CHAPTER 47
Social Change
Garth Massey
Social change in sociology has three mean-
ings, each occupying a wide swath of the
discipline’s attention. The first treats social
change as a subset of sociological theory.
This is the meaning of social change in most
textbooks with the title “Social Change”
published in the last half-century (e.g.,
Sztompka 1993; Applebaum 1970; Boudon
1986; Chirot 1994; Hagen 1962; Moore 1963;
Smith 1976; Lauer 1991). The second sees
social change as a process driven by pow-
erful social phenomena, the workings of
which constitute the mechanism operating
to effect social change in the modern era.
The third approaches social change as an
active engagement in solving problems and
improving people’s life chances. There is
overlap between these three meanings, as
this chapter will show, but each constitutes
a distinctly different answer to the question:
What is social change?
Introduction: Personal Change and
Social Change
Social life is perpetually in flux. We glimpse
a moment and it is gone. We sketch an
outline that describes the way things are,
yet we know they will be different the next
time we look. We often talk about “soci-
ety” or “social life” as if it were a static or
a solid thing, when we know it is constantly
changing, restlessly moving about, reconfig-
uring to becoming something new. For those
in sociology fascinated with the surprises of
what comes next, social change is sociology.
When most people think about change,
they think about their change: changes
in their lives, their choices, and the way
they have coped with new circumstances
and challenges. Some of this is associ-
ated with getting older and accumulating
life experiences. Some comes from geo-
graphic mobility, job changes, marriage, par-
enthood, divorce, illness, the accumulation
of things, the loss of friends, opportunities
to try something new, and personal hard-
ships.
Social change can be thought of as the
sum of people’s personal changes (ubiqui-
tous and continuous) in social contexts, a
philosophical position called methodologi-
cal individualism. “Social change must be
seen as produced by the aggregation of
individual actions, and what else could
487
488 the cambridge handbook of sociology, volume 1
bring it about?” (Boudon 1986: 56). Personal
changes, however, are part of something
bigger than oneself, something social and
beyond the purely personal.
C. Wright Mills (1959) wrote about the
private and the public, biography and his-
tory as a way of conjoining the personal and
the social. Far from being distinct, they are
inevitably intertwined and complimentary.
Human agency (what some people think of
as free will, initiative, or choice) and the
inventive construction of social meaning lib-
erate the individual from a life of reflex-
ive, determined behavior in a social envi-
ronment. At the same time, few choices
are completely free, and the study of social
life tells us that what we do and what we
think are done for reasons that have less to
do with agency and more to do with social
structure than most people would like to
admit.
Karl Marx reminds us that people “make
their own history, but they do not make
it as they please; they do it under circum-
stances existing already, given and trans-
mitted from the past” (Marx 1964[1852]: 1).
Emile Durkheim (1964[1893]) and Georg
Simmel (1950) offer guides to conceptual-
izing this social dimension as a reality that
seems to transcend or stand apart from indi-
viduals. The “social facts” that sociologists
record, measure, analyze, and use to explain
why we do what we do, as well as the
social forms of our encounters with oth-
ers, examined most effectively in the twen-
tieth century by Erving Goffman (1967), are
a subject in themselves. In the analysis of
social facts and social forms can be found
many of our understandings about social
change.
Social Change as Sociological Theory
Sociological thinking has long been dom-
inated by a false distinction between the
static and the dynamic, being and becom-
ing, permanence and change, structure and
function, the synchronic and the diachronic.
Piotr Sztompka calls this the “original sin”
of the discipline and likens it to the
misappropriated example of anatomy and
physiology (Sztompka 1993: 3). The disci-
pline has posited theories of society and
theories of social change, setting for itself
the task of reconciling the two. It is worth
knowing about and understanding this his-
tory of thought, but fortunately sociology
has for the most part moved on.
Classical Theories of Social Change
Most books devoted to social change
recount what the greatest minds have
thought, what the most creative and disci-
plined researchers have found, and what a
contentious academic discipline has argued
about for the past two hundred years. In
short, it tells the reader – usually students
majoring in sociology – what sociologists
think about social change. It is a fascinating
story, full of important lessons and worthy
of sustained inquiry.
Theories of social change are at the core
of sociological theory. It would not be too
much of an exaggeration to believe that the-
ories of social change are not only a staple
of classical sociological theory but are clas-
sical sociological theory, from Montesquieu
to Comte, through Marx, Pareto, Spencer,
Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Veblen, and
Sorokin (Coser 1971).
