CHAPTER 17

Social Change—I Situating Change in Sociological Theory

The social structure is subject to incessant change, growing decaying, finding renewal, accommodating itself to extremely variant conditions and suffering vast modifications in the course of time.

(MacIver and Page, 1955: 508)

Social life is characterized by the inevitability and ubiquity of change. A living society is a changing society.

The demography of society is constantly changing with the birth, growth, and death of its members. It also changes due to migration—members leaving the society (emigration) or outsiders arriving and settling down (immigration) temporarily or permanently; migration changes the ratio of insiders and outsiders. The outsiders contribute to a society’s multicultural character. Changes also occur in the demographic composition of local communities within a larger society—villages and cities continually change in various ways.

Other than demography, changes also occur in settlement patterns and land use, in the connectivity pattern, and in the use of means of transportation and communication.

Similarly, changes occur in the literacy or health profiles of the society.

In this sense, a society’s present can be seen as built on its past with the disappearance of some of its traits, and the emergence and addition of new features from the outside. It is the consequence of the processes of accretion and attrition that change a society’s profile from one time to another. Social change can be viewed as the difference in the society’s make-up and functioning between two time points.

As MacIver and Page¹ suggest, any society is a processual product. A process is ‘a changing equilibrium of present relationships’. A society maintains its identity over time, but it is never the same at two distinct points in time. This is a situation similar to a person who grows from an infant to an aged entity and yet retains his or her identity.

Society exists only as a time sequence. It is becoming, not being; a process, not a product. In other words, as soon as the process ceases, the product disappears. The product of a machine endures after the machine has been scrapped. The everlasting hills are the product of the forces that now are spent. The fossil lives on for ages although the life that created it was transitory. In all these instances, the product is separable from the forces that gave it its form and character, In degree the same is true not only of the material relics of man’s past culture but even of his immaterial² cultural achievements. They are products that are transmitted down the generations … and in so far as human nature retains the same capacities, they remain a vehicle by which past generations communicate with the present (MacIver and Page, 1955: 511).

However, the authors rightly argue that a ‘social structure cannot be placed in a museum to save it from the ravages of time’.

Change is thus an important aspect of society. Individual societies may be relatively slow-changing or fast-changing, but no living society can be non-changing.

It was because of the recognition of this aspect of society that early scholarly interest in societies—or in human society—remained change-oriented. The intellectuals were interested in tracing the trajectory of society’s growth from primitive beginnings to the more complex civilizations. Inspired by Darwin’s monumental work, The Origin of Species, social theorists focused on the origins of human society. Regarding the present as an edifice built on the foundations of the past, they engaged in piecing together scattered evidence left by our forefathers to reconstruct humanity’s past.

The theories of change propounded by those scholars were, however, hypothetical statements about bygone days. However, these were not theories in the strict sense of the term. A theory explains the relationship between two or more variables and enhances our power of prediction. Such theories did not result from these early exercises. They were only conjectures and surmises without conclusive evidence. The reconstruction of our past by the pioneers was like writing history. In the absence of reliable data and dependable techniques, many missing links of our past were filled up by speculations. While some authors attempted to ‘explain’, most histories remained descriptive in character.

When sociology arrived on the scene, it wanted to create a space of its own and tried to be different from history. It therefore focused on the present, rather than on the past. As a result, the emphasis moved from chronology to the description of actually existing social structures. It began analysing the relationships between various parts of the social system. Theory, in this context, meant the ‘perspective’ or ‘paradigm’ for viewing things as ‘social’, and explaining the behaviour of its parts—the individuals, their statuses, and the collectivities of individuals. The early sociologists were impressed by the continuity and persistence of patterns of behaviour rather than the processes of change. This created the impression that sociologists—particularly those who followed the structural-functional approach—were advocates of status quo, and opposed to change.

The priority accorded to the description of existing social structures naturally meant comparatively little work on aspects of social change, and thus a near absence of the theory of social change in the formative period of sociology.

Ethnographies describing the life of tribal societies were written in the idiom of the eternal present. Sociology textbooks generally finished with a section devoted to social disorganization and social control and deviance. Very few books had an adequate treatment of the theory of change.

