Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society

Chapter 1 discussed structure and processes; this chapter turns to social change — its kinds and sources — and its counterpart, social order, including domination, legitimacy, authority, law, crime and violence. It then compares order and change in villages, towns and cities. It has seven activities and ten exercise questions. Colonial urbanisation, land reform and Indian cities are covered in depth on the live pages Structural Change, Change and Development in Rural Society and Human Settlements; this page focuses on the chapter's own concepts.

• Builds on Chapter 1 (structure, enforced cooperation) and Introducing Sociology (socialisation, power and authority, Weber). Leads into Chapter 3 (environment and society) and Chapter 5 (Srinivas's village studies).
• Pairs with live chapters: Social Change and Development in India, Chapter 1 Structural Change (colonialism, industrialisation, urbanisation), Chapter 4 Change and Development in Rural Society (land reform, Green Revolution, agrarian labour) and Chapter 3 The Constitution and Social Change; India: People and Economy, Chapter 2 Human Settlements.
• UPSC: Mains GS1 asked about the social problems arising from rapid urbanisation in India (2013) and whether urbanisation leads to more segregation or marginalisation of the poor in metropolises (2023) — this chapter's account of slums, gated communities, ghettoisation and gentrification answers both.

• Rapid change is recent; social change = intensive + extensive change in underlying structure — by pace (evolution/revolution), nature (structural/values), source.
• Five sources: environment (tsunami, oil), technology and economy (steam, railways 1853, plantations, WTO), politics (universal adult franchise), culture (Protestant ethic, Bhakti, women, cricket).
• Social order: resists and regulates change; privileged groups have a vested interest in stability; produced by consent (socialisation) and compulsion (power, domination).
• Legitimacy → authority (Weber: legitimate power) → law (codified, binding on all); contestation, crime (breach of law — civil disobedience), violence (State's monopoly).
• Village vs city: density and share of agriculture; India's urban share ≈ 31% (2011 — NCERT's ‘37.7%’ is the urban population in crores). Rural order strong; land reform → dominant castes; MGNREGA.
• Urban order is about space: housing, slums, gated communities, transit, gentrification, ghettoisation; city freedoms mostly for the privileged.

Sociology itself emerged to make sense of rapid change in Western Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries — but constant change is recent: humans have existed for about 500,000 years, civilised life for about 6,000, constant and rapid change for about 400, and acceleration for about 100. ‘Social change’ is used loosely for almost any change; sociologists narrow it to significant changes that alter ‘the underlying structure of an object or situation over a period of time’ (Giddens). Bigness means both intensive (deep impact) and extensive (a large section of society).

Change is classified by pace: evolution, slow adaptive change, made famous by Charles Darwin (‘survival of the fittest’), adapted to society as ‘social Darwinism’; and revolutionary change, rapid, mainly political — the French Revolution (1789–93), the Russian Revolution (1917) — and, more loosely, ‘industrial’ or ‘telecommunications’ revolutions. By nature: structural change — e.g. paper money, whose value lies in trust, not the paper, founding credit markets and changing banking; and change in ideas and values — e.g. childhood: once children were small adults expected to work, and early factories depended on them; in the 19th and early 20th centuries childhood came to be seen as special, child labour was banned and compulsory education spread. By source: internal (endogenous) or external (exogenous), and five broad types.

Environment. Nature shaped food, clothing, livelihood and interaction — in deserts, cold climates, ports, trade routes, river valleys. Technology has reduced and altered nature's influence rather than ended it. Natural disasters — earthquakes, eruptions, floods, the 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Andamans and Tamil Nadu — can change societies drastically and irreversibly; but environmental change can also be constructive: oil transformed Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE, as gold did California in the 19th century.

Technology and economy. Combined with the market, technology has produced immense change — above all the Industrial Revolution. Steam power, far stronger than animals and tireless, transformed industry, and through steamships and railways the economy and social geography of the world; in India the railways shaped the economy especially in the first century after 1853. Some inventions matter only later: gunpowder and paper from China had limited impact for centuries until they entered modernising Europe. British spinning and weaving machines, with market forces and imperial power, destroyed the handloom industry of the subcontinent, until then the largest and most advanced in the world. Economic organisation alone can change society: plantation agriculture demanded labour that helped establish the Atlantic slave trade (17th–19th centuries); Assam's tea plantations involved forced migration of labour from eastern India, especially Adivasi areas of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh; today tariff changes under bodies like the WTO can wipe out or boom whole industries.

Politics. Kings and queens represented larger trends; war and conquest brought change in both directions. After defeating Japan in 1945, the United States occupied Japan and introduced land reform; by the 1970s Japanese industry overtook America's in cars and electronics and forced US industry to restructure — turning the tables by economic means. India's independence movement changed society as well as politics; Nepal's people rejected monarchy in 2006. Above all, universal adult franchise — ‘one person, one vote’ — is perhaps the single biggest political change in history: early franchises were limited to high-status, propertied men; only long struggles made universal suffrage the norm, which, though not abolishing inequality, now pressures every government to seek popular approval.

