Social Change

What Is Social Change?

  • Social change: the transformation of a culture over time.
  • Social revolutions: periods of rapid, large-scale social change dramatically redefining human society.
  • Social changes vary in rates, intentionality, controversy, and importance, but society is always changing.

Sources of Social Change

  • Major physical events (e.g., hurricanes).
  • Demographic factors (e.g., Baby Boomers aging).
  • Innovations (e.g., the internet).
  • Collective action (e.g., the civil rights movement) is the most important contribution to social change.

Helping Professions: Agents of Social Change

  • Many sociology majors enter helping professions like nursing, counseling, teaching, social service, and nonprofit sectors.
  • The way you live your life contributes to the ongoing processes of social change.

Collective Behavior

  • Collective behavior: behavior that follows from the formation of a group or crowd of people who take action together toward a shared goal.
  • Collective behavior theories suggest such occurrences are often organized and maintain a certain amount of order.
  • Contagion theory: individuals who join a crowd can become "infected" by a mob mentality and lose the ability to reason.
  • This theory doesn't fully explain wide ranges of collective behavior.

Emergent Norm Theory

  • Emergent norm theory: individual members of a crowd make their own decisions about behavior, and norms are created through others’ acceptance or rejection of these behaviors.
  • Heated rhetoric can create new norms, contributing to events like the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Crowds

  • Crowd: a temporary gathering of people in a public place; members might interact but do not identify with one another and will not remain in contact.
  • Riot: continuously disorderly behavior by a group of people that disturbs the peace and is directed toward other people and/or property.
  • Example: crowds of excited sports fans can become destructive and violent in their celebrations.

Mass Behavior

  • Mass behavior: similar behaviors engaged in by large groups of people who are not necessarily in the same place.
  • Examples: sharing TikTok videos, buying a certain kind of sneaker, and getting a tattoo.
  • Three areas of mass behavior are fads, fashions, and social dilemmas.

Fads and Fashions

  • Fads: interests or practices followed enthusiastically for a relatively short period of time.
  • While fads usually do not result in lasting social change, they follow certain social norms and can create a unified identity among those who practice them.
  • Fashion: the widespread custom or style of behavior and appearance at a particular time or in a particular place.

Social Dilemmas and the Tragedy of the Commons

  • Social dilemma: a situation in which behavior that is rational for the individual can, when practiced by many people, lead to collective disaster.
  • Tragedy of the commons: a type of social dilemma in which many individuals’ overexploitation of a public resource depletes or degrades that common resource.
  • Examples: natural resources like water, air, fossil fuels, forests, plants, and animals.
  • Solutions to these problems come from collective changes in behavior.

Public Goods Dilemma

  • Public goods dilemma: a type of social dilemma in which individuals incur the cost to contribute to a collective resource, though they may never benefit from that resource.
  • People who take advantage of a public good without having contributed to it are called “free riders.”
  • Unlike a tragedy of the commons dilemma, a public goods dilemma puts the cost on the individual, but the benefit is shared by all.

Social Movements

  • Social movement: any social group with leadership, organization, and an ideological commitment to promote or resist social change.
  • Activism: any activity intended to bring about social change.

Promoting and Resisting Change

  • Emerging social movements may be characterized by whether they resist or seek to promote social change.
  • Progressive: term describing efforts to promote forward-thinking social change.
  • Regressive: term describing resistance to particular social changes, efforts to maintain the status quo, or attempts to reestablish an earlier form of social order.

Mass Society Theory

  • Mass society theory: a theory of social movements that assumes people join not because of the movement’s ideals but to satisfy a psychological need to belong to something larger than themselves.
  • Scholars who used this theory mostly worked during the 1940s through the early 1960s and had witnessed the effects of Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and McCarthyism, which partially explains their general distrust of social movements.

Hashtag Activism: #NeverAgain and #EnoughIsEnough

  • Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) high school school shooting founded a grassroots student group and used viral slogans #NeverAgain and #EnoughIsEnough to mobilize a response.
  • They went from online expression to real-life movement in a remarkably short period of time, following up their viral digital campaign with classic tactics.