This concern with continuity and persistence, as stated earlier, made sociologists appear to be anti-change. This relative neglect of social change prompted the critics of the so-called Western sociology—mainly American sociology—to blame the discipline for being status quoist and anti-change, contrasting it with the Marxian perspective, which was seen as historical in its approach and therefore change-oriented.

Wilbert Moore—who had been working on industrialization and associated changes— acknowledged the fact that he too ‘had long been subject to the discipline of thought in sociology that discouraged the study of change’. He said this in a booklet on Social Change published in the Foundations of Modern Sociology Series in 1963.³ He further wrote: ‘ordinary intelligent layman, the person innocent of special training in social science, has seemed more acutely aware of change in life’s circumstances than have the “experts”’.

The element of truth in such observations is the fact that modern sociologists remained preoccupied with questions such as: how do societies function? What keeps societies going and how do they survive? However, the apparent neglect of social change in research cannot be interpreted as the denial of social change. In any case, that fault was later amended. In the latter half of the twentieth century, considerable work, particularly in the societies of the ‘South’, has been done on different aspects of change.

It should also be emphasized that it is incorrect to state that the historical approach ignores the consideration of structures or that the structural approach deplores change. Those who follow the historical approach, and thus focus on change over time, examine processes of change in terms of the existing social structures and make predictions about emerging social structures; similarly, those studying the functions of various structures within society analyse both intended and unintended consequences of social behaviour. Many of the unintended consequences turn out to be useful for society—technically called eufunctional—and are incorporated into the system, thereby becoming responsible for changes in the profile of the social structure; dysfunctional consequences, likewise, adversely affect the functioning of the system. Thus, whatever the analytical route one adopts, in the final analysis the understanding of the social sphere leads one both to the structures and the processes of change.

The two prevalent models for the investigation of society came to be recognized as the functionalist and dialectical models—one regarding society as a well-integrated system of its various elements, the other seeing it as a stratified social structure constantly in conflict and changing radically. Basically, both approaches are complementary. To regard them as belonging to opposing camps is rather unnecessary. Yogendra Singh, in his book Modernization of Indian Tradition, has clarified this point beautifully.

Functionalism assumes that ‘society is a relatively persisting configuration of elements’ and consensus is a ubiquitous element of the social system. The dialectical model, on the contrary, treats ‘change’ or ‘tension’ as ubiquitous in society. Since functionalism assumes social systems to be in a state of value consensus, it relegates the role of power in social relations to a secondary place; the dialectical model, on the other hand, presupposes that value conflict is a universal reality of any stratified social structure. Functionalism treats change as a slow, cumulative process of adjustment to new situations. The dialectical model holds that most changes are revolutionary in significance and affect qualitative transformation in the social structure. According to functionalism, changes constantly take place in social systems through internal growth and adjustment with forces from without; in the dialectical model, major sources are immanent within the system itself.

Yogendra Singh

For ideological reasons, differences between these two models are exaggerated when in reality they have many common elements. The dichotomy between consensus and conflict which is often used to counterpoise the two models is, however, not absolute. Not only consensus, but also conflict has systemintegrative functions, as noted by many sociologists. Moreover, both models take an evolutionary view of change and, in some respects, both are based on an equilibrium model of society (Singh, 1973: 4).

Scientific sociology showed little interest in the origins and evolutionary path that human society has followed—an area on which both historians and anthropologists focused their attention. The latter were drawn to the so-called primitive societies in the hope of constructing the history of the evolution of human society. Early anthropologists viewed primitive contemporaries as social fossils, representing the previous phase of human history. But as the discipline of social anthropology moved into a positivistic phase along with sociology, it gave up its initial interest in conjectural history in favour of studying actual social structures and developing a classificatory schema and a comparative perspective.

In western sociology, social change continued to be treated, until recently, in broader terms, explicating the viewpoints and approaches of the pioneers concerning the growth of human society and the civilizational spread. Later, sociologists began paying attention to the problems of social disorder and disorganization, which were treated as aberrations—considered an aspect of social change.

