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Published byThomas Arthur Paul Modified over 9 years ago
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Part V: Social Change
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Demography is the scientific study of population. Demographers look at many factors when studying population, including size of a population, distribution, age structure, fertility, mortality, and migration. Sociologists study population because it affects social structure, especially in crowded areas.
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Rapid world population growth is a relatively recent phenomenon, but concern about population is not new. English economist Thomas Malthus published essays on population growth in relation to economic development in the late 1700s. Some countries in the world have even experimented with voluntary as The rate of world population growth is slowing, but because of population momentum, it will continue to increase for many years.
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The world has been greatly changed by urbanization, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. In the early 1900s, the U.S. went through a process of urbanization as the population shifted from farms to manufacturing jobs in the city. Today, however, suburbanization has become the dominant trend, enabled by technological and transportation developments and fueled by a scarcity of land in cities.
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Urban ecology is the study of the relationships between humans and their city environments. Urban ecologists have developed four major theories of city growth — concentric zone theory, sector theory, multiple nuclei theory, and peripheral theory. Combining elements from each theory is useful in understanding how humans relate to city environments.
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Change is one of the most constant features of American society. For sociologists, social change occurs when many members of the society adopt new behaviors that have long-term and important consequences. Discovery, invention, and diffusion are the major social processes through which social change occurs. Important agents of social change are technology, changing demographics, the natural environment, and revolution and war.
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The functionalist perspective is based on the concept of equilibrium. A society is relatively stable; it reacts to changes by making small adjustments to keep itself in a state of functioning and balance. The conflict perspective, however, views societies as inherently unstable systems that are constantly undergoing change as they struggle among groups for scarce resources. Symbolic interactionism identifies decreasing shared values as a cause of social instability.
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Collective behavior describes how people behave when they are united by a single short-term goal. Rumors, fads, legends, and fashions are examples of collective behaviors. Mass hysteria and panic are manifestations of collective anxiety and fear. Sociologists identify four basic types of crowds—casual, conventional, expressive, and acting. The contagion, emergent norm, and convergence theories have been developed to explain crowd behavior.
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The social movement is the most highly structured, rational, and enduring form of collective behavior. Most social movements are started to stimulate change. The primary types of social movements are revolutionary, reformative, redemptive, and alternative.
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