UPSC Sociology Syllabus – Chapter 10 – Social change in Modern Societies
(a) Sociological theories of social change.
(b) Development and dependency.
(c) Agents of social change.
(d) Education and social change.
(e) Science, technology and social change.
DEFINITIONS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
- Mazumdar, H. T. “Social change may be defined as a new fashion or mode, either modifying or replacing the old, in the life of a people, or in the operation of a society.”
- Gillin and Gillin. “Social changes are variations from the accepted modes of life; whether due to alteration in geographical conditions, in cultural equipment, composition of the population or ideologies and whether brought about by diffusion or inventions within the group.”
CYCLICAL THEORY
- Cyclic theory of social change has been put forward by many of our contemporary thinkers. Spengler, Vacher-de-Lapouge, Vilfredo Pareto, F. Stuart Chopin, Sorokin and Arnold J. Toynbee are among those involved.
- Spengler is of the view that society also has a pre-determined path, including its birth, development, maturity and decline.
- Cyclical change is a variation on unilinear theory which was developed by Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West, 1918) and Arnold J. Toynbee (A Study of History, 1956). They argued that societies and civilisations change according to cycles of rise, decline and fall just as individual persons are born, mature, grow old, and die.
- According to German thinker Spengler, every society has a predetermined life cycle—birth, growth, maturity and decline. Society, after passing through all these stages of life cycle, returns to the original stage and thus the cycle begins again.
THINKERS AND THEORIES
- Oswald Spengler believed that every society is born, matures, decays and eventually dies. The Roman Empire rose to power and then gradually collapsed.
- Pareto, in his ‘A Treatise on General Sociology, 1963’ presented in his theory of the circulation of elites. His theory was inadequate in that it was based on a limited instance of the circulation of elites in ancient Rome. Pareto also conceived conceived of society as a system in equilibrium, a whole consisting of interdependent parts. A change in one part was seen as leading to changes in other parts of the system.
- Pritim Sorokin in his book ‘Social and Culture Dynamics, 1938’ has offered another explanation. He classified societies according to their ‘Cultural Mentality’, which can be ideational (reality is spiritual), sensate (reality is material), or idealistic (a synthesis of the two). Sorokin considered that social change follows a trendless cyclic pattern, i.e., like a swinging
pendulum, culture moves in one direction and then back in another.Cyclical shift theory, or often called ‘rise and equal theory, presumes that social phenomena of some nature repeat over and over again, much as they were in a cyclical fashion before. Global changes are coming rapidly and their emergence is actually inevitable. But the pace of social change is what it is. A shift can occur at different times in diff
