• The cartoon highlights the continuing debate on development and social change, raising questions such as whose development and what kind of development, since different sections of society experience development unequally.

• Early sociologists, influenced by natural sciences, viewed social change through linear and “one size fits all” models, which were later debunked, and although functionalists portrayed development as harmonious, this view was challenged by the critical school.

• Despite varied explanations of social change, it is evident that developmental benefits are unevenly distributed, and often the development agenda is controlled by dominant groups, though at the same time many social evils of the past century have declined, making society more egalitarian and open.

• Wilbert Moore defined social change as a significant alteration over time in social structure, behaviour patterns and culture, including norms and values.

• At the macro level, social change has two dimensions: structural change (fundamental transformations such as urbanisation and industrialisation) and cultural change (value-based changes such as women’s emancipation, dilution of caste, and changes in family forms and social values).

• The major sources of social change are commonly classified as environmental, technological, economic, political and cultural, and by origin as endogenetic, exogenetic and equigenetic.

• In the Indian context, social change is analysed through concepts like Modernisation, Sanskritisation, Westernisation and Secularisation, where Sanskritisation, Westernisation and the Great and Little Traditions mainly explain cultural change, while democratisation, Green Revolution, legal reforms, occupational mobility and education highlight structural change.

Sociological Theories of Social Change

• Theories of social change can be classified according to the nature of change as perceived by sociologists, where some view change as linear, some as cyclical, some as waves of growth and decay, and some as a spiral process that is ever-expanding.

• Postmodernists reject the idea of any fixed or universal pattern of social change.

Linear Theories of Social Change

• The idea of social evolution in linear theories is borrowed from biological evolution, and major proponents of the evolutionary or linear model include Comte, Tylor, Spencer, Morgan, Hobhouse, Marx, Durkheim and Tonnies.

• Auguste Comte proposed a progressive model in his Law of the Three Stages: Theological, Metaphysical and Positivistic, where theological thought is guided by religion and belief in God’s will, the metaphysical stage begins with the Renaissance and views society in natural terms, and the positivistic stage is based on scientific knowledge, in which Sociology as a science fully develops and social behaviour can be empirically measured and explained.

• For Comte, intellectual development is the basis of all social evolution, and change moves through organic (stable) and critical (transitional) periods, where critical periods inaugurate new phases, while society contains both social statics (constant elements) and social dynamics (changing elements).

• Herbert Spencer, influenced by Darwin, developed Social Darwinism, viewing evolution as movement from simple to complex, guided by survival of the fittest, where societies, like organisms, consist of interconnected parts that undergo differentiation and integration.

• Unlike Comte, Spencer focused more on the individual, rejected the Law of Three Stages, and argued that evolution must be studied in the material and real world, identifying stages as simple, compound, doubly compound and trebly compound societies, and explaining transition from militant societies to industrial societies based on altruism, specialisation and achievement.

• Edward Tylor viewed cultural evolution in terms of growth in industrial arts, scientific knowledge and social–political organisation, and proposed a religious sequence of animism → polytheism → monotheism.

• Lewis Henry Morgan explained social change through stages of primitive, barbaric and civilised societies.

• Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), based on Essential Will (peasants and artisans) and Arbitrary Will (businessmen, scientists and political classes), and argued that societies evolve linearly from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.

• Gemeinschaft is small, homogeneous, isolated, face-to-face, informal, with low conflict, strong family centrality, and religion pervading all aspects of life, whereas Gesellschaft is large, heterogeneous, impersonal, formal, contractual, specialised, marked by high stratification, conflict and secularism.

• Tönnies’ model functions as an Ideal Type for comparing societies, and was later used by Robert Redfield in the folk–urban continuum and by McKim Marriott in explaining change from traditional to modern society.

Comte’s Progressive Evolutionary Model

• A sub-type of classical evolutionary thinking is the dialectic theory, most clearly articulated by Hegel, who explained history as a movement of ideas through a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, where each synthesis becomes a new thesis and the process continues.

• For Hegel, reality and social change were fundamentally idealistic, and he, like the Greeks, searched for ultimate reality in the realm of ideas.

• Karl Marx, though also using the dialectical method, rejected idealism and argued that the real driving force of history is materialism, and that social change occurs through class struggle.

• Marx explained evolution through six modes of production and held that real social change happens only through revolution, leading to socialism and ultimately communism, where exploitation and inequality come to an end.

• Linear theories of social change are criticised for value bias and lack of objectivity, as seen in their use of terms like “savage” and “primitive”, for disagreement among theorists about stages, and for being largely armchair, speculative and based on unreliable secondary data.

Cultural Lag

• The concept of cultural lag was developed by W. F. Ogburn in response to the theory of economic determinism, which argues that social, cultural and political institutions change directly and immediately in accordance with changes in the economic base of society.
• Ogburn observed that changes in material culture do not always bring about equally rapid changes in non-material culture. For example, although changes in technology and the division of labour within the family have taken place, patriarchal ideology has not been transformed at the same pace. Thus, cultural lag refers to the situation in which cultural change, especially in values, norms and institutions, occurs more slowly than changes in material conditions.
• In a more general sense, cultural lag exists when two or more social variables, which were previously in a state of mutual adjustment, become dissociated and maladjusted because they change at different rates.
• However, Molnar and Page have criticised the concept of cultural lag on the grounds that it is vague and does not clearly specify which aspects of culture lag behind others. It is also argued that in the contemporary world, where communication has become extremely rapid, the process may even be reversing, and in some cases non-material culture is changing faster than material culture.