The edifice of conceptualizations and his-
torically illustrated “types” in Max Weber’s
work and the emphasis Emile Durkheim
gave to answering the question, what is
the “sui generis” social in the study of
society, belie their central concern: the
monumental transitions of traditional social
life into modern societies. More directly,
what was central to most of the major
social theorists in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was the diminution of
earlier social forms and the growing pre-
dominance of something new, complex,
powerful, and worrisome. All of them seem
to agree that the speed of this transfor-
mation was unprecedented in human his-
tory. In short, they were all talking about
social change: its scope, speed, and its con-
sequences and, by implication, what could
be done about it.
Weber’s (1958[1904–1905]) most famous
work for American audiences, his thesis on
 social change
the influence of early reformation Protes-
tantism in the emerging economic order
that was passing from mercantile to indus-
trial capitalism, says very little about “soci-
ety” per se. Rather, it is about ideas widely
embraced that compel both economic ratio-
nality and lifestyle choices. The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is trying
to answer a very modern question: What
drives social change?
Similarly, Durkheim’s first major work,
The Division of Labor in Society, is not an
analysis of how things are but how social
life has come to take its late nineteenth-
century form in much of Europe, and what
this means for the future. Between the lines
is the political and social tumult of France
in the nineteenth century and the desire
to understand social change of a kind that
appeared to Durkheim to be the march of
industry and urban life.
To Karl Marx is attributed an alterna-
tive, more threatening examination of soci-
eties dominated by new industrial, eco-
nomic, and political forms. Perhaps among
them all, Marx was the most enamored
by the possibilities of a new type of soci-
ety. The dialectic of change, adopted from
Hegelian philosophy, treated social transfor-
mation as both imminent and full of poten-
tial. It seemed to contain an inner dynamic
that embraced an eschatology of a more
rational and humane social life. Getting
there necessitated the mobilization of social
forces opposing the social fissures growing
ever deeper and more pernicious. The trans-
formation of Europe in the nineteenth cen-
tury had given birth to both the most pow-
erful of antagonisms and the key to human
liberation.
The Social System and Evolutionary
Theory
The enthusiasm for an evolutionary per-
spective gripped late nineteenth-century
thinking. Beyond the life sciences, it pro-
vided a metaphor, an analogy, and a
heuristic device when given expression by
evolutionary social system theorizers like
Herbert Spencer (1898), who saw society –
literally or metaphorically – as an organism.
489
He applied evolutionary principles such as
growth, complexity, adaptation, and repro-
ductive advantage to describe society and
to explain how it operates. Only secondar-
ily did he consider how it changes, falling
prey to and dragging the discipline into the
dilemma of reconciling structure and func-
tion.
Spencer believed all things are evolv-
ing from incoherence to coherence, chaos
to order, simple to complex, small to
large. Where Marx thought the develop-
ment of social classes were the seeds of
social change, Spencer saw differentiation –
including social classes – as a natural and
therefore stabilizing feature of evolution.
Because evolution is a fact of nature that
governs all of its forms, including human
social life, any effort to challenge the course
of evolutionary change was folly. Spencer’s
enthusiasts in the United States, espe-
cially William Graham Sumner (1954[1883]),
pushed this idea as both a moral and politi-
cal imperative.
In the 1940s, Talcott Parsons began con-
structing his highly influential model of
the social system of structures and func-
tions (1964[1951]). A theory of society was
prominently outshining any theory of social
change. But, as the enthusiasm with social
systems theorizing began to wane in the
tumultuous 1960s, its proponents could no
longer avoid the task of explaining social
change (Demerath and Peterson 1967; Par-
son 1966; 1977). The idea of stresses (exter-
nal forces) and strains (internal dynamics)
was advanced, emphasizing the adjustments
the social system could make and the way
interdependencies put limits on any alter-
ation in social system parts. This conserva-
tive answer to the question of social change
was not embraced by many younger sociolo-
gists who looked more favorably on a resur-
gence of Marxian analysis, even in the more
tame forms it took in American sociology.
Conflict Theories and the Critique
of Society
The conflict perspective offers a more
volatile image of social forces engaged in
a continual contest in pursuit of their
490 the cambridge handbook of sociology, volume 1
interests. This is not to say that people are in
pitched battle 24/7, but disruption and sta-
bility are always in uneasy tension. Social
order in periods of calm is held in place
by a balance of forces that are always shift-
ing. Social order is never static, but is being
negotiated as shortcomings and a constella-
tion of divergent forces seek some sort of
resolution. The key to this perspective is
power.
