green Revolution with abundance and variety for the rich.

The rapid changes of every modern society are inextricably interwoven or connected with and somehow dependent upon the development of new techniques, new inventions, new modes of production and new standards of living.

Technology thus is a great bliss. It has made living worthwhile for the conveniences and comfort it provides, and has created numerous vocations, trades and professions. While, giving individual his rightful place, it has made the collectivity supreme.

Technologies are changing and their social consequences are profound. Fundamental changes brought by technology in social structure are discussed as under:

1. Birth of Factory System:

The introduction of machines in the industry has replaced the system of individual production by the factory or mill system. It has led to the creation of huge factories which employ thousands of people and where most of the work is performed automatically.

2. Urbanisation:

The birth of gigantic factories led to urbanisation and big cities came into existence. Many labourers, who were out of employment in rural areas migrated to the sites to work and settled around it. As the cities grew, so did the community of ‘labourers and with it was felt the need for all civic amenities which are essential for society. Their needs were fulfilled by establishing market centers, schools, colleges, hospitals, and recreation clubs. The area further developed when new business came to it with the formation of large business houses.

3. Development of New Agricultural Techniques:

The introduction of machinery into the industry led to the development of new techniques in agriculture. Agricultural production was increased due to the use of new chemical manure. The quality was also improved by the use of superior seeds. All these factors resulted in increase of production. In India, the effect of technology is most apparent in this direction because India is preeminently an agricultural country.

4. Development of Means of Transportation and Communication:

With the development of technology, means of transportation and communication progressed at a surprising rate. These means led to the mutual exchanges between the various cultures. Newspapers, radios, televisions etc. helped to bring news from every corner of the world right into the household. The development of the car, rail, ship and aeroplane made transportation of commodities much easier. As a result national and international trade made unprecedented progress.

5. Evolution of New Classes:

Industrialisation and urbanisation gave birth to the emergence of new classes in modern society. Class struggle arises due to division of society into classes having opposite-interests.

6. New Conceptions and Movements:

The invention of mechanism has also culminated in the generation of new currents in the prevalent thinking. ‘Trade Union’ movements, ‘Lockouts’, ‘Strikes”, “Hartals’, ‘Processions’, ‘Pen down’ became the stocks-in-trade of those who want to promote class interest. These concepts and movements become regular features of economic activity.

The effects of technology on major social institution may be summed up in the following manner:

Technology has radically changed the family organisation and relation in several ways.

Firstly, small equalitarian nuclear family system based on love, equality, liberty and freedom is replacing the old, authoritarian joint family system. Due to invention of birth, control method, the size of family reduced.

Secondly, Industrialisation destroying the domestic system of production has brought women from home to the factories and office. The employment of women meant their independence from the bondage of man. If brought a change in their attitudes and ideas. It meant a new social life for women. It consequently affected every part of the family life.

Thirdly due to technology, marriage has lost its sanctity. It is now regarded as civil contract rather than a religious sacrament. Romantic marriage, inter-caste marriage and late marriages are the effects of technology. Instances of divorce, desertion, separation and broken families are increasing.

Lastly, though technology has elevated the status of women, it has also contributed to the stresses and strains in the relations between men and women at home. It has lessened the importance of family in the process of socialisation of its members.

Technology has effected wide range of changes in our religious life. Many religious practices and ceremonies which once marked the individual and social life, have now been abandoned by them. With the growth of scientific knowledge and modern education, the faith of the people in several old religious beliefs and activities have shaken.

Economic life:

The most striking change due to technological advance, is the change in economic organisation. Industry has been taken away from the household and new types of economic organisation like factories, stores, banks, joint stock companies, stock-exchanges, and corporation have been setup. It has given birth to capitalism with all its attendant evils.

Division of labour, specialization of function, differentiation and integration all the products of technology. Though it has brought in higher standard of living, still then by creating much more middle classes, it has caused economic depression, unemployment, poverty, industrial disputes and infectious diseases.

Effects on State:

Technology has affected the State in several ways. The functions of the State has been widened. A large number of functions of family, such as educative, recreation, health functions have been transferred to the State.

The idea of social welfare State is an offshoot of technology. Transportation and communication are leading to a shift of functions from local Government to the Central Government. The modern Government which rule through the bureaucracy have further impersonalised the human relations.

