SOCIAL CHANGE

Social change in the broadest sense is any change in social relations. In this sense, social change is an ever-present phenomenon in any society. In order to give the concept a more restricted meaning, it has been defined as change of the social structure. A distinction is made then between processes within the social structure, which serve, at least partially, to maintain the structure (social dynamics), and processes that modify the structure (social change). Because the concept of social structure does not have one generally accepted and unambiguous meaning, however, this distinction does not clearly determine which social processes belong to the field of social change.

The specific meaning of social change depends first of all on the social entity considered. Changes in a small group may be important on the level of that group itself, but negligible on the level of the larger society. Similarly, the observation of social change depends on the time span taken; most short-term changes are negligible if a social development is studied in the long run. Even if one abstracts from small-scale and short-term changes, social change is a general characteristic of human societies: customs and norms change, inventions are made and applied, environmental changes lead to new adaptations, conflicts result in redistribution of power. This universal human potential for social change has a biological basis. It is rooted in the flexibility and adaptability of the human species --the near absence of biologically fixed action patterns on the one hand and the enormous capacity for learning, symbolizing, and creating on the other hand. The human biological constitution makes changes possible that are not biologically (genetically) determined. Social change, in other words, is only possible by virtue of biological characteristics of the human species, but the nature of the actual changes cannot be reduced to these species traits.