CHAPTER 2. SOCIAL CHANGE

How is the world today different from that of your childhood? As you think back over your biography, you probably remember historical events as small, personal experiences. I was a baby when the first atomic bomb exploded; my own baby watched television as men walked on the moon. As a child I was impressed when my relatives replaced their farm horses with a tractor. I knew nothing about the transformation of American agriculture, but did miss the animals. As we grow older, we learn to place the things that happen to us in a broader context. We also learn to act in order to bring about changes we believe are desirable. By the time I heard Martin Luther King speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was already a participant in the Civil Rights Movement.

2.1.1 Theories and Paradigms

Structural differentiation is one kind of structural change during which new, specialized roles develop. An informal game of "catch" turning into a more formal game with players each taking on a specific position instead of just throwing the ball around would be an example of structural differentiation. Modern, industrial societies have a high degree of structural differentiation compared to societies of the past. The use of computers contributes to structural differentiation in the economy by creating new specialized jobs.

2.1.2.4 Revolutionary Change

Our sensory system is a biologiclly based data gathering and processing system. However, the meaning of this direct experience is provided by our culture. Although many animal species have pre-programmed responses to environmental stimuli as a part of their genetic " hardware" , humans base most of their actions on cultural "software" . Each culture, through its language, beliefs and habits, encourages individuals to select information from the world in socially appropriate ways and provides interpretations of the meaning of the information selected. An example of this is the differences between the way skiiers and nonskiiers experience snow. Skiiers have large vocabularies to describe snow according to its properties. Their activities, such as travelling downhill, depend upon their ability to distinguish different kinds of snow and to understand the meaning of those differences for their own speed and safety. For most of the rest of us, snow is not important enough to be perceived in such detail. Even the sensory data we do pay attention to is modified by our perceptual mechanisms for sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We receive input from the world only after it has been filtered through our nervous systems and our cultures.

Once developed, tools have an environmental impact on the world. The environmental effects of new technology have often been unexpected and undesirable. Our use of tools to solve one set of survival problems, for example generating energy, can create another set of problems, like environmental pollution. For this reason, gathering information about the consequences of technology and trying to anticipate potential new problems are important for our survival.

The effects of a new tool can change individual social interactions. The use of a two-person saw requires a particular working relationship between a pair of people. If they are then put to work using new single-person power saws, the social relationship of the sawing team will be broken. Many of the problems associated with the introduction of new computer systems are caused by this sort of alteration in people's social interactions. While computer professionals have grown used to considering how user-friendly an interactive program is to a single user, it is also important to consider how computer systems change people's interactions with one another.

Because conceptual models only serve to guide our thinking about the general shape of society, we need more specific theories in order to describe, predict, and explain social change. However, unlike scientific fields which have a generally agreed upon theory, in the social sciences there is a great diversity. Some theories are about different things. Therefore they are competitors only insofar as they disagree as to what are the most important areas of social change. Others offer differing interpretations and predictions for the same phenomenon. These are qenuinely competing theories, and research can be designed to compare them. Since experiments can rarely be carried out to test social change theories (especially macro-level ones), long periods of time must pass before the adequacy of competing theories can be compared.