Conflict theory emphasized how the
contest over power, privilege, and mate-
rial well-being impels social and politi-
cal change. Clashing interests and oppos-
ing forces, often quiescent but sometimes
openly and actively at odds, tell a story of
a society in flux and, for some, a society in
need of change. The outcome of the con-
test determines something more particular
and concrete than the adaptive ability of the
society as a whole. Contestation determines
who will rule, who will take an oversized
portion of the good things a society has to
offer, and who will articulate what consti-
tute society’s dominant attitudes, opinions,
and ideology, at least for a time.
Sociology traces the conflict perspective
to Karl Marx – the theorist and researcher
of capitalism, not necessarily the revolu-
tionary – but its development drew on
many people’s scholarship and has been
shaped by dozens of contemporary scholars.
In the early twentieth century, Georg Sim-
mel wrote elegantly about the contradictory
nature of all social relations, but he is most
often cited for his analysis of the way vari-
ous arrangements engage in conflict result-
ing in new configurations that are them-
selves dynamic, possess contradictions, and
are destined to be resolved. The process is
endless.
If the exercise of power is the cen-
tral process for conflict theorists, the key
social structural feature is inequality, and
particularly social classes. C. Wright Mills,
who described himself as a “plain Marxist,”
was an iconoclastic scholar, raising ques-
tions about power and social class in the
1950s. His White Collar and The Power Elite
paved the way for the critical analysis by
young social scientists of American society
and its global economic and military reach.
The study of social change advanced largely
by discarding theories of a static or slowly
evolving society in favor of something more
dynamic, fluid, and subject to efforts to
make the world a better place.
From Progress to Modernity to
Globalization
It is not surprising that the modern era (the
West since 1500) was dominated for cen-
turies by the idea of progress. As the world
became an increasingly known environ-
ment – geographically but also through sci-
entific discovery, the replacement of author-
itarian governance with the rule of law, an
exponential growth of material wealth and
comforts, and the diminution of caste-like
status systems – it became a matter of belief
that things were getting better.
A version of this took hold in the twen-
tieth century under the heading of mod-
ernization. The West had become a shin-
ing “house on the hill” in contrast to a poor,
non-democratic Third World of poverty,
peasant agriculture, tribalism, and tradi-
tion (Hobsbawm 1994). Confident that the
social formation of Western nations was
preferable to any other, and recognizing the
increasingly interconnected global commu-
nity, modernization was put forth as the
path of social change (Inkles and Smith
1974; Apter 1968). It not only described
social change in the West. It became a
blueprint for how to effect change around
the world in the form of international devel-
opment (McMichael 2016).
Theories of social change in the more
recent decades often have been articulated
around the concept of globalization. The
classical theorists – especially Weber and
Marx – were keen to understand the eco-
nomic dynamics among nations and regions,
but it was not until the second half of the
twentieth century that social theories of
globalization took shape. Immanuel Waller-
stein (1974) and other world-systems the-
orists embedded their ideas in solid his-
torical and comparative research, spawning
new inquiries into the rise of capitalism,
 social change
the growth and dominance of cities, and
the neo-colonial relations between First and
Third World nations. Post-modernization
theories of development borrowed heavily
from the world-system theorists, as did the
emerging perspectives on globalization.
Globalization – the rapidly growing eco-
nomic, political, social and cultural linkages
among nations and particularly the spread
of Western power and influence into every
corner of the globe – expresses the most sig-
nificant form of social change operating in
the world today.
Agents, Mechanisms, and Drivers of
Social Change
There has emerged another approach to
social change in the past two decades.
Instead of building theoretical systems, it
is more historical and comparative, digging
into the grit of social life as it has been
and as it is today. It examines the agents,
the mechanisms, the drivers of social change
that transform people’s lives and the social
world in which they live.
Understanding social change in the world
today requires a confrontation with the
most powerful forces that affect the speed,
scope, and direction of social change. Robert
Merton called these forces “social mech-
anisms” and described them as “social
processes having designated consequences”
(Merton 1968: 43–44). A few examples suf-
fice to illustrate what Merton means. Judi-
cial decisions both play catch-up to pub-
lic opinion and behavior (e.g., same-sex
partnering) and impel people and orga-
nizations to change their practices and
often their attitudes (e.g., outlawing racial
segregation). Digital information technolo-
gies have rapidly changed the way peo-
ple work, communicate with one another,
are entertained, and know about the world
around them. To advance their opposi-
tion to the termination of pregnancy, anti-
abortion activists and their organizations
offer and push for legislation, oppose the
appointment of judges, file lawsuits, hold
491
demonstrations and protest marches, solicit
funds, advertise their views, and seek to dis-
credit their opponents in order to change
women’s reproductive options.
