Social Change

6 Key excerpts on "Social Change"

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  Women

  Social, Political and Economical Changes in the last five decades

  • Sirithida Wannachai(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Society Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Initially, the chapter tries to explain the historical background and its evolution process in context of society and humankind. All of these changes governed majorly by the Social Change are discussed in detail. It explains the various factors responsible for the Social Change. It even explains about cultural diffusion and tries to establish its relationship with societal transformation. It explains the Marx’s idea of sociology, which revolves around the dimension of class conflict. Its application in developing an empowered society is also discussed. 1.1 DEFINING Social Change Social Change relates to any substantial modification in behavior patterns and cultural values and norms, over time. The term “significant alteration” denotes the change as a byproduct of intense social evolution. The industrial revolution, the feminist movement, and the abolition of slavery are a few of the classic examples of substantial Social Changes posing a long-term impact. In the modern time, sociologists voluntarily recognize the vibrant role that these movement play in stirring discontented members of a society to bring about Social Change. In an attempt to comprehend, the nature of long-term societal revolution, along with its patterns and causes, has provoked several sociologists to propose the evolutionary, functionalist, and conflict theories of change. Further, all the defined theories also admit the probability of resistance to change, especially when people with consigned interests feel disturbed and threatened by potential changes. In the late 19th century, the concept of sociology gained popularity across the globe. This movement was an attempt to understand the different dynamics involved in the rise of the modern world. Few early sociological philosophers tried to comprehend the two interrelated revolutionary processes that introduced the world to modernization. These two revolutionary concepts were urbanization and industrialization.

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  Sociology in Our Times: The Essentials

  • Diana Kendall(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Social Change has also been related to changes in population size, distribution, and composition because these affect the culture and social structure of a society and change the relationships among nations. Technology is another factor in Social Change. Technological advances change many other aspects of social life, including bringing about improvements in the quality and length of life. However, technological advances also bring about changes that make us more vulnerable to such concerns as loss of privacy, heightened acts of violence and terrorism, and global unrest and even war. In the present and future, many Social Changes will continue to occur in social institutions, including the family, education, religion, politics, media, and law. In the future we need new ways to conceptualize social life at both the macrolevel and the microlevel so that we can bring about positive changes that benefit the well-being of all people and minimize harmful, destructive changes that might produce catastrophic results for our nation or the world. Questions for Critical Thinking 1 What types of collective behavior in the United States do you believe are influenced by inequalities based on race/ethnicity, class, gender, age, or disabilities? Why? 2 Which of the four explanations of crowd behavior (contagion theory, social unrest and circular reaction, convergence theory, and emergent norm theory) do you believe best explains crowd behavior? Why? 3 In the text the climate change activism and environmental movements are analyzed in terms of the value-added theory.

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  Readings in Social Evolution and Development

  The Commonwealth and International Library: Readings in Sociology

  • S. N. Eisenstadt(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  Such modifications permit the identification of the sources of change in all societies. Various non-social causes and social determinisms have been rejected but other dynamic factors remain. These include both flexibilities and strains inherent in the structure of societies. It is suggested that a pure theory of Social Change, independent of substantive identification of the patterns under-going transformation, would be uninteresting. Rather, Social Change can be integrated with standard theory around the very structural topics already in use. THE mention of theory of Social Change will make most social scientists appear defensive, furtive, guilt-ridden, or frightened. Yet the source of this unease may be in part an unduly awe-stricken regard for the explicitly singular and implicitly capitalized word Theory. The several social scientific disciplines, and notably economics and sociology, do provide some fairly high-level, empirically-based, and interdependent propositions con-cerning Social Change. The present paper presents some suggested conceptual organ-ization of the problem, and some illustrations of interrelated * Sections of this paper were read at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, March, 1960. Preliminary versions of the paper were dis-cussed by two ad hoc committees of the Social Science Research Council. An earlier draft was extensively criticized by Professor Arnold S. Feldman of the University of Delaware, with whom I am currently working on an extensive project relating to the dynamics of industrial societies under the auspices of the Center of International Studies at Princeton. 123 124 READINGS IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT propositions. The exposition is taxonomic and programmatic rather than discursive. Many of the alleged propositions are hypo-thetical, but any resemblance between them and real data, living or dead, would be comforting.

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  Sociology Today

  Social Transformations in a Globalizing World

  • Arnaud Sales, Arnaud Sales, Author(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Part II

  Conceptual Perspectives for Understanding the Dynamics of Social Change

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  2

  A Reappraisal of Agency–Structure Theories to Understand Social Change

  Arnaud Sales

  Change is neither the meeting of the system and the external event, nor the march of history imposing its natural law on actors and social forms despite their resistance. It is at once project and rejection. The central problem is always to understand how the new is born from the old, how old men produce new societies.

