Social Change

SOCIAL CHANGE

Social change is the change in social structure. Social structure is a web of social relationships. Hence, social change as a change in social structure involves social relationships. It is the change in these which alone we shall regard as social change.

DEFINITION SOCIAL CHANGE

1. According to Jones, “Social change is a term used to describe variations in, or modifications of any aspect of social processes, social patterns, social interaction or social organization.”

2. As Kingsley Davis says, “By Social change is meant only such alternations as occur in social organization – that is, the structure and functions of society.”

3. According to Maclver and Page, “Social change refers to a process responsive to many types of changes; to changes the man in made condition of life; to changes in the attitudes and beliefs of men, and to the changes that go beyond the human control to the biological and the physical nature of things.”

4. Morris Ginsberg defines, “By social change, I understand a change in social structure, e.g., the size of the society, the composition or the balance of its parts or the type of its organization.”

5. P. Fairchild defines social change as “variations or modifications in any aspects of social process, pattern or form.”

6. B. Kuppuswamy says, “Social change may be defined as the process in which is discernible significant alternation in the structure and functioning of a particular social system.”

7. H.M. Johnson says, “Social change is either change in the structure or quasi- structural aspects of a system of change in the relative importance of coexisting structural pattern.”

8. According to Merrill and Eldredge, “Change means that large number of persons are engaging in activities that differ from those which they or their immediate forefathers engaged in some time before.”

9. Anderson and Parker define, “Social change involves alternations in the structure or functioning of societal forms or processes themselves.”

10. According to M.D. Jenson, “Social change may be defined as modification in ways of doing and thinking of people.”

11. As H.T. Mazumdar says, “Social change may be defined as a new fashion or mode, either modifying or replacing the old, in the life of people or in the operation of a society.”

12. According to Gillin and Gillin, “Social changes are variations from the accepted modes of life; whether due to alternation in geographical conditions, in cultural equipment, composition of the population or ideologies and brought about by diffusion, or inventions within the group.”

(Any one definition)