Modern theories of social system change owe a great deal to three thinkers of the late 1700's and early 1800's. Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, was an economist who viewed markets as self- regulating systems. His term "the invisible hand" is a description of the principle of feedback in economic systems. He argued that this invisible force would provide stability in an ideal "free market". Smith's theory asserts that supply and demand are interconnected in ways that automatically regulate prices and production. Smith's work affected the thinking of all later economic thinkers, and is still considered valid by conservative economists. Later theorists did not dispute Smith's finding that supply and demand are interconnected, but argued that the relationship was not sufficient to provide social stability, especially when low production and high prices affected the poor. Neo-classical economists are often concerned with the effects of government and business efforts to modify supply and demand. Later social theorists were concerned about the effects of economic system fluctuations on social welfare.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English parson who believed in the moral inferiority of the poor. His Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) warned of the dangers of overpopulation caused by the failure of moral restraint on the reproductive urge. Without abstinence from sexual relationships, he predicted that positive checks (war, famine, and disease) or the preventive checks of vice (contraception and abortion) would act to halt unrestrained poplation growth. Malthus is theoretically important not for his views of the moral depravity of the lower classes, but for his insight into the dynamics of population growth and the importance of the material conditions (especially food supplies) of social life. Changes in food production technology (like the Green Revolution of the l960's), changes in the distribution of food (as in revolutions which overthrow a landowning aristocracy), or changes in reproductive behavior (the demographic transition) have often been used as evidence that Malthus' theory was wrong. Modern limits-to-growth theorists, however, argue that for any particular pattern of human reproduction, food production and economic distribution, the Malthusian checks to population growth are constraints on a social system.

Charles Darwin (1804-1882) was a naturalist whose 1859 publication of Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection created an intellectual furor by arguing that species had evolved from primitive ancestors. Darwin proposed a mechanism for change -- the principle of natural selection -- by which genetic information that provided individuals with better chances of survival were more likely to be inherited by offspring. Darwin's evolutionary model was applied to social systems by many of the 19th century thinkers. Karl Marx offered to dedicate Capital to Darwin, and some version of the idea of evolution was part of nearly all the next century's theories of social change. Pre-18th century ideas of progress were concepts of a developing morality or civilization; 19th century progress became focused on material conditions.

Later theorists (especially Herbert Spencer) applied Darwin's principle of natural selection to social characteristics, arguing that "survival of the fittest" is the mechanism by which cultural traits evolve. Some Social Darwinists tried to link social traits to genetic characteristics, arguing that poverty, crime, or the lower social status of women and minorities were inherited. Draconian social policies based on Social Darwinist principles include the Nazi genocide program that exterminated millions of people, and an early 20th century U.S. immigration policy that excluded southern European, Asian, Latin American, and African immigrants (Chorover, 1980). These oppressive policies were justified with the belief that whole racial or cultural groups could be physically superior to others. Before the 18th century (and equally at odds with contemporary beliefs) people were enslaved in the name of superior cultural or religious ideas (Davis, 1985). Both phenomena illustrate the tendency of human groups to use a scientific or philosophical theory to legitimate its own social structures and practices. When this occurs, the beliefs become part of ideology and are no longer subjected to scientific or philosophical inquiry.

Today, sociobiology has taken up the question of how genetics and human behavior are related on a more scientific basis than its Social Darwinist predecessors. Many of sociobiology's critics (Barash, 1979; Lewontin, Rose and Kamin, 1985), however, are wary of the ideological and social policy implications of a theory that social behavior is determined at birth by genetic traits. Theories of technology and social change also have ideological consequences if they are widely believed to be truths that require no scientific testing.

Three of the most important theorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries grappled with the problem of how to explain the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Karl Marx (1818-1883), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Max Weber (1864-1920) developed different models of the internal dynamics of society. Since each model focuses on different structural features of the social system, these theorists are not competing in the sense that only one of them can be "right". Instead, they are competing in that each identifies a different set of characteristics as "most important" to understanding social change.

Capitalism arose, according to Marx, out of conflicts between merchants and manufacturers and the feudal property relationships which hindered them. The early industrialists formed a social class (the bourgeosie) whose economic interests were in opposition to the political and cultural arrangements of the traditional society. As they grew in wealth and power from their economic activities, the bourgeousie were able to make revolutionary changes in society--in 1776 in the United States and in 1789 in France. In the process the beliefs and social structures of traditional culture were transformed.