Social life:

Technological innovations have changed the whole gamut of social and cultural life. The technological conditions of the modern factory system tend to weaken the rigidity of the caste system and strengthen industrializations. It has changed the basis of social stratification from birth to wealth. Urbanization, a consequence of technological advance, produces greater emotional tension and mental strain, instability and economic insecurity.

There is masking of one’s true feelings. Socially, the urbanites are poor in the midst of plenty. “They feel lonely in the crowd”. On all sides, one is confronted with “human machines which possess motion but not sincerity, life but not emotion, heart but not feelings”. Technology has grown the sense of individualism. It has substituted the ‘handi work’ with ‘head work’.

It is clear from the above explanation that technology has profoundly altered our modes of life and also thought. It is capable of bringing about vast changes in society. But is should not be considered as a sole factor of social change. Man is the master as well as a servant of the machine. He has the ability to alter the circumstances which have been the creation of his own inventions or technology.

Cultural Factor of Social Change :

Among all the factors, cultural factor is the most important which works as a major cause of social change. Culture is not something static. It is always in flux. Culture is not merely responsive to changing techniques, but also it itself is a force directing social change.

Culture is the internal life forces of society. It creates itself and develops by itself. It is men who plan, strive and act. The social heritage is never a script that is followed slavishly by people. A culture gives cues and direction to social behaviour.

Technology and material inventions may influence social change but direction and degree of this depends upon the cultural situation as a whole. “Culture is the realm of final valuation”. Men interpret the whole world. He is the master as well as the servant of his own inventions or technology.

To employ Maclver’s simile, technological means may be represented by a ship which can set sail to various ports. The port we sail to remains a cultural choice. Without the ship we could not sail at all. According to the character of the ship we sail fast of ‘slow, take longer or shorter voyages.

Our lives are also accommodated to the conditions on ship board and our experiences vary accordingly. But the direction in which we travel is not predestinated by the design of the ship. The port to which we sail, the direction in which we travel, remains totally of a cultural choice.

It should be noted that technology alone cannot bring vast changes in society. In order to be effective “The technology must have favourable cultural support”. When the cultural factor responds to technological change, it also reacts on it so as to influence the direction and character of social change.

It may be noted that culture not only influences our relationship and values but also influences the direction and character of technological change. For example, different countries like Great Britain, Soviet Union, U.S.A. and India may adopt the same technology, but in so far as their prevalent outlook on life differs, they will apply it in different directions and to different ends.

The atomic energy can be used for munition of war and for production purposes. The industrial plant can turn out armaments or necessaries of life. Steel and iron can be used for building purposes and for warships. Fire can be used for constructive and destructive purposes.

For a better understanding of the relationship between culture and technology, let us analyse here the concept of “cultural lag”.

Cultural Lag:

The concept of ‘cultural lag’, has become a favourite one with sociologists, it is an expression that has a particular appeal in an age in which inventions discoveries and innovations of many kinds are constantly disturbing and threatening older ways of living. In this context, it will serve also to introduce the principle that cultural conditions are themselves important agencies in the process of social change.

The concept of ‘cultural lag’ was first explicitly formulated by W.F. Ogburn in his treaties entitled ‘Social Change’. Lag means crippled movement. Hence, ‘cultural lag’ means the phases of culture which fall behind other phases that keep on moving ahead.

Ogburn’s idea of ‘cultural lag’ is perhaps one of the most important concept influencing the fact of discussion regarding technology and social change. Ogburn distinguishes between “material” and ‘non-material’ culture.

By ‘material culture’ he means things which are ‘tangible’, visible, seen or touched like goods, tools, utensils, furniture, machine. But the ‘non-material’ culture includes things which cannot be touched or tangible such as family, religion, skill, talent. Government and education etc.

According to Ogburn, when changes occur in ‘material culture’, those in turn stimulate changes in ‘non-material’ culture, particularly in what he terms the ‘adaptive’ culture. According to Ogburn, material culture changes by a process which is different in pace from changes in non-material culture.

The larger the technological knowledge of a society, the greater the possibility of a new combinations and innovations. Thus, material culture tends to grow exponentially. Because society cannot develop methods of controlling and utilizing new technology before the technology is accepted and used. There exists a “cultural lag” in creating controls and altering social relationship related to new conditions brought about by new technology.