There are dozens if not hundreds of sim-
ilar examples of agents or drivers of social
change in the world today. Rather than a
seemingly endless list or a myriad of dis-
parate forces, they can be grouped under a
small number of topics, such as are found in
texts on social change today (e.g., Weinstein
2010; Harper and Leicht 2011). Five drivers of
social change – social movements, technol-
ogy, war and revolution, large corporations,
and the state – make clear this way of under-
standing social change (see Massey 2016).
Social Movements
Probably no area of sociology has done more
to move the study of social change into
the arena of contemporary historical and
comparative inquiry than the scholarship
of social movements. Charles Tilly’s stud-
ies of revolutions, rebellions, and counter-
revolutions (Tilly 1964; Tilly et al. 1975; Tilly
1978) inspired and guided a reorientation of
social movement research. Much of what
sociologists, political scientists, and journal-
ists previously wrote about social move-
ments concentrated on the reasons groups
mobilize and how they form and operate
as organizations. At about the same time,
William Gamson (1975) challenged the lack
of attention that had been given to the
attribution of outcomes, that is, how social
change is the result of social movements.
It is difficult to find a day in which social
movements are not in the news. Unpaid
workers in Zimbabwe, political protestors
in Thailand, gun-safety advocates in the
US, persecuted minorities in Myanmar,
anti-immigration demonstrators in Central
Europe – social movements are part of
everyday life in the twenty-first century,
whether they are conventional and peace-
ful or disruptive and violent, seeking minor
changes or major transformations of politi-
cal, social, or economic affairs.
Social movements drive social change in
at least four ways:
492 the cambridge handbook of sociology, volume 1
r they influence public opinion by insert-
ing their version of issues into popular
discourse;
r they influence the formation of public
policy and take an active role in how poli-
cies are implemented;
r they provide subcultural alternatives for
their members and other movement
sympathizers: language, values, beliefs,
and attitudes, music and dress, and ways
of interacting; and
r social movements impact those who
participate in them: their identity, life
choices, and future public involvement.
Technology
Technologies can be so powerful in their
ability to provide advantages over their pre-
decessors and have such an effect on social
and economic life that they seem to mark
new levels in the development of civi-
lization: the stone (tools) age, the bronze
(smelting) age, the iron (plow) age, the
industrial (steam power) age, and the digi-
tal (information technology) age.
In its most basic sense, technology is “the
application of knowledge to the achieve-
ment of particular goals or to the solu-
tion of particular problems” (Moore 1972:
5). A technology – an object, a way of
doing something, or the system that sup-
ports a practice – acquires new meaning
and is adapted to the active interests and
imaginations of its users. This is the applica-
tion of human agency. That people have an
uncanny knack for finding a use for some-
thing that its originators did not intend is
part of its sociological dimension. For exam-
ple, young people had ideas about, and
found uses for, personal computers (e.g.,
gaming and social networking) far different
from the intentions of the electrical engi-
neers, mathematicians, and military strate-
gists who developed the modern computer.
Technology can radically alter the use
of time and labor. For example, women’s
lives changed immeasurably when washing
machines replaced scrubbing boards and flat
river stones. The move from typewriters
to word processers saved countless work
hours. Internet search engines and apps, the
compressor, online banking, the combine
harvester, photocopiers, robotics are more
examples of how the development of time-
and labor-saving technologies have changed
the way people live and work, interact with
one another, and see the world.
Technologies create new sources of
power, while the control of science and
technology enhances the power of those
who possess them. The stirrup affixed to the
saddle shook up the distribution of power in
Medieval Europe by investing its users with
a better way to deliver violence. Nuclear
weapons had much the same effect in inter-
national relations. The iPhone in its vari-
ous machinations made the Apple Corpora-
tion the most capitalized corporation in the
world, and its top executives are welcome
guests in the halls of government.
War and Revolution
Unlike social movements and technology,
war is only occasionally examined in stud-
ies of social change (Joas and Knöbl 2013).
Michael Mann (1988) convincingly argues,
however, that modern war is an ongoing
and major force influencing and structuring
social, political, and economic life in soci-
eties today.
