Factors and Causes of Social Change

In one line

Societies change because their physical conditions, their numbers, their technology, their economy, their ideas, their politics and their law all change, and each of these moves the others.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the factors of social change are conventionally classified as physical or geographical, demographic, technological, economic, cultural and ideological, political and legal, educational, and the influence of individuals and movements; no one of them is sufficient by itself, they interact continuously, and the relative weight of each differs between societies and periods.

The factors

1. Physical or geographical

Climate, soil, rainfall, natural resources, terrain and natural events. Change here changes what a society can do: drought, flood, earthquake, epidemic, the exhaustion of a resource, or a change in climate. Human action is now itself a source of such change, which is why environmental degradation belongs in this heading rather than outside it.

Geographical determinism, the doctrine that climate and terrain decide a society's character, is rejected: societies in similar environments differ completely, and the same environment supports very different arrangements at different periods.

2. Demographic

Change in the size, composition, distribution and rate of growth of a population. Its mechanisms are direct: a fall in mortality alters the age structure and the burden of dependency; a change in the sex ratio alters marriage; migration moves people between social settings; and urbanisation, which is demographic change in its distribution, is one of the largest single causes of the changes described throughout this book.

India's own demographic transition, falling mortality followed by falling fertility, and its large working-age population, are the standard illustrations, and figures should be attributed to the Census or the Sample Registration System.

3. Technological

The factor with the strongest claim to primacy, and the one Ogburn built his account on. A new technology changes what is possible, and the social arrangements follow. Ogburn's mechanism is worth stating: invention, accumulation, diffusion and adjustment, with cultural lag occurring at the last stage, because the non-material culture adjusts more slowly than the material.

Its effects run through every part of a society: the plough and the surplus; the machine and the factory, which took production out of the household; the motor vehicle and the city's shape; contraception and the size of the family; the computer and the nature of work; and communication, which dissolved the isolation that preserved local cultures.

Technological determinism is equally to be rejected: the same technology is adopted differently, or not at all, in different societies, and what a technology does depends on the social arrangements it lands in.

4. Economic

Change in the mode of production, in ownership, in the organisation of work and in the level of wealth. This is the factor Marx made fundamental: the forces of production develop, come into conflict with the existing relations of production, and the whole superstructure of law, politics and ideas is transformed with them. That argument is worked in [Marx: Historical and Dialectical Materialism].