Class 11 Sociology Book 2 Chapter 2 Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society Notes in English

1 Introduction: Change Is the Only Unchanging Thing

It is often said that change is the only unchanging aspect of society. Constant change is among the most permanent features of modern society. In fact, sociology itself emerged as an effort to make sense of the rapid changes that Western European society experienced between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Yet rapid social change is, comparatively speaking, a very new and recent fact:

Because the speed of change keeps increasing, it is probably true that in the last hundred years change was faster in the last fifty than in the first fifty, and within the last fifty the world may have changed more in the last twenty years than in the first thirty.

1.1 Box: The Clock of Human History

The book quotes Anthony Giddens (2004, Sociology, 4th edition, p.40). Humans have existed for about half a million years; agriculture, the basis of fixed settlements, is only about twelve thousand years old; civilisations date back no more than about six thousand years. Squeeze the whole of human existence into one day, midnight to midnight:

The box ends: perhaps as much change has taken place in the last thirty seconds of this human day as in all the time leading up to it.

2 Social Change: Meaning and Types

2.1 What counts as social change

“Social change” is such a general term that it is often used for almost any change not described by some other term, such as economic or political change. Sociologists had to work hard to narrow it so that it is useful for social theory.

How is “bigness” measured? Not only by how much change it brings, but also by its scale, that is, how large a section of society it affects. So a change must be both intensive and extensive: a big impact spread over a large sector of society.

2.2 Three ways of classifying change

2.3 By pace: evolution and revolutionary change

2.4 By nature or impact: structural change and change in values

Changes in ideas, values and beliefs can also cause social change. The book’s example is childhood:

2.5 By causes: the most common classification

Causes are sometimes pre-classified as internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous). The book names five broad types of sources or causes of social change:

3 Sources of Change 1: Environment

Nature, ecology and the physical environment have always shaped society, especially in the past when humans could not control nature. People in a desert could not practise settled agriculture as in the plains or near rivers, so their food, clothes, livelihood and social interaction were largely set by physical and climatic conditions. The same was true of very cold climates, port towns, major trade routes, mountain passes and fertile river valleys.

• The environment’s influence has been decreasing as technology grows: technology helps us overcome or adapt to nature, reducing differences between societies.
• But technology also alters nature and our relationship with it. So it is perhaps more accurate to say that the effect of nature on society is changing rather than simply declining.

4 Sources of Change 2: Technology and Economy

Technology and economic change together have caused immense change, especially in the modern period. Technology helps us resist, control, adapt to or harness nature; combined with the very powerful institution of the market, its impact can be as big as a tsunami or the discovery of oil.

4.1 Steam power and the Industrial Revolution

4.2 Impact seen only later, and impact far away

• Retrospective impact: sometimes an invention lies “dormant” and its social impact is seen only later, when the economic context changes. Gunpowder and writing paper were discovered in China but had limited impact for centuries, until they entered modernising Western Europe. Then gunpowder transformed warfare and the paper-print revolution changed society forever.
• Textiles: new spinning and weaving machines in Britain, combined with market forces and imperial power, destroyed the handloom industry of the Indian subcontinent, until then the largest and most advanced in the world.

4.3 Economic change that is not directly technological

• Plantation agriculture (growing single cash crops like sugarcane, tea or cotton on a large scale) created a heavy demand for labour. This helped establish slavery and the slave trade between Africa, Europe and the Americas between the 17th and 19th centuries.
• In India, the tea plantations of Assam involved the forced migration of labour from Eastern India, especially the Adivasi areas of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
• Today, changes in customs duties or tariffs through international agreements and institutions like the World Trade Organisation can wipe out entire industries and occupations, or (less often) bring sudden booms to others.

5 Sources of Change 3: Politics

Old histories made the actions of kings and queens look like the main force of change. We now know they represented larger political, social and economic trends: individuals had roles, but within a larger context. Political forces have surely been among the most important causes of change. The clearest examples come from warfare: sometimes the conquerors planted seeds of change; at other times the conquered changed the conquerors.