Cultural lag is due to man’s psychological dogmatism. He is wedded to certain ideologies regarding sex, education and religion. On account of his dogmatic beliefs and ideologies, he is not prepared to change his social institutions. The failure to adopt social institutions to the changes in the material culture leads to cultural lag.

But Maclver points out that “unfortunately it is often adopted without adequate analysis and consequently it has not been developed in a clear and effective manner. According to him, the distinction is not a workable one. Nor again should be assumed that, it is always the ‘material’ or that the main problem is one of adapting the ‘non-material’ to the ‘material’ culture.

Maclver also observes that the term ‘lag’ is not properly applicable to relations between technological factors and the cultural patterns or between the various components of the cultural pattern itself. He has used different words like, ‘technological lag’, ‘technological restraint’, for the resulting imbalance in the different parts of culture.

Kingsley Davis, in his ‘Human Society’ holds that the aspect of culture cannot be divided into material and non-material and that this distinction in no way helps us to understand the nature of technology. Other sociologists, Sutherland, Wood Ward and Maxwell, in their book ‘Introductory Sociology’ point out that Ogburn is guilty of over simplifying the processes of social change.

Social change is a complex phenomenon. The rate, speed and direction of social change is not the same everywhere. So it cannot be explained by simply saying that change first takes place in material culture and thereafter in non-material culture. Ogburn has taken an over simple materialistic view of society.

In spite of various shortcomings, Ogburn’s theory of cultural lag has been proved to be beneficial for the understanding of the cultural factor in bringing about social change. It has been acknowledged by all that there is an intimate connections between the technological advance and our cultural values.

Hence, we may note here that our culture, our thoughts, values, habits are the consequences of technological changes; the latter also is the consequences of changes of the former. Both technology and cultural factors are the two important sources of social change. The two are not only interdependent but also interactive. Man does not simply want a thing but he wants a thing which may also be beautiful and appealing to his senses.

Dowson and Gettys, in introduction to Sociology’, rightly remark, “Culture tends to give direction and momentum to social change to set limits beyond which social change cannot occur.

It is the culture which has kept the social relationship intact. It makes people think not of their own but also of the others. Any change in cultural valuation will have wider repercussion on the personality of the individual and the structure of the group. Every technological invention, innovation, new industrial civilization or new factor disturbs an old adjustment.

The disturbance created by mechanism was so great that it seemed to be the enemy of culture, as indeed all revolutions seem. The wealth-bringing machine brought also, ugliness, shoddiness, haste, standardization. It brought new hazards, new diseases, and industrial fatigue.

That was not the fault of the machines and power plants. It was due to the ruthlessness and greed of those who controlled these great inventions. But human values or cultural values reasserted themselves against economic exploitation. Culture began, at first very slowly, to redirect the new civilization. It made the new means of living at length more tractable to the uses of personality and new arts blossomed on the ruins of the old.

To conclude, social systems are directly or indirectly the creation of cultural values. So eminent sociologist Robert Bierstedt has rightly remarked, “What people think, in short, determines in every measure… what they do and what they want”. Thus, there a definite relation is a definite relation between changing beliefs and attitudes and changing social institutions. So Hobhouse says, there is “a broad correlation between the system of institutions and mentally behind them”.

Demographic Factor of Social Change:

The demographic factor plays the most decisive role in causing social change. The quantitative view of demography takes into account the factors that determine the population: its size, numbers, composition, density and the local distribution etc.

The population of every community is always changing both in numbers and in composition. The changes in population have a far-reaching effect on society. During the 19th century, the population of most countries of Western Europe fell down. During the same time also, the death rate of these countries declined. This double phenomenon is unprecedented in the history of man.

Population changes have occurred all through human history. It is due to various reasons such as migration, invasion, and war, pestilence, changing food supply and changing mores. There was depopulation and overpopulation in times past. The swift and steady decline of both the birth rate and death in the past 70 years or so witnesses to a great social transformation.

In a society where the size or number of female children is greater than the number of male children, we will find a different system of courtship, marriage and family disorganisation from that where the case is reverse. Women command less respect in that community where their numbers are more.

It has always been recognised that there exists a reciprocal relation between population and social structure. The social structure influences population changes and is affected by them. It is beyond doubt that economic conditions and population rates are interdependent. Increasing 254 Social Change interaction results from an increase in the size and density of population. Increase in population also leads to an increase of social differentiation and a division of labour.

