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Social Change

Social Change. Social change:. What is social change? What causes it? Social movements Globalization. What is social change?. Transformations over time of the institutions and culture of society . What causes social change?. Does Giddens have a theory?

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Social Change

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  1. Social Change

  2. Social change: • What is social change? • What causes it? • Social movements • Globalization

  3. What is social change? Transformations over time of the institutions and culture of society

  4. What causes social change? • Does Giddens have a theory? • A theory is a systematic explanation of cause and effect • No real theory presented • “Influences” (pp. 618-622) • Physical environment (economy) • Political organization • Culture • Says we need general theories, but abandons them (except globalization as a trend)

  5. What causes social change: theories Giddens neglects • Parsons (functionalism): evolutionary—differentiation of institutions • Symbolic interactionists: social construction, new “scripts” • Marx: historical materialism

  6. Dialectics thesis New thesis New antithesis antithesis resolution Struggle of opposites New struggle of opposites

  7. Dialectical materialism • (material) social forces of production as base (basis) of social life • Ideas, institutions “erected” in support of relations of production • Class struggle in relations of production becomes political • Struggle (revolution) leads to new stage of history: historical materialism

  8. Historical Materialism Superstructure Ideas, ideology, institutions Social reproduction New superstructure Class struggle Revolution Social forces of production Relations of production Means of production New forces of production

  9. Postindustrial society • aka information society, service society, knowledge society because these sectors dominate the economy • Codified knowledge/information key resource • “Knowledge workers” become leading social group • But: • Service work includes a lot of manual labor • Close integration of service and manufacture • Giddens: this approach overemphasizes economic factors

  10. Postmodernity • Modernity • Refers to the industrial period • Based on notion of “progress” – i.e., history has a direction, things get better • Postmodernity means that idea has collapsed • Social reality is now pluralistic and diverse • Everything is in flux • Shafer and Divney: Postmodernists overemphasize cultural factors, wrong about “end of history”

  11. Globalization: “influences” • Telecommunications • Fall of U.S.S.R, “capitalist road” in China brought virtually entire planet into market system • Transnational corporations dominate: biggest 500 TNC’s bigger than most countries’ economies

  12. Table 20.3

  13. Globalization debate • Skeptics: • Globalization is not new • Regionalization more significant • National governments still play important role • Shafer: current events lend credence to the skeptics’ points

  14. Globalization debate • Transformationalists: • Globalization is changing societies, but governments hold onto some power • Globalization is “multidirectional” • New, “nonterritorial” social organizations: • TNC’s • NGO’s • Social movements

  15. Globalization debate • Hyperglobalizers: • New global order being born • Market forces more powerful than national governments (Ohmae) • National governments in decline • International organizations grow in power: • European Union • World Trade Organization

  16. Fig. 20.3

  17. Campaign for global justice • Grassroots social movement concerned about global inequality • Battle of Seattle, 1999 • Continues today (Miami anti-FTAA protest) • Has its own media using WWW: • http://indymedia.org

  18. Epilogue: social movements • Conscious, organized actions to influence social change • Piven and Cloward: most effective when mass-based, non-bureaucratic • Maoism and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: • Revolution within a revolution • Among many other things, tried to invent new relations of production (non-wage labor)

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