  Alain Touraine (1977: 445)

  Introduction

  One of the driving forces of sociological research is closely related to the considerable tension that exists in social life between, on the one hand, what has been socially created and is still being used and reproduced and hence is still influencing or even constraining individual and collective behaviors, and on the other hand, what human agents do, transform and create. This tension is the focus of this chapter, which examines several issues associated with theoretical interpretative models of the permanent transformation of social life triggered by human action and suggests new ways to understand structuration processes.

  One of the most vivid theoretical confrontations revolves around the question of the fundamental forces of change. There is a certain consensus among sociologists today regarding the fact that ‘the ultimate motor of change is the agential power of human individuals and social collectivities’ (Sztompka, 1993: 200). However, significant differences remain between authors about the weight that should be assigned to human agency itself, in relation to the structural and/or institutional frameworks which clearly not only provide stability, facilitate social life and empower agents, but can also create considerable barriers to change owing to the relative strength of their arrangements, and hence sometimes impose substantial constraints on human action. The question of structures and structuration will therefore be central to major interpretive discussions. In view of this, we must return to the ‘agency–structure’ debates generated by the ‘theories of the constitution of society’ (Joas, 1996: 6, 230, author’s emphasis). They lead to challenging views with regard to human action, social dynamics and processes of change. A selective review of this literature reveals areas of not only consensus but also significant differences between the authors that require further discussion in search for solutions.

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  Relational Sociology

  A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences

  • Pierpaolo Donati(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  But it is w ith Durkheim that the holistic paradigm is expressed in its most precise positivistic form. Social Change is interpreted as the expression of an organism (= society) which differentiates itself with the passage from ‘mechanical solidarity’ to ‘organic solidarity’. This scheme is used in all his works, especially on the division of labour, on suicide, and on religion.

  The generic holistic paradigm can be formulated, following Haferkamp and Smelser (1992: 2), as a conceptual framework according to which each theory of Social Change must contain three principal elements that have to be in definite relation with each other, according to the sequence outlined in (Figure 5.2 ).

  Obviously, the model can be made more complex, but, most of the time, the sociological analysis of Social Change reflects this type of approach. There are innumerable authors who have adopted this scheme in one way or another. A classical example is Ogburn (1922), who privileges the structural determinism of technology as a basic factor underlying Social Change.

  Generalizing greatly, we can say that this paradigm has been favoured by all ‘sociologists’, both in the hyper-structuralist version (for example, R. Merton 1968 and P. Blau 1989) and in the hyper-culturalist version (for example, Baudrillard 1968), or even, and more often, in mixed forms (for example, Lockwood 1964, who resorts to a structural explanation – i.e. Social Change only occurs when system and social mal-integration coincide – but needs to introduce culture as an intervening variable since the latter is not determined by the former).5

  The latter have been derived in a particular way from the sociology of Durkheim, from the moment that he lent himself particularly well to a cultural interpretation of social structures. Interpretations that have had great success both in America (through the mediation of Parsons), in structural–functionalism and other schools (for example, Goffman 1967) and in Europe and especially in France, whose latest exponent was Bourdieu. According to Bourdieu, the

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  Greening the Globe

  World Society and Environmental Change

  • Ann Hironaka(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Finally, the book explores the role of cultural meaning and evolving patterns of conflict in world society theory. World society theory, more World Society and Social Change 5 than other institutional perspectives, stresses the importance of culture, ideas, and meaning. Chapter 5 examines evolving cultural meanings, and their implications for contestation and conflict, focusing on efforts to create a global regime to address climate change from 1992 to the present. The rest of this introductory chapter articulates a world society model of Social Change that explains how the seemingly weak influences of international institutions and global culture can nevertheless generate dramatic changes in activity around the globe. This approach focuses on myriad loosely coupled factors rather than treating behavior as a direct and proximate consequence of specific treaties or policies and their implementation. Next, the chapter contrasts the world society perspec- tive with dominant explanations of Social Change in the literature, includ- ing modernization theories and social movement arguments. The chapter concludes by outlining the overall structure of the book. World Society and Social Change: The Strength of Weak Mechanisms A conundrum for scholars seeking to explain major historical transfor- mations is that Social Change appears to be halting, contested, and par- tial when closely scrutinized. Consider the topics of democratization and gender equality. Close analyses of any democratic society are likely to find failures of effective democracy beneath the facade. Likewise, ongoing gender discrimination can be uncovered even in the most egalitarian soci- eties. Yet when one looks at the forest rather than the trees, tremendous Social Change has occurred. The past century has seen multiple waves of democratization and huge increases in the social status of women across much of the globe (C. Beck 2011; Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997).

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