5.1 The United States and Japan

5.2 Political change at home

• The Indian independence movement did not only end British rule; it also decisively changed Indian society.
• A more recent instance: the Nepali people’s rejection of monarchy in 2006.
• In general, political changes bring social change through the redistribution of power across different social groups and classes.

5.3 Universal adult franchise

Universal adult franchise, the “one person, one vote” principle, is probably the single biggest political change in history.

It did not abolish all inequalities: not all countries are democratic, elections can be manipulated, and people can remain powerless. Still, it is a powerful norm that presses on every society and government, and has brought massive social change.

6 Sources of Change 4: Culture

Here “culture” is a short label for a very wide field of ideas, values and beliefs that matter to people and shape their lives. Change in them leads naturally to change in social life.

6.1 Religion

• Religion is the commonest example of a socio-cultural institution with enormous social impact; some scholars even define civilisations in religious terms and see history as the interaction between religions.
• But religion is contextual: it produces effects in some contexts but not in others.
• Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” showed how the beliefs of some Christian Protestant sects helped establish the capitalist social system: one of the most famous examples of cultural values changing the economy and society.
• India: the impact of Buddhism on social and political life in ancient India, and of the Bhakti Movement on medieval social structure including the caste system.

6.2 The place of women

6.3 Sport: cricket

7 Social Order

Letters on a page are readable because they contrast with the background. In the same way, change makes sense only against continuity: some things must stay the same for comparison to be possible. So social change has to be understood together with social order.

7.1 Why societies resist change

7.2 The positive meaning: two ways to order

Social order is not only resistance to change. It also means the active maintenance and reproduction of a particular pattern of social relations, values and norms. It is achieved in two ways, and every society uses a combination of both:

7.3 Power and domination

Dominant groups are challenged only in abnormal or extraordinary times. In normal times domination can be quite “smooth”, without friction, though people are forced to do things they may not want. The book recalls “forced cooperation” from Chapter 1: why did women “consent” to the patriarchal norm and not claim their rights in their families of birth?

8 Domination, Authority and Law

Why does domination work without open confrontation? Partly because of power. But the deeper answer is legitimation.

Power in itself is simply a fact: it can be legitimate or not.

8.1 Formal authority and its domain

8.2 Informal authority

Some authority is not strictly defined but still wins consent and cooperation: the leader of a sect or a less-institutionalised minor religious group; reputed scholars, artists, writers and other intellectuals in their fields; even a criminal gang leader, who may exercise absolute authority without any formal specification.

8.3 Law

• In a modern democracy laws are made by the legislature of elected representatives, in the name of the people.
• Laws apply to all citizens and are binding whether or not an individual agrees with them.

This does not exhaust power: some power is effective though illegitimate, or legitimate but not codified in law. The mix of legitimate, lawful authority and other kinds of power decides the nature of a social system and its dynamics.

9 Contestation, Crime and Violence

Domination, authority and law do not always meet obedience.

Social order need not mean sameness or unanimity: political parties with different agendas respect the same Constitution; people who know the same traffic rules still argue on the road. How much dissent a society tolerates marks the boundary between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the legal and the illegal, the acceptable and the unacceptable.

9.1 Violence and the state

• A defining feature of the modern state: it has a monopoly over the use of legitimate violence within its jurisdiction. Only the state, through its authorised functionaries, may lawfully use violence (exceptions such as self defense in rare situations).
• So technically every act of violence is directed against the state: if I assault or murder someone, the state prosecutes me for violating its monopoly.
• Violence is the enemy of social order, an extreme form of contestation that breaks both the law and important social norms.
• It is the product of social tensions, shows serious problems, challenges the authority of the state, and marks the failure of the regime of legitimation and consent.