Culture. Changes in ideas and values change social life. Religion is the commonest example — Weber's Protestant Ethic; in India, Buddhism in ancient social and political life and the Bhakti movement on medieval social structure including caste. Ideas about women changed society: in the Second World War women in western countries took factory jobs building ships and armaments, strengthening claims to equality; women's role as household buyers now makes advertisers address women as decision-makers. Cricket, an English aristocratic pastime, became a symbol of national and racial pride — Australia against England, the dominant West Indies of the 1970s–80s, India beating England — and its commercial centre has shifted to South Asian fans. No single factor accounts for change; causes are interrelated, internal or external, deliberate or accidental.

Change has meaning only against continuity, as letters are legible against a background. Social order is the tendency within established systems that resists and regulates change. Every society must reproduce itself and stay stable: people follow the same rules, similar actions yield similar results, behaviour is predictable. There are also concrete reasons: societies are stratified, so those favourably placed want things to continue, while the disadvantaged want change; dominant groups have a vested interest in stability, subordinated groups in change, and ‘normal’ conditions usually favour the rich and powerful.

Order also has a positive meaning: the active maintenance and reproduction of patterns of relations, values and norms. It is achieved in two ways, combined in every society: spontaneous consent — shared values internalised through socialisation, which can never be complete, since people question and change their beliefs — and compulsion. Power is the ability to make others do what you want regardless of their wishes; a stable, settled power relation is domination, and in normal times domination can be ‘smooth’ — recall women's ‘consent’ to patriarchal property norms (Chapter 1).

Why is domination often non-confrontational despite unequal costs and benefits? Partly through power; but chiefly through legitimation. Legitimacy is the degree of acceptance in power relations — conformity to prevailing norms of right, propriety and justice, part of the current ‘social contract’. Power in itself is just a fact; authority is, in Max Weber's definition, legitimate power. A police officer, a judge or a teacher holds authority specified in written job descriptions, each within a domain: the judge in court, the police over public conduct (not private lawful life), the teacher in class (not the pupil's home). Other authority is less formal but effective — a religious leader, a reputed scholar or artist, even a gang leader. A law is an explicitly codified norm, usually written, with rules for making and changing laws and for violations; in a democracy laws are made by elected representatives in the people's name and bind all citizens, whether or not an individual agrees. Domination thus works through power, much of it legitimate authority, a large part codified in law — but there are also effective powers that are illegitimate, or legitimate but uncodified; the mix shapes each social system.

Domination and law do not always meet obedience. Contestation is insistent disagreement, broader than competition or conflict: youth counter-cultures or ‘youth rebellion’ (hairstyles, clothing, language, lifestyle); elections as political competition; dissent and protest against laws or authorities, allowed to different degrees by open societies within explicit and implicit boundaries. Social order need not mean sameness: parties disagree while respecting one Constitution; drivers argue despite shared traffic rules. How much dissent is tolerated marks the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate, legal and illegal, acceptable and unacceptable.

A crime is strictly an act that violates an existing law — no more, no less; its moral worth is a separate matter. When Gandhi broke the salt law at Dandi during Civil Disobedience, he committed a crime deliberately and proudly, and was arrested; many other crimes claim no such virtue. Violence relates to the definition of the modern State, which claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in its territory (with exceptions such as self-defence); so every act of violence is technically against the State, which prosecutes even an assault by one individual on another. Violence is the enemy of social order, a sign of serious tensions, a challenge to State authority and a failure of legitimation and consent.

Villages emerged with the shift from nomadic hunting, gathering and shifting cultivation to settled agriculture: investment in land and new techniques produced a surplus, allowing accumulation of wealth, social differences and occupational specialisation. In economic and administrative terms, rural and urban settlements are distinguished by population density and the share of agriculture in activity — size alone is not decisive. A town and a city differ mainly by size and administrative definition; an urban agglomeration is a city with its suburbs and satellites; a metropolitan area includes more than one city or a continuous urban settlement many times a city's size. Urbanisation — a growing share of population in urban areas — is seen in most countries.

Villages are small and personal; caste, religion and customary practice are stronger; so change is usually slower. Subordinate sections have little scope to express themselves: without anonymity dissenters are easily identified and ‘taught a lesson’; dominant sections control most employment and resources, so the poor depend on them; small numbers make collective action hard to hide. A strong power structure is hard to dislodge; rural order is more resilient. Isolation once slowed change too, but telephones, television, roads and rail have shortened or erased the ‘cultural lag’ between village and town — few villages are truly ‘remote’ now.

