Social Change and Social Processes
What this domain tests
The exam tests the meaning and causes of social change and the five social processes: cooperation, competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation. Classification of a situation into the correct process is the most common application question.
Social change
- Social change is an alteration over time in social structure, institutions, values and behaviour. It may be gradual or revolutionary, planned or unplanned.
- Factors include technology, economy, education, law, ideology, social movements, demographic change and contact with other societies.
- Theories include evolutionary, cyclical, conflict theory (Marx's class struggle), functionalist differentiation and modernization.
- Social change is not the same as progress; change can be regressive.
Social processes
- Cooperation is joint action for shared goals; it can be direct or indirect, formal or informal.
- Competition is an impersonal struggle for scarce resources such as jobs, markets or status; it is continuous and rule-bound.
- Conflict is a deliberate, personal struggle to harm or defeat the other; it can be violent but is not always destructive, since Simmel and Coser noted that it can strengthen group solidarity.
- Accommodation is adjustment that reduces or ends conflict without full fusion: mediation, arbitration, truce or segregation.
- Assimilation is the gradual merging of groups and cultures into a common identity; it is slower and deeper than accommodation.
- Park and Burgess described a sequence: competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation.
Worked example
Two villages dispute water. A panchayat fixes a sharing schedule; conflict stops but the groups remain distinct. Later, intermarriage and shared festivals blur boundaries. Reasoning: the schedule is accommodation; the later merging is assimilation. Competition would be an impersonal race for water, not a deliberate fight.
Traps
- Competition is not conflict; conflict is personal and deliberate.
- Accommodation is not assimilation; accommodation adjusts, assimilation fuses.
- Conflict is not always bad.
- Social change is not always progress.
- Do not call every change a social movement.