Why Do Things Change?
Social Change, Week 1
Last week the new semester started at the University of Houston, and I started Social Change. It’s taught by JT Mudge, a futurist and fellow Pacific Northwesterner who’s into storytelling, board games, and social justice1. I met JT at the UH Spring Gathering in April2, and he made the class sound fun — he said he had recently inherited the class and wanted to keep the core intact but shed its reputation as a huge academic slog of over-the-top reading and writing3.
The big question the course seeks to explore is, as the headline suggests, why do things change? Sometimes people conceptualize Futures simply as the study of change, but I don’t love this; maybe the study and practice of change is pretty close, because the two map reasonably well onto my own imagination/agency conceptualization of Futures skills4. By the end, we should be able to apply change theory to foresight content, like critiquing whether the change described in a scenario is plausible, etc.
Classifying Change
We can break down change in a couple of different ways. One is by type: categorizing the change according to something like the STEEP categories. The boundaries are certainly fuzzy, but note that each category of change has its own flavor and characteristics: technology changes tend to be cumulative whereas many economic changes are cyclical, political changes are more easily created by mass movements such as protest than technology or environmental changes, etc. Another way to break down change is to look at the rate and whether the change is incremental or transformational. Faster or discontinuous change causes more friction as it rubs up against the other parts of the system that used to deal with something different. Importantly, it’s important when discussing the rate of change to distinguish between how fast things have been changing in reality vs in your limited perception: for example, a technology like AI or 3D printing has been around for decades making steady improvements, and then one day it can do your homework or print ghost guns and people feel like it came out of nowhere5.
One key text for the course is Trevor Noble’s Social Change and Social Theory. Noble starts by exploring the questions that theories of change have to answer, and presenting examples of theorists on each side of each item in the taxonomy:
Is change endogenous or exogenous to society?
Is change inevitable/linear or contingent?
Which is more “real” as a unit of analysis — society or the individual?
Are the most important units of analysis things we can see or measure (like technology, traffic, etc) or invisible things like ideas and beliefs?
Can we be objective in our study, or are we bound to subjectivity by commitments we can’t escape?
Will we get further at understanding change by using logic and reason, or by measuring and observing reality?
Evaluating Specific Theories
As an example of what these look like in a particular theorist, here’s a short video about Max Weber. In his theory about capitalism being an outgrowth of Calvinist thinking, he describes the cultural attitudes that made economic change possible: a vague sense of guilt/anxiety about one’s standing before God, hard work as an attempt to atone for sin, the sense that all work is sacred, the elevation of the community over the family, and disenchantment, or the sense that the world has no magic/miracle/supernatural element6. Thus, it’s clear that Weber elevates ideas as a source of change, believes that change is mostly endogenous, and that change mostly takes place at the level of society. Weber also took a strong position on objectivity, noting that our beliefs and values will certainly influence the things we study and the questions we ask (value-relevance) but that no framing of reality is considered superior in that analysis (value-neutrality), and that the job of the scientist is to interpret the data without moral evaluation (value-free), so he was mostly on the positivism end of the fifth question above7.
But beyond this taxonomy, theories of change can differ quite a bit in their particulars. For an example, watch the first episode of James Burke’s classic Connections. In the story Burke tells and the connections he makes, an implicit theory of change is evident: technology is the major driving force in the world; technologies mostly come from other technologies, either by transfer of technology from one application to a related application (like the way that using ovens to bake bread leads to pottery) or by solving a problem created by a previous technology (like the way agriculture on the Nile led to the development of mathematics)8; and, presumably, our ability to pay attention and be curious/inventive is the hidden catalyst for all this change.
In contrast, look at Paul Graham Raven’s recent article about theories of change. He charts the history of theories about people changing behavior (OK so you can see the individual as the unit of analysis already) based on their incentives/conditions or their understanding/information. Then he states that effective theories of change need to, instead of treating individuals like a function of their environment, consider them to be meaningful agents who are complicit in co-creating the existing set of circumstances and who have the ability to choose differently. By now you know how much I center agency in the way I think about the world, so I’m excited to see where Raven takes this next.
Since I’m collecting theories throughout this semester, I’d love to hear from you — what do you feel is the key mechanism that drives change in our world?
I have no idea what order he would put them in.
He’s actually just two people to the left of me in the picture I posted of the event (apologies to Rich in the middle here):
My words, not his, in case you’re the one who developed or ran the prior iteration.
Program director Andy Hines splits the difference in defining
Foresight as the study of change that uses a systematic methodology to explore the future in order to make better decisions today by helping us move us toward the futures we want and avoid those we don’t, and to ultimately build confidence in the future by building our capacity to avoid surprise!
This brings up an interesting issue. AI progress, properly measured, seems to have been gradual over somewhere between 3 and 7 decades (technologically); and yet, when GPT-2 gave way to GPT-3 and then ChatGPT, something discontinuous happened (socially), and the last two years of AI disruption occurred. Which is the best way to see this change? How do we conceptualize layers of change like this? I’m hoping the course helps me think about this in a less confusing way.
Notably, if disenchantment paves the way for capitalism, and if, as I covered in my discussion of Strange Rites, Americans are actively working to re-enchant the world, what economic system might we be laying the groundwork for? Certainly not back to feudalism, because belief in external authority is at an all-time low, but maybe something new.
Not surprisingly, I am neither a sociologist nor a historian of sociology, so I could be doing a bad job understanding or describing these ideas. All the Weber-heads out there should feel free to correct me in the comments.
All of this Civ-tech-tree vibe being much less concerned with the individual than with the way societies are putting the pieces together.