Page 246 - DSOC201_SOCIAL_STRUCTURE_AND_SOCIAL_CHANGE_ENGLISH

Unit 11: Theories of Social Change

moves up and down from just under the bust to the hips, and the amount of cleavage shown increases Notes
and decreases. Kroeber also discovered that women’s dressing in the West repeat themselves over
and over within cycles of about hundred years.
Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian-American sociologist, believed that all great civilizations
pass through three cultural systems in a cyclical way: (i) the ideational cultural society based on faith
and revelation; (ii) the idealist cultural society guided by a ‘mixed’ notion of supernatural beliefs and
empiricism; and (iii) the sensate culture society, which are guided by empirical sense perceptions. He
opined that all societies need not necessarily decay but rather they go through various stages by
shifting from one cycle to another as the needs of the society demand.
11.3 Structural-Functional and Conflict Theories

The structural-functional and conflict theories are generally concerned with micro and middle range
theories of social change. The structural-functionalists assume that society, like the human body, is a
balanced system of institutions, each of which performs a function in maintaining society. They
consider ‘change’ as a constant that requires no explanation. They hold that changes disrupt the
equilibrium of a society, until the change has been integrated into the culture. Societies accept and
adopt those changes that are found useful (functional), while they reject changes that are useless
(dysfunctional). They opine that when events within and without the society disrupt the equilibrium,
social institutions make adjustments to restore stability. For instance, a natural calamity, a famine, an
influx of immigrants or a war may disrupt the social order and compel the social institutions to make
adjustments.

Cultural lag is one term that has been often used to describe the state of disequilibrium.
When an event such as a natural calamity or a war causes a strain and trauma in a society,
it takes sometime for the society to understand the strain and trauma and alter its values,
attitudes, and institutions to adapt to the change. This is simply because societies need to
adjust to maintain and restore to a state of stability just as the human body needs to adjust
its functioning to adapt to changes. Like some of the cyclical theorists (e.g., Pitirim Sorokin),
the structural-functionalists do not give importance to the result of social change as good
or bad in so far as equilibrium is maintained in the society.

Karl Marx was one the great exponents of conflict theories. He looked at society as composition of
oppositional forces— the oppressor and the oppressed. Such notion led him to predict the revolt of
the masses. He saw conflict as the stage of development and progress that would lead to a higher
order.
Karl Marx was the first to introduce dialectical pattern of change to sociological analysis of change
which concept had already been analyzed by the German philosopher G.W.F.Hegel. A dialectical
pattern of change is neither linear nor cyclical. It assumes that new social forms emerge out of the old
social forms through opposition and conflict. Karl Marx and his followers propound that a social
form (the thesis) gives rise to new social form (the synthesis) due to oppositional forces and conflict
(the anti-thesis) within the existing old social form. It would mean that thesis generates anti-thesis,
and anti-thesis generates synthesis, and again synthesis would give rise to a new anti-thesis, which
in turn generates a new synthesis and the alternate process goes on.
11.4 Synthesis of Social Change Theories

Most theorists today integrate the various ideas and theories of social change that have been discussed
above. There are very few theorists that still hold on their own ideas and theories. There are also not
many theorists which believe that social change always results in improvement or that societies
inevitably decay. There is a general agreement, however, that societies change because of various

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 241