Wars, and preparations for war, in the
twenty-first century are a powerful force,
capable of garnering huge portions of
national economies; generating cutting-edge
research; changing international borders;
ushering in as well as destroying politi-
cal and religious systems; realigning social
classes, national groups, and gender rela-
tions.
Three obvious ways modern war acts as
an agent of social change are war’s destruc-
tion, planning for war, and participation in
war (Marwick 1974). Added to this are the
changes in a society that adopts a perma-
nent war economy; the technologies devel-
oped to prevent, conduct, and treat the
wounds of war; and the organizational and
operational lessons war offers to corpora-
tions and the state. Planning and paying for
military preparedness has become a cen-
tral governmental expenditure that creates
 social change
economic regions and entire industries
highly dependent on military spending.
War-torn societies are transformed in the
aftermath of civil and international wars.
The pursuit of diplomacy, reconciliation,
and the creation of a social fabric that makes
war less likely all lend a hand in reconfigur-
ing regions and countries disfigured by war,
sometimes – but not always – successfully.
Unlike war, revolutions are almost always
considered in discussions of social change,
often as a subset of social movements.
The social-psychological analysis of relative
deprivation (Gurr 1970), in various config-
urations, has become a staple in explain-
ing “why men rebel.” Studies of revolutions
look at the social changes that give rise to
revolutionary outbreaks and seek to predict
which have greater likelihood for ushering
in social change (e.g., Skocpol 1979).
Large Corporations
In the twenty-first century large corpora-
tions do not dominate only the economy.
Their decisions reach across the globe to
frame the contours of life: how we work;
how we spend our non-working hours; what
we buy, want, and desire; how we see our-
selves and our relationships with others; and
the choices we make regarding the environ-
ment, our communities, and future genera-
tions. As one of the most powerful forces
ever devised, large corporations influence
the speed, direction, and scope of social
change for every one of us.
While there are more than five mil-
lion legally recognized corporations in the
United States, only a few thousand across
the globe engage in business on a massive
scale. These are the large, often multina-
tional corporations that employ most of the
people, own most of the business property,
exert most of the political influence, provide
most of the personal wealth, and generate
most of the commercial media. Large cor-
porations are continually tinkering with the
“technology” of the corporate form as they
move inexorably around the world and ever
deeper into our lives.
Large corporations are a force guiding
social change in at least five ways:
493
r for more than a century they have orga-
nized the labor process, deciding how
work will be done and contesting the
terms under which people work;
r their size and economic power rest on
the control of capital necessary for both
public and private investment;
r they are intimately involved in reconfig-
uring and finding uses for existing tech-
nologies and developing new technolo-
gies that facilitate and guide what we buy
and what we do with our purchases;
r they dominate the cultural landscape
with images of themselves and their
products, encouraging everyone to par-
ticipate fully in the world of material
consumption; and
r they are integral to the political pro-
cess – including elections – and play a
decisive role in advancing legislation that
benefits themselves, and opposing legis-
lation and regulation that could dimin-
ish or impair their operations as privately
owned, profit-seeking organizations.
The State
Charles Tilly defines states as, “relatively
centralized, differentiated, and autonomous
organizations controlling the principal con-
centrated means of coercion in delimited
space” (Tilly 1984: 63). A state’s operations
are usually thought of as “the government.”
The modern state has both real and unreal-
ized power, the expansion and contraction
of which constitutes much political debate
today.
The state’s power is most obvious in its
preparation for and conduct of war. The
modern state is heavily invested in scientific
research and applications for the develop-
ment of technology. It is the focus of social
movements seeking to speed up or change
the course of change. State-corporate col-
laboration in facilitating and directing eco-
nomic activity is at the heart of both demo-
cratic and authoritarian capitalism. States
advance social improvement to a lesser or
greater degree using public resources to
advance collective goods, that is, improve
the well-being of the nation.
494 the cambridge handbook of sociology, volume 1
States today create and maintain the
value of the currency and regulate pub-
lic finance. They build and operate schools,
waste treatment plants, highways, airports,
bridges, parks, prisons, and what is gen-
erally called public infrastructure. Local,
state, and federal governments oversee pub-
licly owned land and earth resources; take
responsibility for the safety of workplaces,
food, and drugs; respond to emergencies
and disasters; and assume some care for
the elderly, veterans, and disabled citizens.
Modern states patrol the streets and inves-
tigate crime, regulate who and what comes
into their territory, administer pension pro-
grams, ensure health care for some or all
of their citizens, and authorize courts to
adjudicate alleged crimes, levy penalties for
wrongdoing, and imprison malefactors.