With the changes in size, number and density of population, changes take place in composition. The most important reasons for the contemporary population explosion are the tremendous technological changes on the one hand and a most spectacular advance in controlling the diseases by science and preventive medicines on the other hand.

Advancement in science and technology is indirectly boosting the world population by delaying the death rate. For example, take the case of ‘Malaria’. This disease was responsible for the death of million of people in India and other countries.

But it has now been completely eliminated by destroying the malaria carrying mosquitoes with the use of pesticides. Surgery too has advanced so much today. The vital organs of human body such as kidney and heart can be transplanted or replaced when worn out.

The growth of population has given birth to a great variety of social problems such as unemployment, child labour, wars, competition and production of synthetic goods. It has led to urbanization with all its attendant evils.

Countries with growing population and relatively limited resources have an incentive to imperialism and to militarism. These attitudes in turn, encourage a further increase of population. Increase in population threatens the standards of living and thus inspires a change of attitude.

Due to unprecedented growth of population in the 19th century, the practice of birth control took a new development. This practice (use of contraceptive), in turn, had many repercussions on family relationships and even on attitudes towards marriage.

With a change in population, there is also a change in a pattern of ‘consumption’. Societies having large number of children are required to spend relatively large amounts of money on food and education. On the other hand, societies with large proportions of elderly people have to spend relatively more amount on medical care.

In some cases, population changes may initiate pressures to change political institutions. For example, changes in the age, sex or ethnic composition of a people of then complicates the political process of country.

Besides, there is a close relationship between the growth of population and the level of physical health and vitality of the people. Because there are many mouths to feed, none gets enough nutritious food to eat, as a result chronic malnutrition and associated diseases become prevalent.

These, induce physical incompetence, apathy and lack of enterprise. Due to these people’s low level of physical well-being, they are socially backward and unprogressive. They show their indifference to improve their material welfare. An underfed, disease-ridden people are lethargic people.

Moreover, if the growth of population is checked, it would mean a higher standard of living, the emancipation of women from child-bearing drudgery, better care for the young and consequently a better society.

Demographers have shown that variation in the density of population also affects nature of our social relationship. In a low population density area, the people are said to exhibit a greater degree of primary relationship whereas in the area of high density of population, the relationship between people is said to superficial and secondary. In the opinion of Worth, high density areas witness the growth of mental stress and loneliness of life.

The importance of demography as a factor of social change has been realised by various sociologists and economists. An eminent French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, went on to the extent of developing a new branch of sociology dealing with population which he called “Social Morphology” which not only analyses the size and quality of population but also examine how population affects the quality of social relationships and social groups.

Durkheim has pointed out that our modern societies are not only characterised by increasing division of labour but also specialisation of function. The increasing division of labour and specialization of function have a direct correlation with the increasing density of population. He stresses on the fact that in a simple society with comparatively lesser number of people, the necessity of complex division of labour is less felt.

This society, according to Durkheim, is based on “mechanical solidarity”. But as the groups grow in size and complexity with the increase in population, the “services of the experts” are more required. The society, according to him, moves towards “organic solidarity”. There is, so to say, a drift from mechanical to organic solidarity.

M. David Heer, in his book “Society and Population”, has developed a “theory of demographic transition”. The theory was popularised just after the end of World War-II. It has provided a comprehensive explanation of the effects of economic development both on fertility and mortality decline.

Schneidar and Dornbusch, in their book “Popular Religion”, have pointed that decline in mortality rate evokes several changes in social structure. They have stressed on the point that due to decline in mortality rate in USA since 1875, negative attitude towards religious beliefs have been cultivated by the people.

They also point out that in a society wherein children die before reaching the age of five, parents may not develop a strong emotional attachment to their children and also in a high mortality society, arranged marriages are common, but in a low mortality society love marriages become the dominant feature. Again when mortality rate is high, individual tends to have a weaker orientation towards the future and stronger orientation towards the present.

Thomas Robert Malthus, an English cleargyman, mathematician and economist, was one of the earliest demographers. In his work, “An Essay on the Principles of Population”, published in 1978, he mentioned that under normal conditions, population would grow by geometrical progression, whereas the means of subsistence would grow by arithmetical progression. The imbalance or lag or gap between the two would create a lot of problems for society.

