Lecture 1- What is Social Change?

Overview

My father graduated from high school in 1938. For his 50th reunion, in 1988, members of his class compiled a list of changes in society since their graduation. Looking at their list provides a good introduction to social change.

"We were before the pill and the population explosion. We were before television, antibiotics, polio shots, and Frisbees. We were before radar, lasers, fluorescent lights, credit cards, Zerox, and ball point pens. For us, a "chip" meant a piece of wood, hardware meant things you get at a hardware store and software wasn't something nice people talked about in public. Closets were for clothes, not coming out of, gay meant something happy or fun, and community referred to a little town. Bunnies were small rabbits and rabbits were not cars. You could buy a new Chevy coupe for $659 but none of us could afford that huge sum of money. It was a pity, too, because a gallon of gasoline was $.11. Yes, eleven cents.

We were before Frank Sinatra and cup-sizing for bras. All women wore bras, even if they didn't fit very well. We had never heard of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or Snoopy. We were before vitamin pills, disposable diapers, Scotch tape, pizza, Cheerios, instant coffee, Starbucks, McDonald's and KFC. Motels were called Tourist Courts and fast food was what you ate during Lent. Nobody owned an FM radio, nobody had a stereo or a tape recorder. Typewriters were manual and grass was something you had to mow regularly. Coke was something you drank and pot was what you cooked dinner in. Commercial airlines were for the very wealthy, there were no helicopters or interstate highways. Men had short hair; only women wore earrings and took their husbands last names after marriage.

There was no country called Israel or Pakistan or Iceland or The Philippines. Texas was the largest state in the Union. WWII, the Korean WAR, and Vietnam were in the future. We would have been very puzzled if you had asked us about NATO, NASA, UFOs, the NFL, JFK, ERA or IUDs. Alphabet soup!"

So how do we, in the year 2004, make sense of all these changes in our social world and of all the others that have happened since 1988? How can sociology help us to look at the social changes that affect our lives and to predict what might happen to us in the future? That's what this class is all about - identifying sociological tools for understanding change in the modern world.

There are many ways to understand our lives and the society we live in. Sociology provides one perspective, one way to look at social change. This class will provide a sociological perspective on the relationship between society, technology, culture, and our own lives. I’ll use lectures, readings in the texts, and a variety of activities to demonstrate the sociological perspective. Then I’ll ask you to demonstrate what you understand about social change using a sociological perspective.

As you will see, social change is a huge topic and there are many ways to examine it. While you will be introduced to many of those ways in the Harper & Leicht text, we are going to conscentrate on only two : institutional change & culture change. That will be lot to accomplish in 10 weeks and it will give you a good start on using the sociological perspective to make sense out of a confusing world.

We are going to focus on two aspects of social change: Institutional change & Cultural change

The lectures complement rather than parallel the text. They provide additional information about some of the sociological ideas presented in the text. You will find more information about each topic by following the links at the end of each lecture. Plan to use information from the text, lectures, and web links in the writing you do for the group discussions and your own papers. Your text, Exploring Social Change illustrates a lot of the ways that elements in society interact to create social change. The lectures will expand on the sociological ideas used to understand these interactions.

Central Questions

Sociology is basically the study of relationships in society. We look at relationships between different parts of society and at the relationship between the individual and society. While sociology presents only one way to look at the role of science and technology, I think it is a particularly useful way to frame the debates and choices facing us in the modern world.

The key questions for this course will be:

What is social change?

• How can we define social change? What does it mean? How do we know when change has happened.

Most people believe that we have control of society and of our own destiny as a species. They believe that with enough knowledge and good will and attention to ethical principles, we can control the direction of social and technological development and the future of humankind. I’d like to raise some questions about that belief from a sociological perspective.I’ll outline this argument in future lectures and we can discuss it in our Discussion Forums. You will, of course, have to make up your own mind about the direction of society and the amount of control we have over the process of change but I hope our discussions will be lively and thought provoking as you learn more about the sociological perspective

COURSE FOCUS

Note that we will NOT be addressing the ethical issues that surround social change. My argument will NOT be about what we "should" do. While we can examine the ethical issues from a sociological perspective, and we will indeed do that, deciding what to do about technological developments new ideas are not the province of sociology or, indeed, of any science. Questions of ethics and morality are best dealt with by philosophers or in a religious context. We cannot settle questions of ethics and morals in this forum and I have no intention of trying. We are after an analysis, an understanding of how science and technology work in a social context. You can then take this information, match it up to your own value system and decide what to do about it as an individual. Let’s avoid terms like “good,” “bad,” “right,” and “wrong.” Let’s look instead at causes and consequences, relationships, information and energy flows.

SOC 204?

You probably noticed that Sociology 204 (Introductory or General Sociology) is a prerequisite for this course. What that means is that I expect you to have a basic familiarity with sociological concepts and ideas.

You don’t need to be a sociologist to do well in the course, but you do need to understand the basics so you can use the sociological perspective in your coursework. Part of your grade will depend on your ability to do so. I’ll be using terms like values, norms, social structure, institution, organizations, social stratification, deviance, and conflict theory that you should have encountered in Soc 204 and that I hope you have an understanding of. If it has been a while since you took a sociology course and you’ve forgotten some of the basics, you might want to get a basic text in sociology from the library or a used bookstore. You can also look up definitions on the Internet.

Sociology Glossary

WebRef.org's glossary of over 130 terms.

http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/frank.elwell/prob3/glossary/socgloss.htm