An analysis of social change has never been altogether absent in sociology and social anthropology. The advent of sociology and social anthropology, it may be recalled, was facilitated by the Industrial Revolution and the associated process of colonization. Sociology in the West focused on industrialization and the problems caused by it; social anthropology, on the other hand, concentrated on the colonized societies. Thus, the twin processes of industrialization and colonization—seen as agents of change—informed all sociological work in one way or the other. Although the approach remained primarily structural and concerned with the present, elements of change did figure in them.

Scholars saw in the present of primitive societies the past of the modern industrializing societies. Changes in tribal societies, interestingly enough, were introduced by colonizers with a view to erasing their underdevelopment. Thus, as time passed, the colonies began to be characterized as developing societies. The pattern of change in them was different, in the sense that it was induced by external factors, as against the pattern of endogenous change obtaining in the West. In fact, students of western societies contributed parochial theories⁴ of change that were unable to handle the problematics of change occurring in non-western societies.

In India, prior to the advent of social sciences, portrayals of Indian society were drawn on the basis of the writings of sages and savants, who mixed descriptions of actually existing social situations with prescriptions regarding a desirable social structure, norms of behaviour, and cultural patterns. These native philosophers did not make a distinction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. In fact, the treatises, particularly of the Indian sages, were couched in terms of a ‘desirable’ future of our culture. They can also be seen as a set of prescriptions and proscriptions to be followed by the people at a given time.

It must be admitted that there have been studies claiming to depict change. However, these studies compared the situation obtaining in the present with the one described in ancient scriptures, and assumed, rather wrongly, that any departures from the text were indicative of change from the past structures. This was disputed by the pioneering social scientists. Srinivas, for example, asserted that the book view of the social structure cannot be treated as the description of the then existing structure. He also indicated a bias in the upper-caste view. As a corrective, he pleaded for intensive field studies of local communities.

The departure from the text in terms of the observance of some practices is not a sure guide to what really existed in the distant past. It only indicates the difference between the ideal and the real. The ideal is an amalgam of what is desirable and not a description of the real. Some scholars feel that some inkling of what existed can be had from proscriptions—instructions prohibiting some actions or practices. For example, a taboo on non-vegetarianism can be interpreted to mean that at the time of issuing a ban on non-vegetarianism, people must have been eating non-vegetarian food; otherwise the need for such a ban would not have arisen. Thus, a taboo on beef eating in Hinduism might be interpreted to mean that people at the time—when it was issued—were probably eating beef. It is thus the taboo that marks the change, and the practice of not eating beef is an indicator of the acceptance of the taboo. It is misleading to argue that since our ancestors ate beef, its re-introduction is justifiable. What is important is the fact of imposition of the taboo and its acceptance and observance. If beef eating is abhorred by the Hindus today, it is a consequence of the imposition of the taboo. It is important to understand this change in practice in terms of the time when the ban was imposed, and the rationale given for its imposition. Referring to the beef-eating habits amongst Hindus in the ancient period is invoking the past; it cannot be the justification for resuming a long discarded practice.

The focus on change became prominent post World War II, an era that witnessed the end of colonization and the emergence of newly independent states called new nations, but old cultures. This era was characterized as one of decolonization and development. Both these were, and continue to be, significant processes of social and cultural change.

It is after World War II, when the process of decolonization began in the countries of the ‘South’, that the world identified two main priorities:

1. The countries of the North (earlier called western) had the urgent task of reconstructing the infrastructures destroyed by the ravages of war; and
2. the countries of the South (earlier called non-western societies), having attained freedom from colonial rule, placed a premium on the development—social, economic, and political—of their societies, so as to move out of their under-developed status.

A new funding agency was created to undertake these twin tasks. The agency was aptly named the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), popularly known as the World Bank. The term reconstruction in the nomenclature referred to the priorities of the West, and the term development to the priorities of the developing world after their decolonization. The World Bank has a special status within the United Nations family.

