Social change refers to the significant alteration of social structure and cultural patterns through time. Social structure is the routine interaction among persons or groups and cultural patterns refer to the shared way of thinking, knowledge, beliefs, etc. When a social change occurs, it affects both social structure and culture.
The first kind is the change in personnel and it denotes the process of new people, with personal histories and experiences, continuously entering and leaving the society. The second kind refers to the changes that occur as parts of the structure related to each other. Then there are also changes in the way people function in the society and the way they relate to each other. You also find changes in the relationship between structures and new social structures emerge.
Social change occurs both at the macro and micro level in any society. We find both short-term changes as well as the long-term ones in our lives. There are numerous causes for social change. Such causes can be either exogenous or endogenous.
Any aspect of human behavior that focuses its characteristics is considered as a process. Social change, for example, is a process. The term progress refers to the notion of finding if a particular change is progressive or not.
In earlier days, social scientists considered evolution to be the orderly progression from a simple to a complex entity. Of late, they have considered evolution to be the emergence of social novelty that includes reproduction, selection and transmission. Development is also a change that can be at the individual as well as the organizational level. It includes the way of describing the social, economic and political change in various nations.
Modernization refers to the concept of the development of each society from barbarism to civilization. Their citizens will be freer and will have a higher standard of living. Social scientists also believe in dependency theory, which proposes an integral relationship among people, media and social system. The view is that a person depends on media for certain information but not everything. People will become independent on media either for specific need...
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