PAKISTANI SOCIETY AND CULTURE
Prepared by H-M-ZAKRIA
Lecturer GDC Parova, D.I.KHAN
Unit # 4. Social and Cultural Change:
Theories and processes of social change,
The Meaning of Social Change:
The word “change” denotes a difference in anything observed over some period of time. Social change, therefore, would mean observable differences in any social phenomena over any period of time.
(i) 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 organisation.”
(ii) Mazumdar, H. T. “Social change may be defined as a new fashion or mode, either modifying or replacing the old, in the life of a people, or in the operation of a society.”
(iii) Gillin and Gillin. “Social changes are variations from the accepted modes of life; whether due to alteration in geographical conditions, in cultural equipment, composition of the population or ideologies and whether brought about by diffusion or inventions within the group.”
(iv) Davis. By “Social change is meant only such alterations as occur in social organisation, that is, structure and functions of society.”
(v) Merrill and Eldredge. “Social 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.”
(vi) MacIver and Page. “…Our direct concern as sociologists is with social relationships. It is the change in these relationships which alone we shall regard as social change.”
(vii) M. D. Jenson. “Social change may be defined as modification in ways of doing and thinking of people.”
(viii) Koenig, S. “Social change refers to the modifications which occur in the life patterns of a people.”
(ix) Lundberg and others. “Social change refers to any modification in established patterns of inter human relationships and standards of conduct.”
(x) Anderson and Parker. “Social change involves alteration in the structure or functioning of social forms or processes themselves.”
Theories of social change can be divided into two groups:
1. Evolutionary Theory:
Despite the wide variety in the possible directions change may take, various generalisations have been set forth. Because the lot of mankind generally has improved over the long term, by far the most numerous classes of theories of the direction of change comprise various cumulative or evolutionary trends. Though varying in many ways, these theories share an important conclusion that the course of man’s history is marked up ‘upward’ trend through time.
The notion of evolution came into social sciences from the theories of biological evolution. With the advent of Darwinian Theory of biological evolution, society and culture began to be regarded as undergoing the same changes and demonstrating the same trends.
It was conceived that society and culture were subject to the same general laws of biological and organism growth. Some thinkers even identified evolution with progress and proceeded to project into the future more and more perfect and better-adapted social and cultural forms.
Charles Darwin (1859), the British biologist, who propounded the theory of biological evolution, showed that species of organisms have evolved from simpler organisms to the more complicated organisms through the processes of variations and natural selection. After Darwin, ‘evolution’, in fact, became the buzz word in all intellectual inquiry and Darwin and Spencer were the key names of an era in the history of thought.
Herbert Spencer (1890), who is known to be the forerunner of this evolutionary thought in sociology, took the position that sociology is “the study of evolution in its most complex form”. For him, evolution is a process of differentiation and integration.
2. Cyclical Theory:
Cyclical change is a variation on unilinear theory which was developed by Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West, 1918) and Arnold J. Toynbee (A Study of History, 1956). They argued that societies and civilisations change according to cycles of rise, decline and fall just as individual persons are born, mature, grow old, and die. According to German thinker Spengler, every society has a predetermined life cycle—birth, growth, maturity and decline. Society, after passing through all these stages of life cycle, returns to the original stage and thus the cycle begins again.
On the basis of his analysis of Egyptian, Greek Roman and many other civilisations, he concluded that the Western civilisation is now on its decline. The world renowned British historian Toyanbee has also upheld this theory. He has studied the history of various civilisations and has found that every civilisation has its rise, development and fall such as the civilisation of Egypt. They have all come and gone, repeating a recurrent cycle of birth, growth, breakdown and decay. He propounded the theory of “challenge and response” which means that those who can cope with a changing environment survive and those who cannot die.
Thus, a society can grow and survive if it can constructively respond to the challenges. Cyclical theory of change or sometimes called ‘rise and fair theory presumes that social phenomena of whatever sort recur again and again, exactly as they were before in a cyclical fashion.
A variant of cyclical process is the theory of a well-known American sociologist P.A. Sorokin (Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1941), which is known as ‘pendular theory of social change’. He considers the course of history to be continuous, though irregular, fluctuating between two basic kinds of cultures: the ‘sensate’ and the ‘ideational’ through the ‘idealistic’. According to him, culture oscillates like the pendulum of a clock between two points.
