Ch 5Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society — Class 11 Sociology, concept-first.

Change is sometimes called the one truly permanent feature of society -- and sociology itself, as a discipline, grew largely out of an effort to make sense of the sweeping transformations Western Euro…

The physical environment -- climate, geography, natural resources -- has always exerted a strong pull on how societies organise themselves.

Technology, especially when combined with the workings of the market, has been one of the most powerful engines of social change in the modern period.

Political forces have been among the most consequential drivers of social change throughout history, though older ways of writing history often exaggerated the role of individual rulers rather than th…

Culture -- the broad field of ideas, values and beliefs that matter to people -- is another major source of social change, and religion is probably its clearest example.

Social change only makes sense against a backdrop of things that are not changing -- just as change needs some baseline of continuity to be visible as change at all.

One of the more interesting puzzles in sociology is why domination -- a relationship where costs and benefits are distributed unequally -- so often proceeds smoothly, without constant friction, rather…

Domination, authority and law do not guarantee automatic obedience -- societies always contain some degree of disagreement, and sociologists use the broad term contestation to cover this, since narrow…

Most societies can be divided broadly into rural and urban sectors, and because the conditions of everyday life differ sharply between them, so do the forms of social order that hold each together and…

Rural social order tends to be sturdier and more resistant to change than urban social order, and this follows fairly directly from the objective conditions of village life.

Cities themselves are ancient -- built historically around trade routes, ports, defensible or strategically located sites, and religious pilgrimage centres -- but urbanism as a way of life for large s…

This chapter's glossary collects a handful of terms that recur across its discussion of social order and social change in rural and urban settings, and reviewing them together is a useful way to conso…