Four Theories Of Social Change

[Cookie Grosky]

Atfirst, social evolutionists asserted that all societies must go through the same sequence of progress. Modern theorists believe that change is multilinear. Societies can evolve in different ways and different directions.

It is clear from a glance at our global history that conflict provokes social change. Inequalities based on class, race, gender, religion, and more foster dissatisfaction and anger. To address their situation, groups come together to fight for change. Governments can be overthrown or restructured. Sometimes change happens quickly, but oftentimes it develops over time in stages.

Social change often occurs as a result of social movements. There are countless examples throughout history in every country on earth. Some of the most famous (many of which are ongoing and/or evolving) include:

Social change occurs when societal institutions, structures, and cultures undergo a significant shift. Famous examples include the Reformation in 16th-century Europe and the American civil rights movement. More often than not, social change is slow. This is especially true of a global society. Why does social change matter? Here are 10 reasons:

Throughout the course of history, greed exploits and endangers employees in every industry. The United States is an example of how social change affects labor and worker rights. Over two centuries, the US experienced the birth of unions, child labor laws, the minimum wage, and laws for family and medical leave. This area of social change is ongoing as workers continue to fight for their rights. They strike for higher wages and push for better legal protections. Consumers also play a part when they boycott businesses with unethical practices.

History proves that power can corrupt. Governments often commit human rights violations against their own people. Social change can draw attention to these injustices, dismantle destructive structures, and help societies transition into better systems. These changes can occur quickly and violently through civil war or conflict. Through elections and legislature, the change can be more gradual.

Many social movements lean on the understanding that social change is slow. Those fighting for change now know they might not reap the benefits, but coming generations will. Climate change activists are keenly aware of this fact. They understand that healing the planet takes time. Fighting battles now on behalf of those not even born yet is a selfless act. It sets up a society for future success.

We inspire, educate, equip everyone for a career in human rights. We also provide information about online courses, jobs, paid internships, masters degrees, scholarships and other opportunities in the human rights sector and related areas.

In our nursery, we grow thousands of beautiful and useful plants that cross-pollinate food sovereignty and ecological restoration. Basically, we cultivate and celebrate tree crops in the image of the forest. We do that to tend the life and health of places defined by the shape of land and flow of water rather than colonial borders and capitalist properties. That way, we might remediate the toxins that pollute our souls, society and soil, from erosion to empire.

Rather than cutting emissions or redistributing wealth, elite regimes dump huge sums of money to plant trillions of trees. An unprecedented flood of government and grant funding is currently flowing towards agroforestry. But long-term plantings, for tree crops or ecosystem restoration, require protected land tenure and dignified workers. White people own 98 percent of agricultural acres in the United States. This is the legacy of capitalist agriculture and colonial policies backed by state and vigilante violence. Funding for crops that require enduring land access mostly goes to those who own the land, not necessarily those who tend it.

The obvious truth is that trees always grow in context. Trees sprout in specific seasons and soils, planted by someone on land claimed by someone, guided by social systems and cultural customs. Counting saplings without collectively organizing is a dead-end.

A transformative way to plant trees and tree crops sees the forest along with the trees, as whole ecosystems instead of individuals. It addresses root causes from the local to the global, stems from clear goals coordinated with attentive care, and includes people affected by decisions in the process.

The scale of social change necessary to protect land and the humans that love it is planetary, and our scale is clearly not enough. But seeds start somewhere. So many gorgeous efforts resist and remediate the crises of global racial empire and the capitalist circuit that feeds it, from solidarity economies to cooperative structures to forest defense allied with abolition.

What would a theory of social change look like that grew from the power of plants? We grow plants because we love them and their vital place in the world. We also grow plants because we want to grow power that feeds us and the blessed land. Plants and power propagate from layers of roots and shoots of seeds, the established and emergent.

What connects them is the common ground of politics based on participation, economies based on subsistence and market necessities, land access grounded in autonomous tenure, and broad alliances linked for justice. Those four seed-scale propositions germinate into endless locally adapted possibilities, as the Zapatistas say, governed in accordance with our geography and our calendar. They trellis over borders between tree planting, food sovereignty economies and social movements.

Common ground and a nursery theory of social change also gives trees a way to be a right answer again. Not as technofixes but as living beings in partnership with people protecting land and water from destruction, shading soil and streets, calling back carbon from the commons of the atmosphere, celebrating old growth and resprouting cultures of care, and cultivating food and medicine for future generations so that everyone has enough. Small scale or large, it gives tree growers a world to plant at the edge of ecosystem and empire.

Campaign Nonviolence, a project of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, is working for a new culture of nonviolence by connecting the issues to end war, poverty, racism and environmental destruction. We organize The Nonviolent Cities Project and the annual Campaign Nonviolence Week of Actions.

This guide is designed to help funders and those who implement programs realize their ambitious social change efforts. It explores theory of change models, processes and products as well as key theory of change concepts, benefits and limitations.

A theory of change is both a conceptual model and a concrete product that reflects the model. A fundamental component of any large-scale social change effort, theory of change can help teams strengthen strategies and maximize results by charting out the work ahead, what success looks like and how to get there.

Developing a theory of change model involves making explicit collective assumptions about how a change will unfold. This work can help the funders and leaders of a social change effort clearly articulate their objectives, discuss equity considerations, define roles of decision-making authority and enable useful measurement and learning.

As teams clarify core elements of their strategies, assumptions and expectations, they will have opportunities to determine a number of value-affirming details. These include: whose voices to include, who makes key decisions and how to identify and address historic biases.

Importantly, the notion of complexity does not imply that social phenomena and social processes are chaotic or devoid of regularities, patterns or structure. Rather, complexity implies that they consist of many parts in elaborate, multi-layered arrangements. From a micro-perspective, the diversity of migration experiences may seem bewildering but, once we start to zoom out, regularities and patterns tend to emerge. This reflects the very purpose of social theory: to discern patterns in order to make sense of what is happening around us. For instance, as Ravenstein (1885, particularly for the case of Britain) and Mabogunje (1970, particularly for the case of Africa) have already shown, migration is anything but a random phenomenon. In different geographical and historical settings, they both observed that most migrants move along spatially clustered pathways between very particular communities in origin and destination areas. Similarly, at a macro level, Zelinsky (1971), Skeldon (1990) and Hatton and Williamson (1998) observed clear long-term regularities between demographic, economic and social transitions on the one hand and the sequenced emergence and decline of particular forms of internal and international human mobility on the other.

Functionalist social theory tends to see society as a system, a collection of interdependent parts (individuals, actors), somehow analogous to the functioning of an organism, in which an inherent tendency towards equilibrium exists. Functionalist migration theories generally see migration as a positive phenomenon contributing to productivity, prosperity and, eventually, greater equality in origin and destination societies through bidirectional flows of resources such as money, goods and knowledge. Essentially, they interpret migration as an optimisation strategy, in which individuals (and sometimes families or households) use migration to access higher and more-secure sources of income and other livelihood opportunities.

Historical-structural views are often based on underlying assumptions that much 'South-North' migration is a largely irrational process that would often not be in the interests of migrants themselves, as they would be blinded by over-optimistic mirages about life abroad and deceived by untrustworthy recruiters, smugglers and traffickers. This assumption is also reproduced in official discourses and policies according to which prospective migrants should be educated about the risks and costs of migration through information campaigns. This clearly denies the fact that, even for less-skilled or undocumented migrants, migration still has huge potential to improve the long-term wellbeing of themselves and their families and that they are therefore willing to endure situations of exploitation and suffering, however unjustified these may be from a moral and ethical point of view.

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