A World of Change

Sociologists refer to fundamental alterations in the patterns of culture, structure, and social behavior over time as social change. It is a process by which society becomes something different while remaining in some respects the same.

• Sources of Social Change Many factors interact to generate changes in people’s behavior and in the culture and structure of their society, including the physical environment, population, clashes over resources and values, supporting values and norms, innovation (discoveries and inventions), diffusion, and the mass media.



• Perspectives on Social Change Evolutionary theorists, particularly those with a unilinear focus, depict history as divided into sequential stages characterized by an underlying trend. Cyclical theorists look to the course of a civilization or society, searching for generalizations regarding their stages of growth and decline. Functionalist theorists see society as a system that tends toward equilibrium, with cultural lag an important factor in social change. Conflict theorists hold that tensions between competing groups are the basic source of social change.



• Social Change in the United States Computers have consequences for the use and manipulation of social power. They alter the manner in which people relate to one another, and they have implications for individual privacy, the confidentiality of communications and personal data, and employment.



• Social Change in DevelopingNations The modernization approach sees development as entailing a pattern of convergence as societies become increasingly urban, industry comes to overshadow agriculture, and other changes occur. According to world system and dependency analysis, an unequal exchange takes place between core and periphery nations, with development in core nations occurring at the cost of underdevelopment in periphery nations.




Collective Behavior

Collective behavior is not organized in terms of established norms and institutionalized lines of action.

• Varieties of Collective Behavior Collective behavior comes in many forms, including rumors, fashions and fads (which can turn into crazes), mass hysteria, panic, and crowds. Types of crowds include the acting crowd, the casual crowd, the conventional crowd, and the expressivecrowd. These crowd types share three characteristics: suggestibility, deindividualization, and invulnerability.



• Preconditions for CollectiveBehavior One framework for examining collective behavior is based on the valueadded model popular among economists and specifies six determinants of collective behavior.



• Explanations of Crowd Behavior Sociologists offer three approaches to crowd behavior: contagion theory, convergencetheory, and emergent-norm theory.




Social Movements

Social movements are vehicles whereby people collectively seek to influence the course of human events through formal organizations.

• Causes of Social Movements Some sociologists seek the roots of social movements in social and economic deprivation; others look to the resources and organizations aggrieved persons can muster as providing the key to an understanding of social movements.



• Types of Social Movements An ideology is critical to a social movement. Common forms of social movements include revolutionary, reform, resistance, and expressive movements.



• Social Revolution Social revolutions are most likely to occur when: (1) a good deal of political power is concentrated in the state, (2) the military is no longer a reliable tool for suppressing domestic disorders, (3) political crises weaken the existing regime, and (4) a substantial segment of the population mobilizes in uprisings.



• Terrorism Although what constitutes terrorism is a matter of social definition, sociologists have come to see terrorism as a new mode of warfare with far-reaching implications.




Looking to the Future

Futurists have identified two changes that seem to be central to contemporary social life: the United States is being restructured from an industrial to an information society and modern societies are increasingly shifting from a national to a global economy.