Social Change

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 European society underwent between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, obvious as constant change feels today, it is a remarkably recent fact in the long run of human existence. Human beings have lived on earth for roughly 500,000 years, but anything resembling a "civilised" existence -- settled agriculture, cities, writing -- is barely 6,000 years old, and of those 6,000 years, sustained rapid change belongs only to the last 400 or so. Even within that span the pace keeps quickening: change has plausibly moved faster over the last 100 years than across all the centuries before them, faster over the last 50 years than in the first half of that century, and faster still over the last 20 years than in the 30 years before that. Compress the whole of human history into a single day, midnight to midnight, and agriculture would not begin until around 11:56 pm, civilisation until 11:57 -- modern society would occupy only the final thirty seconds before the clock strikes twelve again, yet those thirty seconds may hold as much change as everything that came before them.

Used loosely, "social change" can mean almost any change that is not already labelled economic or political, so sociologists narrow the term to make it analytically useful. At its core, social change refers only to changes significant enough to alter a society's underlying structure over time -- and to count, a change has to be both intensive (deep enough to transform how things fundamentally work) and extensive (widespread enough to touch a large section of society). A change that runs deep but reaches only a handful of people, or one that is everywhere but only skin-deep, does not qualify.

Even narrowed this far, the term stays broad, so sociologists classify it further along three axes: pace, nature, and source. By pace, evolutionary change unfolds slowly, across generations or centuries -- the kind of change Darwin traced in the natural world, later and more controversially borrowed by "social Darwinism" -- while revolutionary change is sudden and often topples an existing power structure outright, as in the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution of 1917. By nature, structural change alters a society's institutions or the rules that govern them -- the move from metal-backed coinage to paper currency resting purely on trust is one example -- while a separate kind of change happens in ideas, values and beliefs, as when the modern notion of childhood emerged and eventually made child labour unacceptable and schooling compulsory. By source, five broad drivers are usually named: the environment, technology, the economy, politics, and culture -- with technology and the economy close enough in how they operate that the chapter treats them as a single connected theme. Each of these sources gets its own section ahead, beginning with how the physical environment has shaped, and continues to shape, human societies.