Social Change: Concepts, Factors, Theories and Processes
What the exam tests
You must define social change, distinguish it from progress and evolution, identify factors, compare theories and explain four processes: urbanisation, industrialisation, modernisation and globalisation.
Core rules and concepts
- Social change: alteration in social structure, institutions, norms and values over time. It may be gradual or revolutionary.
- Factors: technological innovation, economic shifts, demographic change, ideas and ideologies, social movements and state policy. Factors interact; no single cause explains all change.
- Theories: evolutionary theories (Comte, Spencer) see gradual differentiation; cyclical theories see rise and decline; Marxian conflict theory sees change through class struggle; functionalism sees adaptation and integration.
- Processes: urbanisation concentrates population and creates new lifestyles; industrialisation reorganises work and production; modernisation involves rationalisation, education and communication; globalisation intensifies cross-border flows of goods, people, images and ideas.
Worked example
Smartphones spread quickly in Indian families. Reasoning: technology is a factor, but its effects are mediated by norms. It changes communication and shopping, yet family rules, income and generation shape use. Ogburn's 'cultural lag' helps explain why non-material culture may adjust more slowly than technology. Avoid technological determinism, the claim that technology alone causes change.
Traps that cost marks
- Equating social change with progress; change can be regressive.
- Treating modernisation as pure Westernisation.
- Reducing globalisation to economic flows only.
- Naming a theorist without explaining the mechanism of change.