With the establishment of the United Nations Organization (UNO), radical changes have occurred not only in the field of international politics, but also in international cooperation. Various specialized agencies were constituted under the UN banner for these tasks, such as UNESCO (for education, science, and culture), WHO (for Health), UNICEF (for women and children), and ILO (for Labour).⁵ For the developing countries, the United Nations created the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), which developed its country-specific programmes and activities in consultation with the governments. As far as support to the developing countries goes, these UN institutions are divided into two categories: the fund-giving agencies and the specialized agencies for programme delivery. The UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), UNFPA (United Nations Fund for Population Activities), UNIFEM (United Nations Fund for Women), besides UNDP and the World Bank, are primarily funding agencies, and have country offices to provide and monitor UN funding to country-level projects in their respective areas of specialization. Agencies such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), ILO (International Labour Organization), WHO (World Health Organization), FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization) and UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) are regarded as executing agencies within the United Nations system. They do have their own budgets and their own governing bodies consisting of member countries, but the programme funds from their regular budget are limited; they provide expertise in their areas of specialization for the country projects funded by the UN fund-giving agencies—in that sense, they are executing agencies. Changes are now occurring in these arrangements where the fund-giving agencies are also taking responsibility for the implementation of projects, or where some governments are directly implementing the projects funded by the United Nations.

The decolonization of countries of the so-called Third World—a euphemism that has now become defunct with the collapse of the Second World—and Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), either in the form of UN support or bilateral assistance, ushered in an era of directed culture change in which money, manpower, mechanisms, and machines came initially from the outside to help the developing countries.

As the work on development grew with the involvement of the United Nations and the deep commitment of developing societies to development, new problems began to surface, attracting worldwide attention. Prominent among them were population growth and environmental degradation. Social sciences, along with the natural sciences, were called upon to handle these issues through research and active participation in action programmes.

The concern over the fast depletion of resources made societies rethink the ways these used these resources are used, and search for alternative ways to meet their energy requirements. These concerns are well-expressed in the famous Brundtland Report titled Our Common Future.⁶ Taming solar and wind energy, limiting the use of scarce resources, and even exploring alternative sources of energy have become the new priorities for scientific research and investigation. In addition to technological intervention, political factors also play their part. The resources of the earth are not equitably distributed. Different societies located in different parts of the world can be stratified according to richness. The countries of the Middle East, for example, are rich in oil. It is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that decides the price of petroleum on grounds that include not only the actual availability of the oil, but the willingness of the OPEC countries to sell the product at a given price. It is their decision to hike the price that affects not only the OPEC countries, but all the other countries that buy oil from them to run their machines and vehicles. Artificial scarcity is a social construct that can affect various economies of the world.

Climate change, which now worries the entire world—as evident from the World Congress at Copenhagen in December 2009—is attributed to the enormous emission of carbon dioxide by the highly industrialized countries. However, it requires concerted action with the participation of every country. The less developed countries are in a dilemma: on the one hand, they are committed to accelerating the pace of industrialization, which would mean greater energy needs and greater emission of gases, worsening the already deteriorating climate conditions; on the other hand, global warming is also going to affect them all. They therefore insist that developed countries should drastically reduce their emission rates. Politics has thus entered this debate, and has divided the countries on this vital issue. Climate change has become a part of international politics.

It is in these areas that social sciences were called upon to engage themselves. Studies of planned change and development are now part of social science research. In these exercises, both outside experts and local social scientists participate, and make contributions relevant to both planning and administration, and social theory. Social change has become a central concern in countries like India, and has developed as applied sociology or action sociology. Researches in this genre contributed significantly to the theory of social change. A new field, sociology of development, emerged, which is essentially a part of the sociology of social change. Contributions in this area relate to the process of planning and evaluation—both intermittent and post facto. This has opened up new vistas of research in the domain of the future.

In what is said above, it is clear that change originates both from within and from without. Change from within is called endogenous or orthogenetic. Likewise, change from without is exogenous or heterogenetic.⁷ In today’s world, no society is completely cut off from other societies, and therefore changes in society come from a multitude of sources. Moreover, changes occur in all spheres. It is sociological theory that alerts us to the fact that a change brought about in one aspect of society or culture has ramifications all over, and not just in the sub-system in which it occurs.