An internal contradiction in capitalist society occurs between the successful bourgeousie and the wage workers they employ. Marx, observing the dismal factory conditions of the early industrial revolution, argued that the workers (who formed a class called the proletariat) were alienated from their own economic activity and oppressed by the capitalist mode of production. Marx predicted a proletarian revolution that would be violent (since the workers had no sources of power) and would replace capitalism with a socialist mode of production in which private property would become collectivized. Because Marx believed that the government was an instrument of the ruling class, and that under communism there would be no rulers, he predicted that socialist revolution would lead to a "withering away of the state" and a transition to a stable communist social system.

The Industrial Revolution broke down mechanical solidarity by creating different specialized jobs. This structural differentiation of society meant that people no longer lived in the same pattern as their neighbors. However, according to Durkheim, people in industrial society became increasingly dependent on one another's work. This creates a new form of organic solidarity, because no one is able to survive without the specialized skills of others. People are joined by their common need for one another's differences. Thus for Durkheim, structural differentiation provides a new way to integrate industrial people into a common culture.

In choosing the term mechanical solidarity for traditional societies and organic solidarity for modern ones, Durkheim was replacing an older system model of society as a clockwork mechanism with a model based on the way the specialized parts of a biological organism are integrated into a single entity. What is also significant about Durkheim's model is that culture plays a major role in providing stability. Social norms and values, especially those of religion, are the "glue" that holds his model together. Social conflict is a form of pathology (again, a model borrowed from biology). Contemporary functionalist theorists are still concerned with Durkheim's question of how societies maintain their cultural patterns from generation to generation and with how a cooperative division of labor produces social integration. Empirical social science research is also indebted to Durkheim for pioneering (in his study of the causes of suicide) the use of statistical data to develop information about society.

In his studies of the evolution of rational bureaucratic organizations and modern legal and governmental institutions, Weber provided contemporary sociology with some of its central problems. Although his analysis showed that bureaucracy developed as a rational and efficient means to administrate businesses and political units, Weber feared that what he called the "iron cage" of impersonal bureaucratic structures would come to dominate society. Despite his personal dislike for bureaucracies, his analysis of them has become the basis of most of our contemporary theories of industrial and business organizations. His inquiry into why people accepted the legitimacy of political power, and why then political regimes could change, offers insights to all theorists of social change.

In contrast, Karl Marx believed that work was basic to the human species. He described labor as a process "in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and nature" (1967:177). For Marx, human nature was expressed through people's relationships to the products of their work, to the activity of work itself, to their human potential, and to one another. Where Freud saw a socially necessary repression of human instincts, Marx saw an oppression of human creative instincts by capitalist society. With industrialization, work became alienated labor. In other words, people were separated from the voluntary process of work, from control over the products of their labor, from their creative potential, and from other people. According to Marx, workers in capitalist society are not free to choose what they will do and how they will dispose of the results. The constraints of private property and the capitalist mode of production also interfere with "natural" social relationships and with individuals' expression of their own creative powers (1964:106-119).

For Durkheim, the individual was also connected to society through work, but work was regulated by norms. Society for Durkheim was primarily a sacred moral order. Individuals' identification with a profession and its ethical values was a source of social solidarity. Anomie, or normlessness, was a problem of rapid social change if the old mechanical solidarity broke down before the new division of labor integrated people into the new organic solidarity. Individuals suffering from anomie would lack a "place" in society and be prone to deviance and suicide. Where Freud saw repression and Marx saw alienation, Durkheim saw a failure of social norms.

Weber looked at individuals as social actors who calculate their interests and estimate how others will evaluate their behavior. He argued that an individuals status in industrial society depended on their life chances, in other words what they were able to sell their labor for, but his contribution to the role of individuals in social change was his analysis of charisma. Charismatic leaders are people like Jesus, Hitler, Ghandi, or Martin Luther King, who can move their religious or political followers to make extraordinary changes. Weber argued that the charismatic people have a special relationship with whatever their followers hold sacred, and are able to give them new moral values and norms. Weber thought individuals accepted even exploitative social relationships of capitalism because they believed them to be legal and legitimate. Ultimately, for Weber, it was the institutions of law and bureaucratic organizations that bound individuals to society.