The pendulum of a clock swings with the passage of time, but ultimately it comes to its original position and re-proceeds to its previous journey. Thus, it is just like a cyclical process but oscillating in character. A sensate culture is one that appeals to the senses and sensual desires.
It is hedonistic in its ethics and stresses science and empiricism. On the other hand, the ideational culture is one in which expressions of art, literature, religion and ethics do not appeal to the senses but to the mind or the spirit. It is more abstract and symbolic than the sensate culture.
The pendulum of culture swings from sensate pole and leads towards the ideational pole through the middle pole called ‘idealistic’ culture, which is a mixed form of sensate and ideational cultures—a somewhat stable mixture of faith, reason, and senses as the source of truth. Sorokin places contemporary European and American cultures in the last stage of disintegration of sensate culture, and argues that only way out of our ‘crisis’ is a new synthesis of faith and sensation. There is no other possibility.
In Sorokin’s analysis of cultures, we find the seeds of both the theories—cyclical and linear change. In his view, culture may proceed in a given direction for a time and thus appear to conform to a linear formula. But, eventually, as a result of forces that are inherent in the culture itself, there will be shift of direction and a new period of development will be ushered in. This new trend may be linear, perhaps it is oscillating or it may conform to some particular type of curve.
Vilfredo Pareto’s (1963) theory of ‘Circulation of Elites’ is also essentially of this variety. According to this theory, major social change in society occurs when one elite replaces another, a process Pareto calls it ‘circulation of elites’. All elites tend to become decadent in the course of time. They ‘decay in quality’ and lose their ‘vigour’.
According to Marx, history ultimately leads to and ends with the communist Utopia, whereas history to Pareto is a never-ending circulation of elites. He said that societies pass through the periods of political vigour and decline which repeat themselves in a cyclical fashion.
Processes of Social Change:
The term “Social change” itself suggests nothing as far as its direction is concerned. It is a generic term describing one of the categorical processes. It only suggests a difference through time in the object to which it is applied. Social changes are of various types and can be explained by different terms such as Growth, Progress, Evolution, Revolution,- Adaptation, and Accommodation, etc. Here we shall consider only two terms, i.e..
Progress and Evolution.
Evolution is a process of differentiation and integration. The term ‘evolution’ comes from the Latin word ‘evolvere’ which means ‘to develop’ or ‘to unfold’. It is equivalent to the Sanskrit word ‘vikas’. It means more than growth. The word ‘growth’ connotes a direction of change but only of a quantitative character, e.g., we say population grows.
Evolution involves something more intrinsic, change not merely in size but at least in structure also, for example when we speak of biological evolution, we refer to the emergence of certain organisms from others in a kind of succession.
Evolution describes a series of related changes in a system of some kind. It is a process in which hidden or latent characters of a thing reveal themselves. It is an order of change which unfolds the variety of aspects belonging to the nature of the changing object. We cannot speak of evolution when an object o system is changed by forces acting on it from without.
The change must occur within the changing unity as the manifestation o forces operative within it. But since nothing is independent of the universe, evolution also involves a changing adaptation of the object to its environment, and after adaptation a further manifestation of its own nature. Thus, evolution is a continuous process of differentiation-cum-integration.
The concept of evolution as a process of differentiation-cum integration was first developed by the German sociologist Von Bae and subsequently by Darwin, Spencer and many others. Spence writes, “Societies show integration, both by simple increase c mass and by coalescence and recoalescence of masses. The changes from homogeneity to heterogeneity is multitudinously exemplified; from the simple tribe, to the civilized nation full of structural and functional unlikeness in all parts. With progressive integration and heterogeneity goes increasing coherence…… simultaneously comes increasing definiteness.
Social organisation is at first vague; advance brings settled arrangement which grow slowly more precise; customs pass into laws, which while gaining fixity, also become more specific in their application to variety of actions, and all institutions, at first confused] intermingled, slowly separated at the same time that each within itself marks off more distinctly its component structures. Thus in all respects is fulfilled the formula of evolution. There is progress towards greater size, coherence, multiformity and definiteness.”
Herbert Spencer thus prescribes four principles of evolution these are:
(i) Social evolution is one cultural or human aspect of the law of cosmic evolution;
(ii) Social evolution takes place in the same way in which cosmic evolution takes place:
(iii) Social evolution is gradual;
(iv) Social evolution is progressive.
