SOC122 Exam 2 Study Guide

Materialistic: cause of chnage

Usually means economic factors

• natural resources (land, animals)

• Wealth distribution or concentration

• Technologies of economic production (factories, tools, labor unions, laws regarding work or property rights)

How does technology cause change?

• increases alternatives available in a society

• Alters interaction patterns among people

• Creates new”problems” to be dealt with

• Involves skills, routines, methods, and knowledge

  • Scientific method

  • Written communication

  • Computer/social media literacy

  • Housing loans and mortgages & credit organizations and tools

• Technology is a system

cultural lag

speed gap between material changes and non material (cultural) changes

limitations to the materialist perspective

• significant social change can occur without technical change

  • When technical change occurs in some contexts, it might not produce much change in others

• Resistance to materialist social change: the “conversation peasant”

conservative peasant hypothesis

• peasants in poor countries are reisstant to technological change because they are engaged in an economy that has to do with family obligations, fairness, and community well being

• Many able to maintain rough but sustainable life

• In moral economy, ‘technological development” means uncertainty and risk when there is already a model that works

• Outside perspectives may see that conservative peasants as irrational, but for the conservative peasant, change is irrational

Idealist perspective

• knowledge

• Beliefs

• Values (assumptions about what is desirable and undesirable)

• Ideology: “more or less organized combination of beliefs and values that serves to justify or legitimize forms of human action”

  • The American dream

3 main ways ideas cause change

1. Legitimizing a desired direction of change

2. Providing the basis for the social solidarity necessary to promote change

3. Highlighting contradictions and problems

providing the necessary social solidarity

• ideology can be a powerful mobilizing force in times if war; for instance, justifying and promoting the war as a “holy crusade”, a “defense of democracy”

• No just political sloganeering, each set goals and agendas for change and helped to mobilize popular support fair those goals

idea systems as powerful drivers of social change

Nationalism, ideology of particular identity and community of a people based on shared history, culture, and language, has been & remains, a potent force for conflict and change

• impossible to understand the changing relationships between these groups and their states fully in terms of material and economic factors alone without considering the powerful role of nationalist ideas, cultures, and myths