Agrarian changes have major impact. Land reform: the first phase after Independence removed proprietary rights from absentee landlords and vested them in the groups managing cultivation, mostly intermediate castes — often not cultivators themselves — whose land plus numbers (votes) raised their status and power: M.N. Srinivas's dominant castes, who came to dominate the countryside and electoral politics. More recently they face assertion from castes further below — the lowest and most backward — producing upheavals in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Farm technology — labour-saving machinery, new cropping patterns — changes demand for labour and bargaining power between landlords and labourers; price swings, droughts and floods can cause havoc, as in the recent spate of farmer suicides; and large programmes for the rural poor, such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, can have enormous impact.

Cities are old — located on trade routes and harbours (Tezpur on the Brahmaputra, Kozhikode on the Arabian Sea), at strategic sites, or as pilgrimage and temple towns (Ajmer, Varanasi, Madurai) — but urbanism as a way of life for large populations is modern. The city is the domain of the modern individual, offering anonymity and amenities that only large numbers can support. Yet freedom and fulfilment are available mainly to a privileged minority; most city dwellers have limited, relative freedoms. The city also fosters group identities — race, religion, ethnicity, caste, region, class — which concentration intensifies as strategies of survival, resistance and assertion.

Urban order revolves around space: housing and residential patterns; mass transit; coexistence of residential, public and industrial zones; public health, sanitation, policing and safety — all amid class, ethnic, religious and caste tensions. Housing shortage produces homelessness, ‘street people’ and slums — congested neighbourhoods without proper civic facilities, built of anything from plastic sheets to concrete, where unsettled property rights breed ‘dadas’ and strongmen, a stepping stone to extra-legal and real-estate gangs. Gated communities wall off affluent neighbourhoods with controlled entry and parallel services. Distance between homes and workplaces demands mass transit; commuting becomes a way of life and a political constituency — Mumbai's suburban ‘locals’ host commuter associations, bhajans, festivals, vegetable-chopping and card tournaments. Reliance on cars rather than buses brings congestion and pollution.

Urban change is also about space: city centres declined in the late 20th century as the affluent moved to suburbs, and are reviving in many Western cities; gentrification converts a lower-class neighbourhood into a middle- or upper-class one as rising prices make conversion profitable — sometimes it fails and the area slips back. Ghettoisation turns mixed neighbourhoods into single-community ones. Transport shapes a city's character — public-transport London or New York versus car-based Los Angeles; NCERT wonders whether Delhi's Metro will change social life. The main issue for rapidly urbanising India is how cities will cope with ever-rising population as migrants join natural growth.

The chapter has seven activities. Short outlines follow.

The ten questions at the end of the chapter (page 48).

Numbers

One-liners

• Rapid social change is historically recent.
• Social change is intensive and extensive change in underlying structure.
• Change is classified by pace, nature and — most often — source.
• Universal adult franchise is perhaps the biggest political change in history.
• Change has meaning only against social order.
• The privileged have a vested interest in stability; the disadvantaged in change.
• Authority is legitimate power; law is codified authority.
• Crime is breach of law — its moral worth is a separate question.
• The modern State claims a monopoly of legitimate violence.
• Rural order is resilient because there is no anonymity and few alternatives.
• Land reform created dominant castes.
• Urban order is fundamentally about space.

Traps to avoid

• India's urban share in 2011 was about 31%, not NCERT's ‘37.7 per cent’ (that is 37.7 crore people).
• Size alone does not separate villages from towns — density and agricultural share do.
• Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees; they share a common ancestor.
• ‘Survival of the fittest’ was coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin.
• Giddens's clock times do not match the spans given; recomputed, agriculture falls near 11:25 pm.
• Authority is legitimate power; domination may or may not be legitimate.
• Crime is defined by law, not morality — Gandhi's salt satyagraha was legally a crime.
• Dominant castes were intermediate castes empowered by land reform, often not tillers themselves.
• Gentrification moves a neighbourhood up the class scale; ghettoisation turns mixed areas single-community.
• The UN 54%/66% figures are from World Urbanization Prospects 2014.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• No Prelims question in the archive is drawn directly from this chapter's concepts. Useful facts: India ≈ 31% urban (2011); Census town criteria; MGNREGA (2005, 100 days — asked in 2006 and 2011, sitting on the live economics page); railways 1853.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• Urbanisation (GS1): social problems of rapid urbanisation (2013) — housing shortage, homelessness and slums under strongmen, transport and congestion, land-use conflict, public health, intensified identities, crime; and whether urbanisation segregates or marginalises the poor in metropolises (2023) — gated communities, ghettoisation, gentrification, freedoms mainly for the privileged, set against the city's anonymity and mobility. Develop with the live pages Structural Change and Human Settlements.
• Rural change (GS1): use the resilience of rural order (no anonymity, dependence on dominant groups), land reform → dominant castes → assertion from below, and technology and MGNREGA shifting bargaining power.
• Concepts for any answer: distinguish social change from mere change (intensive + extensive); name sources (environment, technology, economy, politics, culture); for order and dissent, legitimacy → authority → law, and crime vs morality.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.