States exercise powers that make them a
force of social change. The means of a state
are many, but among them are three of par-
ticular note.
States create laws about what is and
is not allowable behavior or organizational
activity. Dismantling corporate trusts more
than a hundred years ago altered the
economic landscape as American industry
became the most powerful in the world.
Laws advancing workers’ ability to col-
lectively bargain with large corporations
increased the wages of workers and were a
major force by the mid-twentieth century in
greater income equality than the nation had
ever known or has known since.
States devote resources, create agencies
and organizations, and in other ways solve
problems and meet challenges faced by
its citizens. The interstate highway system
was a state creation that transformed not
only transportation but the nation’s human
geography. Public health agencies, originat-
ing in city government before spreading to
states and the nation as a whole, has had
a dramatic effect on people’s well-being,
including maternal and childhood health
and the eradication of diseases.
States’ judicial systems interpret and
enforce the law with sometimes dramatic
consequences for social change. Decades
of civil rights struggle came to a head
with the US Supreme Court’s decision in
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that all
forms of racial segregation were unconstitu-
tional. The Supreme Court’s Citizen United
v. Federal Election Commission decision that
campaign contributions are a form of free
speech protected by the First Amendment –
ending limits on corporate campaign contri-
butions – is transforming the political land-
scape today.
Social Change as Social Activism
One of the reason students are drawn to
sociology is their interest in making social
change. Young people are concerned about
the world around them, locally and beyond.
They want to make a difference, and they
want things to change. There is too much
poverty, too many people in prison, there
is too much war, too many refugees, and
too many lives ruined by war. They want
to apply what we know and help shape
the fabric of social life to empower people
and enhance the potential for human dig-
nity and social justice. Sociology is expected
to be an activist discipline that will help its
students and practitioners make a difference
in the world – make social change.
Activism takes many forms. Obviously,
engaging in a social movement is one of
these. Activism can mean, for the mechan-
ically inclined or technologically savvy,
developing a better way to do something
or having the ability to do something that
previously was not possible. For example,
the disability rights movement – through
encouraging research and development and
by changing laws and public perceptions –
has opened doors to jobs and schooling.
It has helped to develop technology that
makes environments more accessible, safer,
and welcoming.
Sometimes social activism can sound
like a how-to manual for social movement
mobilization (Alinsky 1946; 1971). It can
also be a how-to manual for engaging in
work that directly changes peoples’ lives.
Bill Drayton established Ashoka in the 1980s
to help enterprising individuals around the
 social change
world improve their own and their com-
munity’s life through what he called “social
entrepreneurship.” Thousands of projects
have been created both in the United States
and around the world (Bornstein 2007).
Among them is the use of micro-credit to
launch very small-scale businesses by poor
people to whom capital was not available.
For his work founding the Grameen Bank
and helping change the lives of millions of
people (the majority are women), Moham-
mad Yunis received the Nobel Peace Prize.
A third form of activist sociology
directed at social change is community
action research (Whyte 1991). It is a research
approach in the sense that, in the course
of helping solve people’s problems, it solic-
its the “local knowledge” of those affected
by the efforts and seeks continual feedback
from them as the work proceeds, making
adjustments and enlisting their participa-
tion. International development projects in
health, education, and agriculture, as well as
urban renewal efforts have harnessed soci-
ology to social improvement and real-world
social change.
Conclusion
Social change has many meanings in the
discipline of sociology. Sociology has a
long tradition of developing and articulat-
ing theory. Recent theories in social change
have adopted increasingly dynamic and fluid
views of social life and structuration, a com-
bination of individual and structural forces
(Giddens 1984) that both guides human
activity and is a constant project of human
agency.
Answers to the question of “Why we do
what we do” hinge on an understanding of
the mechanisms or drivers of social change.
Five of these were discussed in this chap-
ter. Not included are the possibilities that
religion, population dynamics – including
migration – natural catastrophes (e.g., earth-
quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes), and excep-
tional individuals are also drivers of social
change. They may be, or they may be the
outcomes of the sociological forces of war,
495
large corporations, social movements, tech-
nology, and the state.
Finally, for people who want to solve
social problems and live in a better world,
social change means rolling up your sleeves
and getting busy. Sociological tools can
help in these endeavors. Indeed, sociology
has a long and proud record of harnessing
sociological knowledge to efforts at social
improvement.
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