Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XI (Understanding Society), Chapter 2.

If the world has changed so fast, why does anything stay the same?

Ask your grandparents what did not exist when they were your age, and the list will be long: mobile phones, plastic buckets, zip fasteners, packaged milk, the photocopier on the corner. Now ask what has stayed the same, and the answer is just as interesting: the school routine, family expectations, the rules of cricket. This chapter has two halves because change only makes sense against continuity. The first half asks what counts as social change and where it comes from. The second asks what holds society steady, which is social order, and how that order looks in a village compared with a city.

Change is new, and getting faster

Human beings have lived on Earth for about 500,000 years, and have had a civilised existence for only about 6,000 of them. Constant, rapid change has been the pattern for only the last 400 years, and the pace has picked up mainly in the last 100. Sociology itself was born as an attempt to make sense of the rapid change in Western Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Giddens's "clock of human history" makes this visible. Squeeze all of human existence into one day. Agriculture, the basis of fixed settlement, appears at 11:56 pm and civilisations at 11:57 pm. Modern societies begin only at 11:59 and 30 seconds, yet perhaps as much change has happened in those last 30 seconds as in all the time before.

What counts as social change?

Not every change is social change. A new hairstyle trend is a change, but it does not rewire society. Social change means changes that alter the underlying structure of an object or situation over time. Following Giddens, the "bigness" is judged on two scales: how deep the change is (intensive) and how large a section of society it touches (extensive). A change must be both.

Changes are then classified in three ways: by source or cause, by nature or impact, and by pace.

Why paper money counts as structural. A gold coin is worth its metal. A paper note is worth nothing as paper. It works only because people trust what it represents. Once society accepted that a medium of exchange need not be valuable in itself, credit, banking and finance were reorganised, which in turn changed economic life further.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: evolutionary change is slow and adaptive, and Social Darwinism applied Darwin's idea to society. In reality: Darwin's theory was a theory about living organisms, and carrying "survival of the fittest" over to human societies was heavily criticised and is not accepted as an explanation of social inequality today. Why it matters: it explains why the textbook treats it as an idea about adaptive change, not as a finding about people.

Pause and predict: a popular new phone colour sweeps the market for one year. Does it qualify as social change?

Check your answer: No. It may be wide (many buyers) but it is not deep (intensive). It does not alter the underlying structure of any situation. Social change needs both intensity and extent.

Five sources of change

Sources can be internal (endogenous) or external (exogenous). The textbook groups them into five broad types.

Environment can also be constructive. The discovery of oil in the desert regions of West Asia, like gold in California, transformed the societies in which it was found. Natural disasters, by contrast, often cause changes that are irreversible: livelihoods destroyed by the 2004 tsunami may never come back, and the social structure of many coastal villages was altered.

Technology and economy together. Steam power was far stronger than animals or people and could run without rest. Applied to ships and railways, it changed the economy and social geography of the world. Indian railways, introduced in 1853, shaped the country's economy in their first century. Steamships made voyages faster and more reliable, changing international trade and migration.

Sometimes the effect of an invention appears only later. Gunpowder and writing paper existed in China for centuries with limited effect, and had a very large impact once they entered the context of modernising Western Europe, where gunpowder changed warfare and the paper and print revolution changed society. Closer to home, new British spinning and weaving machines, combined with market forces and imperial power, destroyed the handloom industry of the Indian subcontinent, which had been the largest and most advanced in the world.

Economic change that is not directly technological counts too. Plantation agriculture, the large scale growing of single cash crops such as sugarcane, tea or cotton, created a heavy demand for labour. That demand helped establish slavery and the slave trade between Africa, Europe and the Americas between the 17th and 19th centuries. In India, Assam's tea plantations involved the forced migration of labour, especially from Adivasi areas of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Today, changes in customs duties or tariffs under international agreements can wipe out industries or, less often, bring booms.

Politics. Kings and queens were representatives of larger political, social and economic trends. Individuals played roles, but within a larger context. Conquest shows this: sometimes conquerors plant change, and sometimes the conquered change the conquerors. After the Second World War, Japan was occupied by the United States for several years, which brought changes including land reform. By the 1970s Japanese industrial techniques had moved far ahead in fields such as car manufacturing, and between the 1970s and 1990s changed the industrial organisation of the United States and Europe. Change came through economic and technological means, not warfare.

