Social Change and Social Processes
What the exam tests
This domain tests definitions of change, development, modernisation, globalisation and social movements, and your ability to explain mechanisms rather than list examples.
Core rules
- Social change: alteration in social structure, institutions and norms over time; can be evolutionary, revolutionary or planned.
- Development: planned improvement in well-being and capabilities; not identical with economic growth or GDP.
- Modernisation: movement toward rationality, achievement, mobility, secularisation and urban-industrial life; it is uneven and contested.
- Globalisation: intensification of economic, political, cultural and technological flows across borders; produces homogenisation and glocalisation (local adaptation).
- Social processes: cooperation, competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation.
- Social movements: organised collective efforts for change or resistance-reform, revolutionary, identity, environmental, women's, Dalit and farmers' movements.
Worked example
Smartphones spread among rural youth in a Karnataka taluk. Is this simple modernisation? Reasoning: technology diffusion changes communication and aspirations (modernisation), but content is globally sourced and locally adapted (glocalisation). Caste and gender shape access: boys may get phones before girls. The change is not linear progress; it creates new dependencies and conflicts. A strong answer names mechanisms-diffusion, market expansion, peer learning-and shows uneven effects.
Traps
Do not equate change with progress. Do not reduce development to GDP. Do not treat globalisation as only economic; culture and politics matter. Do not present modernisation as replacing tradition neatly; they often mix. Do not confuse a social movement with a crowd or a riot.