Learning Objectives

After studying this chapter you should be able to understand the following:

2 The success of social movement will depend in good part on how effectively it mobilizes its resources.

3 New social movements tend to focus on more than just economic issues and often cross national boundaries.

4 Early advocates of evolutionary theory of social change believed that society was inevitably progressing to a higher state.

5 Talcott Parsons, a leading advocate of functionalist theory, viewed society as naturally being in a state of equilibrium or balance.

6 Conflict theorists see change as having crucial significance, since it is needed to correct social injustices and inequalities.

7 In general, those with a disproportionate share of society's wealth, status, and power have a vested interest in preserving the status quo and will resist change.

8 The period of maladjustment when the nonmaterial culture is still adapting to new material conditions is known as culture lag.

9 In the computer age, telecommuters are linked to their supervisors and colleagues through computer terminals, phone lines, and fax machines.

10 Early users of the Internet, the world's largest computer network, established a subculture with specific norms and values and with distinctive argot terms.

11 Advances in biotechnology have raised difficult ethical questions about sex selection of fetuses and genetic engineering.

12 Social scientists focus on human error in the normal accidents associated with increasing reliance on technology.

13 The domination of the Internet by the English language is not surprising, since English has largely become the international language of commerce and communication.

14 Computer and video technology has facilitated supervision, control, and even domination by employers or government.

15 Conflict theorists fear that the disenfranchised poor may be isolated from mainstream society in an "information ghetto," just as racial and ethnic minorities have been subjected to residential segregation.

16 Computer technology has made it increasingly easy for any individual, business firm, or government agency to retrieve more and more information about any of us and thereby infringe on our privacy; it is also easy to disseminate pornographic material to millions of people at a time. How much government should restrict access to electronic information is an important policy issue today.