The document discusses social and cultural change, defining culture and social change while examining significant alterations like education, slavery, and women's workforce participation. It outlines various theories of social change, including evolutionary, functionalist, and conflict perspectives, highlighting resistance to change and the concept of culture lag. Additionally, it addresses the vested interests of powerful groups and economic factors that can impede social change, using examples such as resistance to technological advancements and community opposition under the 'NIMBY' phenomenon.

1. Social and Cultural Change
Hassaan
bin Jalil

2. Definition
• Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted
customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior.
• Social change has been defined as significant alteration
over time in behavior patterns and culture
• But what constitutes a “significant” alteration?

3. Examples of significant alteration
• Certainly the dramatic rise in formal education
represents a change that has had profound social
consequences.
• Emergence of slavery as a system of stratification have
had long-term and important consequences
• The Industrial Revolution
• Increased participation of women in the paid labor
forces of the United States and Europe

4. Theories of social & cultural change.

5. Evolutionary Theory
• Darwin’s approach: human beings came at a
later stage of evolution than reptiles and
represent a more complex form of life.
• Social theorists seeking an analogy to this
biological model originated evolutionary
theory, in which society is viewed as moving
in a definite direction

6. • Early evolutionary theorists generally agreed that
society was progressing inevitably toward a
higher state.
• As might be expected, they concluded in
ethnocentric fashion that their behavior and
culture were more advanced than those of earlier
civilizations.

7. Functionalist Perspective
• Society is being in a natural state of equilibrium. By
“equilibrium,” he meant that society tends toward a
state of stability or balance.
• Because functionalist sociologists focus on what
maintains a system, not on what changes it, they might
seem to offer little to the study of social change.
• Although this approach explicitly incorporates the
evolutionary notion of continuing progress, the
dominant theme in his model is stability.

8. • Society may change,
but it remains stable
through new forms of
integration. For
example, in place of
the kinship ties that
provided social
cohesion in the past,
people develop laws,
judicial processes, and
new values and belief
systems.

9. Conflict Perspective
• The functionalist perspective minimizes the importance
of change. It emphasizes the persistence of social life
and sees change as a means of maintaining society’s
equilibrium (or balance).
• In contrast, conflict theorists contend that social
institutions and practices persist because powerful
groups have the ability to maintain the status quo.
Change has crucial significance, since it is needed to
correct social injustices and inequalities.

11. Resistance to Social Change
• Efforts to promote social change are likely to
meet with resistance.
• Material culture includes inventions, artifacts,
and technology
• Nonmaterial Culture encompasses ideas,
norms, communications, and social
organization

12. Culture lag
• One cannot devise methods for controlling and
using new technology before the introduction of
a technique
• Thus, nonmaterial culture typically must respond
to changes in material culture.
• Term culture lag to refer to the period of
maladjustment when the nonmaterial culture is
still struggling to adapt to new material
conditions.

13. Resistance to Technology
• Technology is cultural information about the ways in
which the material resources of the environment may
be used to satisfy human needs and desires.
• Technological innovations are examples of changes in
material culture that often provoke resistance.
• Resistance to Industrial Revolution
In England, beginning in 1811, masked craft workers took
extreme measures: they mounted nighttime raids on
factories and destroyed some of the new machinery

14. Status Quo
• People with a disproportionate share of society’s wealth,
status, and power are likely to suffer from social change,
they have a stake in maintaining the status quo.
• Term vested interests to refer to those people or groups
who will suffer in the event of social change
• In 2010 President of U.S.A proposed scuttling NASA’s
Constellation project, whose primary goal was to return
humans to the moon. The key opposition came from just 27
members of Congress. All represented districts in Alabama
and Texas that were home to large suppliers to the project.

15. NIMBY
• Communities, too, protect their vested interests, often
in the name of “protecting property values.” The
abbreviation NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard,”
• NIMBY is a pejorative characterization of opposition by
residents to a proposal for a new development because
it is close to them, often with the connotation that
such residents believe that the developments are
needed in society but should be further away.

16. Economic Factors
• Economic factors play an important role in resistance
to social change.
• For example, it can be expensive for manufacturers to
meet high standards for the safety of products and
workers, and for the protection of the environment.
• In a capitalist economic system, many firms are not
willing to pay the price of meeting strict safety and
environmental standards. They may resist social
change by cutting corners or by pressuring the
government to ease regulations.

17. Thank you