Universal adult franchise. The textbook calls "one person, one vote" probably the single biggest political change in history. Earlier, rulers claimed to rule by divine right, and even where voting began it was restricted to men of high status or property. Women, the poor, working people and subordinated ethnic groups were excluded. Long struggles made universal adult franchise a norm, and now governments must at least appear to seek the approval of the people to be considered legitimate.

Culture. Religion is the commonest example of a sociocultural institution with enormous social impact, but it is contextual: it produces effects in some contexts and not others. Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism showed how the religious beliefs of some Protestant Christian groups helped establish the capitalist system. In India, Buddhism changed social and political life in ancient India, and the Bhakti movement had a wide influence on the medieval social structure, including the caste system.

Women's struggles for equality are another cultural source. In the Second World War women in Western countries took jobs building ships and operating heavy machinery, which strengthened their claims to equality, though without the war they would have had to struggle for much longer. Because women take many household buying decisions in urban societies, advertisers address them as decision makers, and this affects the media too. In sport, cricket began as a British aristocratic pastime and spread through the middle and working classes to the colonies, where it often became a symbol of national or racial pride. The England and Australia rivalry, the West Indies' dominance in the 1970s and 1980s and the special value of beating England before independence all show this. Today the game's commercial profile is driven by South Asian fans, especially Indians.

Two views. For the exam: each source of change is taught separately, with its own examples. Another reading: the textbook itself stresses that no single factor or theory accounts for social change. Causes can be internal or external, deliberate or accidental, and are often interrelated. A railway line (technology) changes the economy, which changes politics and culture. So when a question gives a case, expect more than one source to be at work.

Pause and predict: a state builds a large irrigation canal. Is this an environmental, technological or economic source of change?

Check your answer: All three are involved. It is technology that builds the canal, nature (water supply) that is altered, and the economy (cropping and incomes) that responds. In an MCQ choose the source the question stresses.

Social order: the other side of change

Social order is the tendency within established social systems to resist and regulate change. It also has a positive meaning: the active maintenance and reproduction of a particular pattern of social relations, values and norms. Every society needs stability. Imagine different parents at home every day or football rules that changed each match: life would be impossible, so predictable behaviour is essential.

Why societies resist change. Societies are stratified, and the strata differ in command over resources, status and power. Dominant groups resist changes that may alter their position because they have a vested interest in stability. Subordinated groups have a vested interest in change. "Normal" conditions usually favour the rich and powerful, and that is a second reason why societies are generally stable.

How order is achieved. Broadly in two ways: people spontaneously consent to rules they have internalised through socialisation, or they are compelled. Every society uses a mix. Socialisation can never fully erase the will of the individual, so people question what they once believed and change their minds. Most modern societies therefore also depend on power or coercion.

From power to law: Weber's ladder

The key terms build on one another.

Power in itself is simply a fact and may or may not be legitimate. Authority is limited to its proper domain. A judge is obeyed in the courtroom but outside it is a citizen like any other. A teacher's authority covers the classroom, not the pupil's home, where parents or guardians have primary authority. Not all authority is formal: a respected scholar, a religious leader or even a criminal gang leader can wield considerable authority with no formal specification, and this informal kind is still effective in producing consent.

In a modern democracy, laws are made by an elected legislature in the name of the people. Domination works through power, much of which is legitimate authority backed by law. The mix of legitimate authority and other kinds of power decides the nature of a social system.

Contestation, crime and violence. Domination does not always meet with obedience. Contestation is any insistent disagreement. Competition and conflict are narrower, so contestation covers more: youth counter cultures (hairstyle, language, lifestyle), elections (a form of political competition), and dissent against laws or authorities. Social order does not mean sameness. Citizens who respect the same Constitution can disagree sharply, just as drivers who know the same traffic rules can argue on the road.

A crime is an act that violates an existing law, nothing more, nothing less. Its moral worth is a separate question. Mahatma Gandhi broke the salt law at Dandi as part of the Civil Disobedience campaign. He was committing a crime in law, and he was arrested, but he did so deliberately for moral reasons and the people were proud of him.

The modern state is defined by its monopoly over the use of legitimate violence within its jurisdiction. All other violence is illegal by definition, apart from rare exceptions such as self defence. So even an assault on another individual is prosecuted by the state, because it violates that monopoly. Violence is the enemy of social order and marks a failure of the regime of legitimation and consent.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the state has a monopoly over legitimate violence, and authority is legitimate power. In reality: defining the state by its claim to legitimate force is a classic idea associated with Weber, the same thinker whose name the textbook attaches to authority. Why it matters: when a question asks who defined authority as legitimate power, the answer is Weber, not Durkheim or Marx.