That is why, Malthus has pleaded for two types of checks which can keep the population down. He spoke of hunger and disease as positive check, and late marriage and enforced celibacy as the preventive check.

From the above analysis, we find that demographic factor has been contributing to the great transformations in society’s socioeconomic and political structure throughout human history. For example, most countries in Asia where more than half world population is now living, is characterised by high birth rate. These countries in general and Indian society in particular, are passing through a critical period of great poverty, unemployment and moral degeneration.

The gap between the living standards of general masses of these countries and that of the developed countries is widening. The gap is cruelly frustrating the third world country’s hopes for development.

With the current rate of population increase, it is expected that the total requirements for future health, education, housing and many other welfare needs are bound to increase. This will certainly bring the drastic changes not only in the microstructures, but also in macrostructures of Indian society.

Related Articles:

• Difference between Social and Cultural Change
• Cultural Change: Main Factors and Causes of Cultural Change

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Essay on Society

Students are often asked to write an essay on Society in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Society

Introduction.

Society is a group of individuals who share a common area, culture, and behavior. It includes various communities, families, and organizations.

Role in Development

Society plays a vital role in our development. It shapes our values, beliefs, and norms, influencing our behavior and decisions.

Importance of Society

Society is important as it provides structure and order. It offers a platform for social interaction, helping us learn and grow.

In conclusion, society is an essential part of our lives. It shapes us as individuals and plays a key role in our overall development.

250 Words Essay on Society

Understanding society: a complex web.

Society, the intricate network of human relationships and interactions, is a cornerstone of human existence. Formed through shared values, norms, and beliefs, it serves as the bedrock of civilization, fostering cooperation, and mutual understanding among individuals.

The Evolution of Society

Society has evolved significantly over time, transitioning from small bands of hunter-gatherers to complex, technologically advanced communities. This transformation has been driven by various factors, including environmental changes, technological advancements, and shifts in human cognition and behavior.

Society and Individual

The relationship between society and the individual is a subject of continuous debate. While society shapes individuals through socialization, individuals also influence society by challenging norms and driving change. This dynamic interplay between society and individuals highlights the fluidity and complexity of social structures.

The Role of Society in Modern Times

In today’s globalized world, societies are becoming increasingly interconnected. This interconnection has amplified the exchange of ideas, cultures, and values, leading to a more diverse and inclusive global society. However, it also presents challenges such as cultural homogenization and the erosion of traditional societal structures.

In conclusion, society is not a static entity but a dynamic construct that evolves with time. Understanding its complexities and nuances is crucial for fostering social harmony and progress. As we move forward, it is essential to ensure that societal evolution is inclusive and sustainable, promoting the welfare of all its members.

500 Words Essay on Society

The concept of society.

A society is more than a mere collection of individuals. It is a living, breathing entity that shapes and is shaped by its members. It is a system of interdependent parts that function together to ensure the survival and prosperity of the whole. In essence, a society is a mirror of its people, reflecting their values, beliefs, and aspirations.

The Structure of Society

Societies are structured in ways that reflect the underlying power dynamics and social hierarchies. These structures can be formal, such as government institutions and legal systems, or informal, like social norms and cultural practices. They serve to maintain order, facilitate cooperation, and mediate conflicts. However, they can also perpetuate inequalities and injustices, making societal structure a critical area of study and reform.

Society and Culture

Society and change.

Societies are not static; they are continually evolving. This evolution is driven by a variety of factors, including technological advancements, economic developments, and social movements. Change can be a source of progress, leading to improvements in living standards, social equality, and human rights. However, it can also be a source of conflict, as people resist changes that threaten their interests or values.

The Role of Individuals in Society

Individuals play a crucial role in shaping society. Through their actions, ideas, and innovations, individuals can instigate change, challenge existing norms, and contribute to the development of society. However, individuals are also shaped by society, their thoughts and behaviors influenced by the social, cultural, and institutional contexts in which they live.

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About this Chapter

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? How we answer these questions shapes how we think about, and how we behave toward, ourselves and others. And our answers to those questions are influenced by the society we live in.  This chapter explores the relationship between the individual and society, and how that relationship affects the choices we make.  

