Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 179

Sociology’s founders all saw the modern world as, in crucial ways, a radically different place than it had been in the recent past. Yet social change is difficult to define because, in a sense, society is changing or ‘in process’ all of the time. Sociologists try to decide when there has been fundamental social change leading to a new form or structure of society and then look for explanations of what brought such change about. Identifying major shifts means showing that there has been an alteration in the underlying structure of an institution or society over a specified period of time. All accounts of social change must also show what remains stable, as a baseline against which to measure change. Auguste Comte described this kind of analysis as the study of social dynamics (processes of change) and social statics (stable institutional patterns).

In the rapidly moving world of today there are still continuities with the distant past. For example, major religions such as Christianity and Islam retain their ties with ideas and practices initiated in ancient times. Yet most institutions in modern societies change more rapidly than those of earlier civilizations, and we can identify the main elements that consistently influence patterns of social change as economic development, socio-cultural change and political organization. These can be analysed separately, though in many cases a change in one element brings about change in the others.