14 Chapter 14: Social Change – How to Make and Remake Culture

Chapter Overview: 

Social change is how culture, interaction, and innovation change social institutions over time. Reactions to events and new opportunities most often cause changes in society. One avenue of social change is technology, the creation, use, and application of knowledge and its interrelation with life, society, and the environment. Resistance to change can take many forms, including invention, futility, perversity, and jeopardy. Invention is the creation of a new device or way of thinking. The claim that reform cannot work because the social problem is unsolvable is called futility. Perversity claims that any attempts to fix a problem would compound the issues the change was trying to address. The claim that attempting to solve a problem will only draw attention away from other, more important matters is jeopardy.

Any social interaction in which a group of people engages in behavior that is not in their everyday culture is called collective behavior. Forms of collective behavior include mobs and riots, fashion and fads, crowds and rumors. Social movements are activities that support or protest social issues organized by nongovernmental organizations. The first stage of a social movement is emergence, when people become aware of a problem and begin to notice that others feel the same way. Coalescence is the second stage of a movement when groups reach out to other groups and individuals to gain membership. The third stage, bureaucratization, occurs when it becomes a social force. Finally, the decline is the final stage of a social movement. This takes place when an organization completes its goal or is seen as irrelevant.

There are many types of social movements. Reformative social movements seek to change a society’s thoughts and actions, but only in a limited way. Reformative movements can be progressive, promoting social change, or regressive, seeking to stop change. Revolutionary social movements are also known as transformative social movements. These movements seek to change the thoughts and actions of all society radically. Redemptive social movements focus on specific individuals, but the amount of change sought is radical rather than limited.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe how technology can influence social change.
• Define social movements, collective behaviour, and social change.
• Compare and contrast resistance to change using the concepts of invention, futility, perversity, and jeopardy.
• Identify and give examples of the different forms of collective behaviour, including mobs, hysteria, riots, fads, a craze, a panic, a crowd, rumours, and urban legends.
• Identify and give examples of the various stages of social movements.
• Define the different types of social movements.