Essential Questions

• What is the relationship between the individual and society?
• What factors shape our identities? What parts of our identities do we choose for ourselves? What parts are determined for us by others, by society, or by chance?
• What dilemmas arise when others view us differently than we view ourselves?
• How do our identities influence our choices and the choices available to us?

What's Included

This chapter is from the  Individual & Society  section of  Holocaust and Human Behavior  and includes:

• 17 readings 
• Connection Questions

Additional Context & Background

We begin to learn our culture—the ways of our society—just after birth. That process is called socialization, and it involves far more than schooling. Our culture shapes the way we work and play, and it makes a difference in how we view ourselves and others. It affects our values—what we consider right and wrong. This is how the society we live in influences our choices. But our choices can also influence others and ultimately help shape our society.

Imagine that you encounter a stranger walking down the street. How might you describe the person? What labels would you use? We know that every person is different from any other in countless ways, yet when we encounter others we often rely on generalizations to describe them. “It's a natural tendency,” says psychologist Deborah Tannen. “We must see the world in patterns in order to make sense of it; we wouldn’t be able to deal with the daily onslaught of people and objects if we couldn’t predict a lot about them and feel that we know who and what they are." 1

Our society—through its particular culture, customs, institutions, and more—provides us with the labels we use to categorize the people we encounter. These labels are based on beliefs about race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, and more. Sometimes our beliefs about these categories are so strong that they prevent us from seeing the unique identities of others. Sometimes these beliefs also make us feel suspicion, fear, or hatred toward some members of our society. Other times, especially when we are able to get to know a person, we are able to see past labels and, perhaps, find common ground.

The stories in this chapter explore some of the dilemmas people face as they establish themselves both as individuals and as members of a group, and as they define themselves and are defined by others. As the first step in the Facing History & Ourselves journey, this chapter introduces ideas about human behavior and decision making that will serve as a foundation for examining the historical case study in the chapters that follow. Teachers are encouraged to select the readings that match their objectives and the interests and needs of their students.

• 1 Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 16.

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Inside this chapter, explore the readings.

The Bear That Wasn't

The Danger of a Single Story

Names and identity, finding one's voice, the eye of the beholder, gender and identity, defining race, the social reality of race, the consequences of stereotyping, the blink of an eye, little things are big, words matter, religion and identity, the "in" group, finding confidence, one identity, multiple belongings.

Analysis & Reflection

Enhance your students’ understanding of our readings on individual, society, and identity with these follow-up questions and prompts.

A person has three names: one that he is called by his father and mother; one that people know him by, and one that he acquires for himself.

What is this poem suggesting about the ways we come to understand our identities? What stories from this chapter could illustrate this poem?

• The Bear That Wasn’t is a children’s book that reflects universal questions about the relationship between the individual and society. How do you see ideas from Reading 1, "The Bear That Wasn’t ,"  echoed in some of the other readings throughout this chapter?
• In the reading  The Danger of a Single Story , Chimamanda Adichie warns of “the danger of a single story.” What does she mean? What other readings in this chapter illustrate this danger? Which ones suggest ways to overcome the danger of a single story?
• Legal scholar Martha Minow writes, “When we simplify and sort, we focus on some traits rather than others, and we assign consequences to the presence and absence of the traits we make significant.” What are some of the “traits we make significant” in our society? Do you think some traits and differences matter more than others, and if so, why? Who decides which traits matter most? What readings from this chapter have had the strongest influence on your thinking about these questions?

Related Materials

• Reading The Bear That Wasn't
• Reading The Danger of a Single Story

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Changes in Society and Schools Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Change in every situation is inevitable as new issues usually crop up and necessitate adjustments. Change is however taken differently by those affected as some prefer to maintain their old ways of doing things while others are ready to absorb and appreciate changes especially when it is to their benefit. This piece of work gives an insight to the changes that are to take place in the United States’ schools and the society at large and the different ways in which the changes are received by different persons for instance the teachers, administrators and the parents. It also provides some recommendations or ways of dealing with the different reactions so as to come to a consensus.

With the economic conditions the way they are in the United States, many parents feel they both must work. What suggestions as a potential administrator would you make to parents regarding their school-age children?

