Social change

About: Social change is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 61197 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1797013 citations.

State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another

Abstract: The essays in this book trace the development of Joel Migdal's 'state-in-society' approach. That approach illuminates how power is exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change. Despite the triumph of concept of state in social science literature, actual states have had great difficulty in turning public policies into planned social change. The state-in-society approach points observers to the ongoing struggles over which rules dictating how people will lead their daily lives. These struggles, which ally parts of the state and groups in society against other such coalitions, determine how societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day life - the nature of the rules that govern people's behavior, whom they benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them, what shared meaning people hold about their relations with others and their place in the world.

Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society

Abstract: This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century. Social structures are organized around relationships of production/consumption, power, and experience, whose spatio-temporal configurations constitute cultures. They are enacted, reproduced, and ultimately transformed by social actors, rooted in the social structure, yet freely engaging in conflictive social practices, with unpredictable outcomes. A fundamental feature of social structure in the Information Age is its reliance on networks as the key feature of social morphology. While networks are old forms of social organization, they are now empowered by new information/communication technologies, so that they become able to cope at the same time with flexible decentralization, and with focused decision-making. The article examines the specific interaction between network morphology and relationships of production/consumption, power, experience, and culture, in the historical making of the emerging social structure at the turn of the Millennium.