10 Village, Town and City

Most societies can be divided into rural and urban sectors, with very different conditions of life, social organisation, forms of social order and kinds of change. (For village studies, the book points to Chapter 5’s section on M.N. Srinivas.)

10.1 How villages emerged

10.2 Telling them apart

• Town vs city: much more a matter of administrative definition; basically the same sort of settlement, differentiated by size.
• Urban agglomeration (a Census term): a city along with its surrounding suburban areas and satellite settlements.
• Metropolitan area: more than one city, or a continuous urban settlement many times the size of a single city.

10.3 Urbanisation

Most developed countries are now overwhelmingly urban; developing countries are urbanising too, faster or slower, unless special reasons block it. According to the United Nations report (2014), 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, expected to rise to 66 per cent by 2050.

11 Social Order and Social Change in Rural Areas

Villages are small, so relationships are more personalised: members often know all or most others by sight. Their social structure is more traditional: caste, religion and customary practice are stronger. So, unless special circumstances exist, change is slower to arrive in villages than in towns.

11.1 Why the rural power structure is hard to shift

So a strong power structure in a village is very hard to dislodge: shifts in power are slow and late because the rural social order is stronger and more resilient.

Other change is slow because villages are scattered and less connected. But the telephone and television have made the cultural “lag” between villages and towns much shorter or nonexistent, and better roads and rail mean few villages can really be called “isolated” or “remote”. This has accelerated change somewhat.

11.2 Land reform and the dominant castes

11.3 Technology, prices and development programmes

• New labour-saving machinery or new cropping patterns can change the demand for labour and so the bargaining strength of landlords and labourers, setting off a chain of changes.
• Sudden fluctuations in agricultural prices, droughts or floods can cause havoc; the recent spate of farmer suicides in India is an example.
• Large development programmes for the rural poor have an enormous impact: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (MGNREGA). Activity 5 asks you to find out its aims, why it is so important, its problems and what success would mean.

12 Social Order and Social Change in Urban Areas

The city itself is very old, but urbanism as a way of life for large parts of the population is modern.

12.1 What made old cities important

12.2 The city and the individual

12.3 Space: the central question of urban order

High population density puts a great premium on space. The primary task of the urban social order is the spatial viability of the city: organising and managing

Each is a huge task of planning, implementation and maintenance, made harder because divisions and tensions of class, ethnicity, religion and caste are present and active.

12.4 Housing: slums and gated communities

12.5 Transport and commuting

• The urban transport system depends on where homes are relative to industrial and commercial workplaces. When they are far apart, an elaborate mass transit system is needed; commuting becomes a way of life and a constant source of possible disruption.
• Transport directly affects the “quality of life” of working people. Relying on private cars rather than buses causes traffic congestion and vehicular pollution.
• So the “simple” issue of distributing living space is a complex, multi-dimensional part of urban society.
• Daily long-distance commuters can become an influential political constituency and develop sub-cultures: on Mumbai’s suburban trains, the “locals”, commuters’ informal associations sing bhajans, celebrate festivals, chop vegetables, play card and board games (even tournaments), or just socialise.

12.6 Change in urban areas: the city centre and gentrification

As real estate prices rise, developers profit from such conversion; at some point it becomes self-fulfilling as rents rise and the locality gains enough prosperous businesses and residents. But it can also fail, and the neighbourhood slides back to its previous status. Activity 7 asks who benefits, who loses, and who decides about such “up-scaling”.

12.7 Mass transport and the main issue for Indian cities

• Affordable, efficient and safe public transport can shape a city’s social character as well as its economy. Scholars contrast cities based on public transport (London, New York) with car-based cities (Los Angeles).
• It “remains to be seen” whether the new Metro Rail in Delhi will significantly change social life there.
• The main issue in rapidly urbanising countries like India: how the city will cope with the constant increase in population as migrants keep streaming in, adding to its natural growth.

13 Rural and Urban Order Side by Side

14 Quick Revision