Different aspects in the world are interdependent and they tend to affect each other either directly or indirectly for instance the economic, political, social and even cultural factors affect a situation either positively or negatively depending on the impacts experienced. The hard-economic conditions in the United States of America has greatly affected the way of life of the people as they feel they have to work a little bit harder so as to satisfy their increasing needs.

Increase in population size has particularly brought about increase in the level of poverty among the American people as competition for resources become stiff as each and every person try to make ends meet. Parents with school going children find themselves in situations that force them to be both working to deal with high economic conditions like high housing and food prices and also school fees. Parents should however under all circumstances make sure that their children’s needs are taken care of and also ensure that they have adequate time to discuss school related issues with their children.

As educators, we have no control over who is poor and who is not. In what ways do schools make poor children second-class citizens, and what can we do to prevent this from occurring?

Different people including children have different wealth levels; some are rich while others are poor. The differences are quite evident from the way people behave or respond to issues in life. Schools make poor children second-class citizens through the discrimination and poor treatment on them in comparison with the rich children. Even though we do not have control over who is poor or rich, we should always try to equalize the children by provision of equal opportunities and treatments and most importantly encouraging associations like group discussions and games among the children from rich and poor families.

Unmarried mothers are usually at the high school level, although not always. What educational options does your district offer for young unmarried mothers? How are these options conveyed to the pregnant teenager?

Single parenthood is not the best to school going children especially where the level of education of the mother is low for instance elementary or high school levels as the mothers have got limited knowledge and skills on parenting and the general life. Although it is difficult to take back the mothers to class special programs are offered to the young unmarried mothers where they are organized into associations and parenting issues are discussed during meetings. Pregnant teenagers are also encouraged to participate in the meetings to be well equipped with parenting skills.

Does your community have gangs? What evidence have you observed or read about their activities? What community or school programs have been created as a result of their existence?

Gangs are present in America and the rate at which they are formed and their increase in number and members is on the rise and therefore their activities cannot go unnoticed. They usually employ violence in their illegal activities and therefore are harmful to the general society. It is difficult to deal with the gangs due to the violence and power they possess.

However arresting and convicting them, providing educational programs that aim at informing the members of the effects of their illegal activities to the society and the importance of positive change, provision of counseling in regard to drugs where people are told of the effects of drugs and the importance of living positively and avoiding violence and rebellious acts and also provision of treatment which helps the victims recover from the effects of drugs is offered to counter their effects (Albaneese, 2003).

Answers to the Case study questions

During the planning for a possible switch to a year-round system, some school- community techniques were overlooked for instance there was poor communication where some information was leaked to the community by the staff at the wrong time when the idea was not fully synthesized. All the participants for instance the parents, staff and the community should be given the right information at the right time through the right means to avoid conflicts.

Some teachers, Mr. Brown and Ms. Silver could be the ones responsible for the breakdown of communication to the site-level administrator and superintendent. This was however due to poor planning since better planning could have ensured that the information reach the right people at the right time. The reactions of the parents could be anticipated by gauging the positive and negative attributes of the introduction of the new system and the effects it is expected to make.

Sampling would also help to gauge the public opinions by taking different ideas and opinions from different people. Knowing that at least two outspoken teachers were against the proposed plan, Mr. Johnson could have been more careful and know that the two particular teachers could be voicing the opinion of the majority of the staff and therefore take necessary steps. Some of the factors influencing the teachers and the parents in regard to the year-round school system are the changes the system is to bring along for instance elimination of holidays for the teachers, congestion of the teachers and students which will result to sharing of the limited resources. These issues could have been discussed in advance to anticipate the reactions.

To avoid alienating either the parents who want to hear the music performance and those who want to discuss the year-round school issue, Mr. Johnson should stick to his word that the meeting was meant for the music but promise another meeting for the year-round school issue soon. He should then take necessary actions with immediate effect and be ready to listen to different views of all those involved.

Mr. Brown and Ms. Silver attitude towards the issue should be dealt with appropriately to avoid influencing others and a balance should be reached between the different opinions so as to avoid conflicts between the staff members. There should also be effective communication to all participants including the community of any action taken in regard to the year-round school issue to ensure that everyone is at per with what is happening.

Reference List

Albaneese, J. (2003). Organized Crime: World Perspectives . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Change — The Importance Of Change For Success Of An Individual And Society

The Importance of Change for Success of an Individual and Society

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Published: Dec 3, 2020

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