Relative Deprivation Theory

  • Relative deprivation theory: a theory of social movements that focuses on the actions of the oppressed groups seeking rights or opportunities already enjoyed by others in the society.
  • The poorest and most oppressed tend not to participate in social movements, despite their relative deprivation, because of the resources necessary to join and the consequences of participation.
  • There are notable exceptions to this trend, including Cesar Chavez’s successful organizing of migrant farm workers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Relative Deprivation and the Voting Rights Movement

  • The history of voting rights in the United States demonstrates the power of relative deprivation theory to explain some social movements.
  • The Nineteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Act were not enough to guarantee everyone the right to vote.
  • Gerrymandering: redrawing the boundary lines of state voting districts to advantage one political party over another.

Resource Mobilization Theory

  • Resource mobilization theory: a theory of social movements that focuses on the practical constraints that help or hinder social movements’ action.
  • Some of the most basic human activities, such as reading and meeting together freely, are actually social movement resources that not everyone can take for granted.

Framing Theory

  • Framing theory examines how participants give meaning to their struggles for social change.
  • In framing theory, members of social movements progress through three different frames: diagnostic, prognostic, and motivation.
  • Shared understandings of social problems draw people together to lay out strategies to solve the problem and to encourage participants to engage in social action for change.

Stages in a Social Movement

  • Armand Mauss identified the four stages that social movements tend to go through.
    • The public defines the problem.
    • People begin to organize.
    • The movement becomes bureaucratized.
    • The movement begins to decline.
  • Life as we know it has been shaped by all sorts of social movements, regardless of whether they succeed in the traditional sense of the word.

Theory in Everyday Life Table 16.1

  • Structural Functionalism: Social change is necessary to maintain equilibrium and order in society.
  • Conflict Theory: Social change is the inevitable result of social inequality and conflict between groups over power and resources.
  • Symbolic Interactionism: Social change involves changes in the meaning of things as well as changes in laws, culture, and social behavior.

Technology and Social Change

Cultural Diffusion

  • Cultural diffusion: the dissemination of material and nonmaterial culture (tools and technology, beliefs, and behavior) from one group to another.
  • The diffusion of technological advancements can also lead to social movements.
  • Example: labor unions multiplied in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, and today, the internet can help people organize for social change.

Theories of Technology and Social Change

  • Technological determinism: a theory of social change that assumes changes in technology drive changes in society, rather than vice versa.
  • Cultural lag: the time between changes in material culture or technology and the resulting changes in the broader culture’s relevant norms, values, meanings, and laws.
  • Material culture often changes faster than nonmaterial culture, and we struggle to create new values and norms to catch up to new technologies.

Technology in the Global Village

  • Virtual communities: social groups whose interactions are mediated through information technologies, particularly the internet.
  • Global village: Marshall McLuhan’s term describing the way that new communication technologies override barriers of space and time, joining together people all over the globe.
  • New technologies have had a profound impact on society, but in what ways and whether this impact has been positive or negative are still to be determined.

Globalization

  • Globalization: the cultural and economic changes resulting from dramatically increased international trade and exchange in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
  • Social structures and institutions like commerce and politics must be considered on a global rather than a national scale.

Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Leveling

  • Cultural imperialism: the imposition of one culture’s beliefs and practices on another culture through media and consumer products rather than by military force.
  • Western media’s powerful influence over ideas is often considered a type of cultural domination.
  • Cultural leveling: the process by which cultures that were once unique and distinct become increasingly similar.

Global Perspective: Bhutan and Gross National Happiness

  • The government of Bhutan (Asia) hopes to achieve Gross National Happiness by carefully identifying and adopting what the West is doing right while also rejecting its cynicism and consumerism.
  • Although the country is now a democracy, it still endures high rates of infant mortality, poverty, and illiteracy.

Modernity

  • Modernity: a term that characterizes industrialized societies, including the decline of tradition, an increase in individualism, and a belief in progress, technology, and science.
  • Since the Industrial Revolution, many common diseases have been cured, life expectancies have increased, and infant mortality rates have declined.
  • Advances in technology and science have not benefitted everyone equally.

Postmodernity

  • Postmodernity: a term that characterizes postindustrial societies, including a focus on the production and management of information and skepticism of science and technology.
  • Ideas and cultural debates are the focus rather than material things.
  • According to postmodern thought, modernity’s progress has failed to solve important social problems, and modern institutions are implicated in this failure.

Utopia—or Doomsday?

  • We know that change is coming, brought on by natural, technological, and social processes; what kind of future are we headed for?
  • While some work toward a utopia of better health, abundance, and connection, others prepare for societal collapse from conflict, global climate change, and new diseases.
  • How can sociology help prepare for change?