The Study of Change in Social Science

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NE OF the more significant changes in the social sciences to-day is { )the way the subject of social change is being redefined for investiga tion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries social scientists were interested in the problem of how to mould a society characterized by rational order and progress for all. The assumption of human nature underlying the theories of such figures as Marx and I,ester Ward, for example, lay in the belief that man was fundamentally a rational being capable of coming to grips with the laws of social reality as they perceived them and resolutely working for the change of broad social and political structures. Their theoretical systems were designed to demonstrate the possibility of man)s controlling his physical and social environment for human betterment. As such their theoretical positions presented alternative programmes and methods for the patterning of societal action.l To-day, social scientists are predominantly occupied with the reverse emphasis of how to help man successfully adjust to the existing social and political order. The theoretical basis of research begins with the Hobbesian problem of how to maintain social control. The subject of change as treated by Talcott Parsons and Robert K: Merton, undoubtedly the leading social theorlsts in the field of sociology to-day, is deISned as a by-product in the malfunctioning of social control or order. Though both theorists have made notable contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms involved in social control, their approach is similar to the earlier anthropologists, Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown, both of whom were primarily concerned with maintaining a stable, integrated and harmonious social equilibrium. By taking as their research problem the task of explaining how it is that various social institutions of preliterate societies function interdependently in an integrated whole, these earlier anthropologists either neglected the question of change in direction or control of institutional structures or stlldied social change as