Pause and predict: a judge is stopped for speeding on her way home. Whose authority applies, and what happens to hers?

Check your answer: The police officer's. Outside the courtroom the judge has no judicial authority and is bound by the law like any citizen. Authority belongs to a role within its proper domain.

Village, town and city: how to tell them apart

Villages emerged when people moved from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. Settled farming made a surplus possible, which allowed wealth to accumulate, brought social differences and created the need for occupational specialisation.

The textbook distinguishes rural from urban on two factors: population density and the proportion of agriculture related economic activity. Size alone is not decisive, because large villages can be as populous as small towns. Villages are spread over a larger area and have a larger share of agriculture in their income, while towns and cities are dense. The difference between a town and a city is mainly an administrative matter of size.

Urbanisation is the process by which a growing share of a population lives in urban rather than rural areas.

World comparison: a United Nations report of 2014 put the global urban share at 54 per cent, expected to rise to 66 per cent by 2050.

Order and change in rural areas

Villages are small and permit personalised relationships, and members often know most others by sight. Institutions like caste, religion and customary practice are stronger. Change is therefore slower.

Why dissent is hard in a village. There is little anonymity or distance, so a person who dissents can be identified and "taught a lesson" by the dominant sections. Those sections control most employment and resources, so the poor have nowhere else to turn. A small population makes it hard to gather large numbers without the powerful noticing and suppressing the effort. A strong power structure is difficult to dislodge, which is why shifts in power come slowly and late.

Change is also slowed by weak connections to the wider world, but this is changing. Telephones, television, roads and railways have shortened the cultural lag between villages and towns, so few villages can honestly be called remote.

Land reform and dominant castes. Agricultural change has an immediate effect. After independence, the first phase of land reform took away proprietary rights from absentee landlords and gave them to the groups actually managing the land. Most of these belonged to intermediate castes, who were often not cultivators themselves. With their numbers, this increased their status and political power, because their votes mattered for winning elections. M.N. Srinivas called them the dominant castes, landowning intermediate castes that are numerically large and enjoy political dominance in a region. More recently, they have faced assertion from castes below them in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

New labour saving machinery or new cropping patterns can change the demand for labour and the bargaining power of landlords and labourers. Sudden price falls, droughts or floods can devastate rural families. On the other side, large development programmes for the rural poor can have a big impact, and the textbook's example is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (MGNREGA).

Order and change in urban areas

Cities are ancient, but urbanism as a way of life for large numbers of people is modern. Before the modern era, trade routes, ports, military position and religious pilgrimage decided where cities rose. Examples: Tezpur on the Brahmaputra and Kozhikode (Calicut) on the Arabian Sea as trading towns, and Ajmer, Varanasi and Madurai as pilgrimage towns.

City and modernity go together. The city combines anonymity with the amenities and institutions that only large numbers can support, so it offers the individual boundless possibilities of fulfilment. But freedom and opportunity are available mainly to a socially and economically privileged minority. Most residents have only limited, relative freedom, bound by the same class, caste, region and other constraints. Crowding actually intensifies group identities and makes them part of survival, resistance and assertion.

Why space is the central issue. Density puts a premium on space, so the task of urban order is to keep the city workable. That means managing housing, mass transit, the mix of residential, public and industrial land use, and public health, sanitation, policing and safety, all while class, ethnic, religious and caste tensions are present.

Commuting becomes a way of life. Reliance on private road transport creates congestion and pollution. Long distance commuters can become a political constituency and develop sub cultures. The textbook's example is Mumbai's suburban trains, where informal commuter groups sing, celebrate festivals, chop vegetables and play games on board. Affordable, safe public transport shapes city life, which is why scholars contrast transit based cities like London or New York with car based Los Angeles. Whether Delhi's metro changes social life is left as an open question. The main challenge for rapidly urbanising countries like India is coping with population growth as migrants keep arriving.

Two views. For the exam: the city nurtures the individual, while the village discourages individuality. Another reading: the textbook immediately qualifies this. Freedom in the city is mostly for a privileged minority, and for most residents group identities become stronger, not weaker. Both halves of the picture are part of the textbook position, and a statement that gives only one half is often a trap.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Social Structure, Stratification and Social Processes in Society supplies stratification, which explains who resists and who wants change.
• Next: Environment and Society takes the environment as a source of change further.
• Thinkers: Introducing Western Sociologists develops Weber, whose terms for authority and legitimation appear here.
• Class XII link: Change and Development in Rural Society and Change and Development in Industrial Society continue the village and city themes.