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Social change can occur throughout an entire society or within parts of a society like groups, communities, or regions. It can have a variety of causes, including the efforts of individuals and groups to address social problems.

For analytic purposes, social change may be considered as any fundamental alteration in (a) the structure of existing relationships of a society or parts of a society, (b) the processes or common practices used in everyday life, (c) population composition (for instance, the size of a society or ethnic groups within a community), and (d) the basic values, ideas, and ways of thinking that prevail in a society or its parts. In actuality, when significant alteration takes place in one of these aspects, it is accompanied by change in one or more other aspects. For example, structural changes in U.S. race relationships during the 20th century were accompanied by alterations in discriminatory practices and in the idea of race itself. In Japan during the late 19th century, as new ideas and policies affecting national unification and relationships with world powers emerged, alterations in occupations and urbanization of the Japanese population also took place.

Social change has long received attention in a diversity of fields. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BCE, inquired into the best form of social organization in which humans might live (the city-state, he concluded) and how this best form develops from changes in simpler forms of association. During the 19th and 20th centuries, social conditions in many societies inspired novelists, dramatists, and other writers to bring questions of change before the public. In various societies, such individuals (Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Jacob Riis, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Upton Sinclair, Alan Paton, Yukio Mishima, Michael Harrington, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chinua Achebe, and Edna O'Brien) made issues of social change explicit or implicit parts of their work.

However, it was early 19th-century philosophers and social scientists like Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte who, influenced by major upheavals during their lifetimes and ideas of their Enlightenment predecessors, are credited with beginning modern efforts to understand social change. They saw change as progress and assumed that developmental dynamics governed change in all societies. Later in the 1800s, many social scientists and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Lester Frank Ward made the phenomenon of social change a focus of attention and followed the same developmental assumption. By the opening of the 20th century, Spencer and his American followers had pushed Social Darwinism (including the ideas of societal evolution and the superiority of "more civilized" societies) into prominence, while anthropologist Franz Boaz and others were beginning to produce studies and articles countering evolutionary notions. Around the same time, the ideas of Marx about class conflict as the key source of change gained in influence; a few years later, the analysis of sociologist Max Weber concerning the causal importance of beliefs and values began gaining scholarly recognition. Around midcentury many social scientists were influenced by sociologists Talcott Parsons, Lewis Coser, and other "structural functionalists" who explained social change as resulting from strains or inconsistencies within social systems. Soon after, other sociologists like Ralf Dahrendorf, William Domhoff, and Pierre Bourdieu brought attention back to the importance of conflict and power differences as sources of change. By the later years of the century, the assumption that social change was governed by developmental dynamics had been largely discarded, and the focus was on describing and understanding change in specific societies and situations.

Bibliography:

1) Diamond, Jared. 2004. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.

2) Greenwood, Davydd J. and Morten Levin. 2006. Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

3) Harper, Charles L. and Kevin T. Leicht. 2006. Exploring Social Change: America and the World. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

4) McMichael, Philip. 2007. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

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