Social and Cultural Change

Hassaan bin Jalil

Definition

• Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior.

• Social change has been defined as significant alteration over time in behavior patterns and culture

• But what constitutes a “significant” alteration?

Examples of significant alteration

• Certainly the dramatic rise in formal education represents a change that has had profound social consequences.

• Emergence of slavery as a system of stratification have had long-term and important consequences

• The Industrial Revolution

• Increased participation of women in the paid labor forces of the United States and Europe

Theories of social & cultural change.

Evolutionary Theory

• Darwin’s approach: human beings came at a later stage of evolution than reptiles and represent a more complex form of life.

• Social theorists seeking an analogy to this biological model originated evolutionary theory, in which society is viewed as moving in a definite direction

• Early evolutionary theorists generally agreed that society was progressing inevitably toward a higher state.

• As might be expected, they concluded in ethnocentric fashion that their behavior and culture were more advanced than those of earlier civilizations.

Functionalist Perspective

• Society is being in a natural state of equilibrium. By “equilibrium,” he meant that society tends toward a state of stability or balance.

• Because functionalist sociologists focus on what maintains a system, not on what changes it, they might seem to offer little to the study of social change.

• Although this approach explicitly incorporates the evolutionary notion of continuing progress, the dominant theme in his model is stability.

• Society may change, but it remains stable through new forms of integration. For example, in place of the kinship ties that provided social cohesion in the past, people develop laws, judicial processes, and new values and belief systems.

Conflict Perspective

• The functionalist perspective minimizes the importance of change. It emphasizes the persistence of social life and sees change as a means of maintaining society’s equilibrium (or balance).

• In contrast, conflict theorists contend that social institutions and practices persist because powerful groups have the ability to maintain the status quo. Change has crucial significance, since it is needed to correct social injustices and inequalities.

Resistance to Social Change

• Efforts to promote social change are likely to meet with resistance.

• Material culture includes inventions, artifacts, and technology

• Nonmaterial Culture encompasses ideas, norms, communications, and social organization

Culture lag

• One cannot devise methods for controlling and using new technology before the introduction of a technique

• Thus, nonmaterial culture typically must respond to changes in material culture.

• Term culture lag to refer to the period of maladjustment when the nonmaterial culture is still struggling to adapt to new material conditions.

Resistance to Technology

• Technology is cultural information about the ways in which the material resources of the environment may be used to satisfy human needs and desires.

• Technological innovations are examples of changes in material culture that often provoke resistance.

• Resistance to Industrial RevolutionIn England, beginning in 1811, masked craft workers took extreme measures: they mounted nighttime raids on factories and destroyed some of the new machinery

Status Quo

• People with a disproportionate share of society’s wealth, status, and power are likely to suffer from social change, they have a stake in maintaining the status quo.

• Term vested interests to refer to those people or groups who will suffer in the event of social change

• In 2010 President of U.S.A proposed scuttling NASA’s Constellation project, whose primary goal was to return humans to the moon. The key opposition came from just 27 members of Congress. All represented districts in Alabama and Texas that were home to large suppliers to the project.

NIMBY

• Communities, too, protect their vested interests, often in the name of “protecting property values.” The abbreviation NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard,”

• NIMBY is a pejorative characterization of opposition by residents to a proposal for a new development because it is close to them, often with the connotation that such residents believe that the developments are needed in society but should be further away.

Economic Factors

• Economic factors play an important role in resistance to social change.

• For example, it can be expensive for manufacturers to meet high standards for the safety of products and workers, and for the protection of the environment.

• In a capitalist economic system, many firms are not willing to pay the price of meeting strict safety and environmental standards. They may resist social change by cutting corners or by pressuring the government to ease regulations.

Thank you