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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, SOCIAL
CHANGE, AND TECHNOLOGY
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Chapter Outline
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Social Movements
Theories of Social Change
Resistance to Social Change
Technology and the Future
Technology and Society
Social Policy and Technology: Privacy
and Censorship in a Global Village
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Social Movements
•Social Movements refer to organized collective
activities to bring about or resist fundamental
change in an existing group or society.
•Social Change is a significant alteration over time
in behavior patterns and culture.
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Social Movements
Relative Deprivation
•Relative Deprivation is defined as the conscious
feeling of negative discrepancy between legitimate
expectations and present actualities.
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Social Movements
Resource Mobilization
•Resource Mobilization refers to the ways in which
a social movement utilizes such resources.
•False Consciousness are attitudes that do not
reflect workers’ objective position.
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Social Movements
New Social Movements
•New Social Movements refers to organized
collective activities that promote autonomy and selfdetermination as well as improvements in the
quality of life.
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Theories of Social Change
Evolutionary Theory
•Evolutionary Theory: This theory views society as
moving in a definite direction, generally progressing to
a higher state.
•Unilinear Evolutionary Theory
This theory contends that all societies pass through the
same successive stages of evolution and reach the
same end.
•Multilinear Evolutionary Theory
This theory holds that change can occur in several
ways and does not inevitably lead in the same
direction.
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Theories of Social Change
Functionalist Theory
•Functionalist Theory: This theory focuses on what
maintains a system, not what changes it. Talcott
Parsons was a leading proponent of functionalist
theory.
•Equilibrium Model: As changes occur in one part of
society, there must be adjustments in other parts. If
this does not happen, strains will occur and the
society’s equilibrium will be threatened.
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Theories of Social Change
Functionalist Theory
•Parsons maintained that four processes of social
change are inevitable:
differentiation
adaptive upgrading
inclusion
value generalization
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Theories of Social Change
Conflict Theory
•Conflict theory holds that change has crucial
significance, since it is needed to correct social
injustices and inequalities.
•Marx argued that with societal evolution, each
successive stage is not an inevitable improvement over
the previous one.
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Theories of Social Change
Global Social Change
•This is a truly dramatic time in history to consider
global social change.
•Socio-political changes can be predicted.
•Sociologists must also be able to recognize upheavals
and major chaotic shifts that set global changes in
motion.
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Resistance to Social Change
Economic and Cultural Factors
•In a capitalist economic system, many firms are not
willing to pay the price of meeting strict safety
standards.
•They may resist social change by:
cutting corners
pressuring government to ease regulations
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Resistance to Social Change
Economic and Cultural Factors
•Nonmaterial culture typically must respond to
changes in material culture.
•Culture Lag : Describes the period of maladjustment
during which the nonmaterial culture is still adapting
to new material conditions.
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Resistance to Social Change
Resistance to Technology
•Neo-Luddites: Neo-Luddites are those who are wary
of technological innovations and who question the
expansion of industrialization, the increasing
destruction of the natural and agrarian world, and the
“throw it away” mentality of contemporary capitalism.
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Technology and the Future
Computer Technology
•Telecommuting: Telecommuters are employees who
work at home rather than in an outside office and who
are linked to their workplace through computer
terminals, phone lines, and fax machines.
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Technology and the Future
The Internet
•The Internet, the world’s largest computer network,
evolved from a computer system built in 1962 by the
U.S. Defense Department.
•The expansion of the Internet has led to a
proliferation of chat rooms and webpages where
people exchange information.
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Technology and the Future
Geographical Distribution of Internet Hosts, January 2000
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Technology and the Future
Biotechnology
•Sex Selection
--Advances in technology allow us to ascertain the
presence of certain defects that require medical
procedures prior to birth, and these advances have
also brought us closer to effective techniques for
sex selection.
--In some societies, couples planning to have only
one child want to insure this child is a boy.
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Technology and the Future
Biotechnology
•Genetic Engineering
--Genetic engineering may make possible the
altering of human behavior.
--Genetic engineering’s recent development, gene
therapy, involves disabling genes carrying
unfavorable traits and replacing them with genes
carrying desirable traits.
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Technology and the Future
Biotechnology
•Bioterrorism
--Scientists have long recognized that chemical
and biological agents can be used intentionally as
weapons of mass destruction.
--The 2001 Anthrax scare in the U.S. mails
underscored the relative ease with which
biotechnology can be used for hostile purposes.
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Technology and the Future
Technology Accidents
•Normal Accidents: Failures that are inevitable given
the manner in which human and technological systems
are organized.
•As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace,
there are always new possibilities for accidents.
•Sociological imagination can assist us in
understanding the past and present and anticipating
and adjusting to the future.
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Technology and Society
Culture and Social Interaction
•Because of the Internet, English has become the
international language of commerce and
communication.
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Technology and Society
Figure 16.1: Projected Language Use on the Internet, 2003
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Technology and Society
Figure 16.2: Internet Access in the United States, 2000
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Technology and Society
Social Control
•With Big Brother watching in more places, computer
and video technologies have facilitated supervision,
control, and even domination by employers or
government.
•Technology has created new opportunity for white
collar crime, computer crime.
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Technology and Society
Stratification and Inequality
•There is little evidence that technology will reduce
inequality; in fact, technology may intensify
inequality.
•Conflict theorists argue that the disenfranchised poor
may be isolated from mainstream society into an
information ghetto.
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Technology and Society
Percent of Households
100
80
Automobiles
Televisions
60
Cellular telephones
Electric power
40
Home computers
20
0
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
Household Adoption of Selected Technologies Since 1900
Source: Office of the President. 2000. Economic Report of the President: Transmitted to
the Congress, February 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 100.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
The
Issue
--The buying and selling of personal information is a
big industry.
--Privacy laws have so many loopholes and are so
patchy that it is often difficult to distinguish between
data that are obtained legally and data that are gathered
illicitly.
--The issue of privacy and censorship in this
technological age is another case of culture lag in
which the material culture is changing faster than
cultural norms.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
The
Setting
--Personal information about a typical consumer is
included in dozens of marketing databases.
--The question of free expression on the Internet raises
questions of censorship.
--Efforts to censor pornography on the Internet have
been struck down.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
Sociological
Insights
--Functionalists can point to the manifest function of
the Internet in its ability to facilitate communications.
They also identify the latent function of providing a
forum for groups with few resources to communicate
with literally tens of millions of people.
--Functionalists see many aspects of technology
fostering communication.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
Sociological
Insights (continued)
--Some observers insist that we benefit from such
innovations and can exist quite well with a bit less
privacy.
--Viewed from the conflict perspective, there is the
ever-present danger that a society’s most powerful
groups will use technological advances to invade the
privacy of the less powerful.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
•Sociological Insights (continued)
--Interactionists view the privacy and censorship
debate as one that parallels concerns people have in
any social interaction.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
Policy
Initiatives
--Civil liberties advocates insist that legislation to
ban the transmission of “indecent” material infringes
on private communications between consenting
adults and inevitably limits freedom of speech.
--Censorship and privacy are also issues globally
where some governments regulate technology use
such as fax machines and the Internet.
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Social Policy and Technology
Privacy and Censorship in a Global
Village
Policy
Initiatives (continued)
--While some people chastise government efforts to
curb technology, others decry their failure to limit
certain aspects of technology.
--The U.S. is developing an international reputation
of being opposed to efforts to protect people’s
privacy.
--As technology continues to advance, there are sure
to be new battlegrounds over privacy and
censorship.
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