Social Change

Social Change

Social change:

 What is social change?

 What causes it?

 Social movements

 Globalization

What is social

change?

Transformations over time

of the institutions and

culture of society

What causes social change?

 Does Giddens have a theory?

 A theory is a systematic explanation of

cause and effect

 No real theory presented

 ―Influences‖ (pp. 618-622)

 Physical environment (economy)

 Political organization



 Culture



 Says we need general theories, but

abandons them (except globalization as

a trend)

What causes social change:

theories Giddens neglects

 Parsons (functionalism): evolutionary—

differentiation of institutions

 Symbolic interactionists: social

construction, new ―scripts‖

 Marx: historical materialism

Dialectics





thesis New thesis





antithesis New

resolution antithesis









Struggle of New struggle

opposites of opposites

Dialectical materialism

 (material) social forces of production as

base (basis) of social life

 Ideas, institutions ―erected‖ in support

of relations of production

 Class struggle in relations of production

becomes political

 Struggle (revolution) leads to new stage

of history: historical materialism

Historical Materialism

Superstructure New

Ideas, ideology, institutions superstructure

Social reproduction



Class

struggle Revolution





Social forces of

production New forces of

Relations of production production

Means of production

Postindustrial society

 aka information society, service society,

knowledge society because these sectors

dominate the economy

 Codified knowledge/information key resource

 ―Knowledge workers‖ become leading social group

 But:

 Service work includes a lot of manual labor

 Close integration of service and manufacture

 Giddens: this approach overemphasizes economic

factors

Postmodernity

 Modernity

 Refers to the industrial period

 Based on notion of ―progress‖ – i.e., history has a

direction, things get better

 Postmodernity means that idea has collapsed

 Social reality is now pluralistic and diverse

 Everything is in flux

 Shafer and Divney: Postmodernists overemphasize

cultural factors, wrong about ―end of history‖

Globalization: ―influences‖

 Telecommunications

 Fall of U.S.S.R, ―capitalist road‖ in China

brought virtually entire planet into

market system

 Transnational corporations dominate:

biggest 500 TNC’s bigger than most

countries’ economies

Globalization debate

 Skeptics:

 Globalization is not new

 Regionalization more significant



 National governments still play important

role

 Shafer: current events lend credence to

the skeptics’ points

Globalization debate

 Transformationalists:

 Globalization is changing societies, but

governments hold onto some power

 Globalization is ―multidirectional‖



 New, ―nonterritorial‖ social organizations:

 TNC’s

 NGO’s



 Social movements

Globalization debate

 Hyperglobalizers:

 New global order being born

 Market forces more powerful than national

governments (Ohmae)

 National governments in decline



 International organizations grow in power:

 European Union

 World Trade Organization

Campaign for global justice

 Grassroots social movement concerned

about global inequality

 Battle of Seattle, 1999

 Continues today (Miami anti-FTAA

protest)

 Has its own media using WWW:

 http://indymedia.org

Epilogue: social movements

 Conscious, organized actions to influence

social change

 Piven and Cloward: most effective when

mass-based, non-bureaucratic

 Maoism and the Great Proletarian Cultural

Revolution:

 Revolution within a revolution

 Among many other things, tried to invent new

relations of production (non-wage labor)