Resisting Social Change
Some people resist social change. In the midst of continual technological breakthroughs, some people harbor vested interests (financial or otherwise) in maintaining the status quo. These people lose something in response to social change. Other people may feel insecure about trying to adapt to an ever‐changing society.
Economic factors take a hand in resisting social change. Conflict theorists complain that capitalistic systems encourage owners to protect their assets at the expense of workers. Protecting their assets may mean ignoring safety standards or putting pressure on government officials to lessen state regulations.
Cultural factors also play a central role in resistance to social change. When technology enters a society, non‐material culture must respond to changes in material culture. Culture lag refers to the time during which previous aspects of a society still need to “catch up” to cultural advances. For example, certain religious groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church, promote large families and regard contraceptive methods that limit family size as immoral. In other words, a lag exists between aspects of non‐material culture (religious beliefs) and material culture (reproductive technologies).
Social movements typically question a culture's established state of affairs. In the United States today, both the gay rights and feminist movements challenge society's definitions of “natural order”—that heterosexuality is the only sexual standard and that females should submit to males. Resistance to such social movements remains predictably strong.
There are subtle changes happening in Pakistan, many of which continue to fly under the radar but which may, over time, have tectonic implications for society in this country. Take, for example, the emerging consensus that, after years of inertia, poverty levels in Pakistan are finally starting to drop. There are numerous indicators that point towards this development, such as rising incomes and increased use of household appliances, and while poverty and inequality are still widespread (and social indicators related to health and education remain dismal), progress seems to be being made. Perhaps more significantly, Pakistan’s mythical middle class also appears to be growing, fuelling increases in consumption across the countries towns and cities. How and why this is being achieved remains a mystery. While Pakistan has experienced moderate levels of economic growth over the past decade, the mechanisms through which this has translated into poverty reduction are not immediately clear given the often anarchic and confused approach taken to policy formulation and implementation in the country. Putting this question aside however, it is clear that these economic changes have the potential to fundamentally alter Pakistan’s social landscape. Rising incomes will inevitably mean higher levels of education, a diversification of skills and occupations, greater social and geographical mobility, and the cultivation of wider tastes and interests. At a time when the Internet and media are facilitating ever greater exposure to the world, it can no longer be assumed that the values and traditions of the past will be unquestioningly carried forward by the young.
That these changes are taking place can arguably be demonstrated by looking at developments in marketing. Take any mass-market product targeting young people, such as soft drinks or packages for mobile phones. What you quickly discover is that, almost without exception, these goods project an aura that is radically divergent from the mainstream narrative that suggests Pakistani society is inherently conservative; on billboards and television screens, there is a constant deluge of young people partying, with men and women mixing and having fun, wearing Western clothes and shattering society’s traditional boundaries. Advertising has always had an aspirational element, but the very fact that millions of rupees are spent on selling this particular lifestyle suggests it has an appeal that is not entirely manufactured. Unless these marketing campaigns are entirely wrongheaded and misguided, it seems clear that there are lots of young people who desire to lead lives vastly different from those society expects them to adhere to.
There is obviously some cognitive dissonance at work here. Many of the young people who yearn to emulate what they see on television might, at the same time, take to social media to castigate women who refuse to conform to traditional gender roles. Some might even find the entire discourse to be repellant, turning towards religion and tradition as a means through which to make sense of an increasingly fragmented and chaotic world. But it is precisely these contradictions, this emergent clash between the old and the new, that have the potential to generate new ideas and ways of life. Far from being moribund and stagnant, Pakistan may be entering a new phase of social ferment.
It would be a mistake to fall into the trap of uncritically endorsing the ‘modernisation’ thesis, which has long assumed that economic development and material progress are inextricably linked to social and political changes including democratisation, secularisation, a decline in societal conflict, and the spread of more moderate political views. After all, modernisation is often accompanied by tremendous costs – ranging from social and economic dislocation to environmental degradation – and the upsurge in support for populist demagogues and unabashed fascists parading as anti-establishment insurgents should demonstrate how the correlation between ‘development’, moderation, and enlightenment is fragile at best. As is always the case, it is the mix of institutional interventions and policy changes that matters more than the outcomes that are generated; economic growth can be achieved in a variety of ways, but a type that promotes inequality will obviously have effects that are different from a variant that emphasizes inclusion and redistribution.
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