Social Order

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. This baseline is what sociologists call social order: the tendency within an established social system to resist, regulate, and slow down change. Every society needs a degree of predictability to reproduce itself over time -- people need to be able to expect that rules will hold, that similar actions will produce similar results, and that institutions will behave consistently.

Societies resist change for both abstract and concrete reasons. Abstractly, total unpredictability would make ordinary life unworkable. Concretely, most societies are stratified unequally -- some groups have more command over resources, status, and power than others -- and those who are favourably placed generally have a vested interest in things staying as they are, while those who are disadvantaged have a vested interest in change. Because "normal" conditions usually favour those already well off, social order tends to work in favour of dominant groups. …