Social Media Means
Social Media Means
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The three traditional ideas of social change—decline, cyclic change, and progress—have unquestionably influenced modern theories.
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Read More »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.
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Read More »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.
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Read More »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.
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