Q.How is social change to be distinguished from other kinds of change?

In everyday language, "change" can mean almost anything -- a new fashion trend, a change in the weather, a shift in government policy. Sociology needs a narrower, more precise definition to make the concept analytically useful, and the standard reference point, following Anthony Giddens, is that social change refers specifically to changes that alter the underlying structure of an object or situation over a period of time. This immediately rules out a great deal of everyday change: a change has to be significant, not incidental, to count as social change.

Two criteria help make "significant" more precise. A genuine instance of social change must be intensive -- deep enough to actually transform how something fundamentally works, not just adjust its surface features -- and extensive -- widespread enough to affect a substantial section of society, not just a small or isolated group. Both conditions are needed together: a change that is profound but confined to a handful of people is not social change in the full sense, and neither is a change that touches many people but does not alter anything structurally important about how they live.

Even with this refinement, "social change" remains a broad umbrella, so sociologists further classify it along several dimensions. By pace, change can be evolutionary (slow, incremental, unfolding over long stretches of time) or revolutionary (rapid, often associated with the sudden overthrow of an existing power structure). By nature, change can be structural (altering institutions or the rules by which they operate, such as changes in currency or banking) or a change in ideas, values and beliefs (such as evolving notions of childhood or gender roles). By source, sociologists commonly identify environmental, technological, economic, political, and cultural causes, which frequently overlap and reinforce one another rather than operating in isolation. Taken together, this layered definition -- structural, significant, both intensive and extensive, and classifiable by pace, nature and source -- is what distinguishes social change as a sociological concept from the much looser, everyday sense of the word "change."