A sociological approach to change requires us to focus, according to MacIver and Page, on three great orders, namely, (i) the biophysical, (ii) the cultural, and (iii) the technological. There are changes in the biological and physical world that are beyond human control, but they influence social behaviour; there are changes that occur because of human activity, including technological advancement; and there might be changes in the attitudes and beliefs of people, which in turn bring about changes in the social structure.

A good example of these interlinked aspects of change is the current concern with climate change. The problem of climate change is related to the consequences of human activity on the physical environment. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the entire world was worried about the fast depletion of natural resources and environmental pollution on the one hand, and population explosion on the other. Similarly, climatic changes induced by Man, or changes occurring because of non-human factors, are likely to affect ways of living in all societies. However, it should be noted that the influence of environmental change differs from society to society. The oil crisis, for example, had a different impact on the petroleum exporting countries than it did on those that import petroleum products. The exporting countries formed a group called OPEC to collaboratively affect petroleum prices. Countries adversely affected by the price rise of petroleum products due to a resource crunch began focusing on alternative sources of energy, including harnessing solar energy or economizing the use of oil. The search for alternatives also took different routes in different societies, depending on their current profiles of energy use and availability of other sources of energy. It brought home the point that common problems need not have common solutions. The significance of ‘local’ and ‘cultural’ variables is now being recognized.

Changes are also caused by the technological revolution. Witness the number of changes that have occurred in our social life with the advent of the Information Revolution. Some 30 years ago, it was difficult to get a landline telephone connection in India—sometimes people had to wait for several years. Today, mobile phones have made the landline virtually defunct, and the use of this facility of communication is no longer enjoyed by the privileged few; it has reached the lower socio-economic classes and remote rural areas. In several ways, this has affected social behaviour.

Change should not be seen only in terms of improvement, understood as marking progress or development. It can be negative as well. Change may occur even when the structure remains intact. Positions do not change, but the people occupying those positions might. Such a change in personnel also affects the social system—positively or negatively. A change in government through electoral victory is one such example. There might be a change in terms of the size of the organization, or its composition, which may add to its diversity or complexity. Then there can be institutional changes in the sense that new structures may be created to tackle emerging problems and challenges, or defunct structures may be closed down.

Change is a complex process of accretion and attrition. These may involve actors or systems that are alien. The import of technology from the outside may bring about revolutionary changes within the system. The arrival of computers, for instance, has generated a group of computerates. It has vastly affected office culture as well as the learning environment in all societies. In India, CAT examinations are now conducted via the Internet—something that was unthinkable only a few years ago. The Indian judiciary has also taken the decision to reduce paperwork and usher in an era of computer culture. Computer culture provided the concept of ‘leap-frogging’ as one additional route to change. The assumption of stages, ingrained in theories of evolution, do not apply when one analyses the changes caused by the introduction of computers in particular, and the information revolution in general.

It was towards the end of the twentieth century that a new intellectual wave overwhelmed all sciences, including social sciences. On the one hand, it gave an impetus to a stocktaking exercise of what individual countries had achieved in terms of development and where the lacunae lay, and on the other, it spurred an interest in the future. Scholars engaged in the dual exercise of (i) making predictions about the distantly un-born future; and (ii) developing a vision for a desirable future. Several scenarios were painted and many blueprints prepared for the preferred world of the future. The world was seen not as the one inherited by the present generation from its forefathers, but as borrowed from yet-to-be-born children and grandchildren.

All this constitutes the realm of social change. Historically, we can say that studies of social change can be classified into three categories:

1. Change in the historical perspective: origin, evolution and growth.
2. Change in the context of the present: changes in environment, technology, and in social structures: introduction of innovations and their consequences.
3. Prediction of change and planning for the future.

In sum, it can be said that sociological interest in change has a long history. However, the focus has continuously been changing. Initially, change was seen in the context of the past, then in the context of the present, and finally in the context of the unseen future. Theorists of change engaged initially with the reconstruction of the past; then with the analysis of efforts aimed at improving the present; and finally in fashioning the future. It is not that old concerns have been given up in the subsequent phases of growth of the sub-theme of social change, but that the focus has shifted. It will therefore be helpful to summarize the major contributions to social change in terms of these changing orientations towards change.

The next three chapters discuss theories of social change of these three phases respectively.