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16SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND TECHNOLOGY

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Chapter Outline

• Social Movements• Theories of Social Change• Resistance to Social Change• Technology and the Future• Technology and Society• Social Policy and Technology: Privacy a

nd 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 is defined as the conscious feeling of negative discrepancy between legitimate expectations and present actualities.

Relative Deprivation

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Social Movements

•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.

Resource Mobilization

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Social Movements

•New Social Movements refers to organized collective activities that promote autonomy and self-determination as well as improvements in the quality of life.

New Social Movements

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Theories of Social Change

•Evolutionary Theory: This theory views society as moving in a definite direction, generally progressing to a higher state.•Unilinear Evolutionary TheoryThis theory contends that all societies pass through the same successive stages of evolution and reach the same end.•Multilinear Evolutionary TheoryThis theory holds that change can occur in several ways and does not inevitably lead in the same direction.

Evolutionary Theory

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Theories of Social Change

•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.

Functionalist Theory

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Theories of Social Change

•Parsons maintained that four processes of social change are inevitable:

differentiationadaptive upgradinginclusionvalue generalization

Functionalist Theory

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Theories of Social Change

•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.

Conflict Theory

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Theories of 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.

Global Social Change

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Resistance to Social Change

•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 cornerspressuring government to ease regulations

Economic and Cultural Factors

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Resistance to Social Change

•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.

Economic and Cultural Factors

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Resistance to Social Change

•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.

Resistance to Technology

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Technology and the Future

•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.

Computer Technology

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Technology and the Future

•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.

The Internet

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Technology and the Future

Geographical Distribution of Internet Hosts, January 2000

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Technology and the Future

•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.

Biotechnology

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Technology and the Future

•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.

Biotechnology

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Technology and the Future

•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.

Biotechnology

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Technology and the Future

•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.

Technology Accidents

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Technology and Society

•Because of the Internet, English has become the international language of commerce and communication.

Culture and Social Interaction

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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

•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.

Social Control

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Technology and Society

•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.

Stratification and Inequality

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Technology and Society

Electric power

Automobiles Televisions

Home computers

Cellular telephones

Percent of Households

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

100

80

60

40

20

0

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

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.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village

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Social Policy and Technology

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.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village

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Social Policy and Technology

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.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village

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Social Policy and Technology

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.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village

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Social Policy and Technology

•Sociological Insights (continued)--Interactionists view the privacy and censorship debate as one that parallels concerns people have in any social interaction.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village

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Social Policy and Technology

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.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village

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Social Policy and Technology

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.

Privacy and Censorship in a Global Village