Change is the most defining characteristic of the world in which we live. Change is a constant factor in human beings’ natural environment, in our relationships with our surroundings, in our relationships with other people, and in our relationships with our own inner selves. Change influences humans’ lives in a myriad of direct and indirect ways, and is viewed by scholars according to a range of varying perspectives. The purpose of this discussion is to develop a personal and professional understanding of the meaning of the term “societal development,” in general; and to consider specific factors that contribute to social and cultural change.
In order to develop an understanding of the meaning of “societal development,” social change theories of Charles Horton Cooley, Tamara Haraven, Beth Rubin and Lev Vygotsky will be compared, contrasted, and analyzed. The selected works of these scholars reflect sociological and psychological perspectives that will shape this discussion, and include both historical and contemporary views. More specifically, these theories will be considered as they relate to the changing nature of the American family.
Understanding societal development is predicated upon a more basic understanding: What, exactly, is “society”? Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1964, p. 37) offers an insightful illustration of the shifting perspectives needed in order to fully understand the concept of society. Cooley explains that society can be seen as the general-as collections of individuals, as groups; but he also observes that any group is a very different prospect if its individual members are viewed separately. As an example, Cooley states that an approaching army would be perceived very differently by an observer than would be the individual soldiers of which that army was composed. Both viewpoints are essential to understanding the whole.
In the same way, a picture is made up of so many inches of painted canvas; but if you should look at these one at a time, covering the others, until you had seen them all, you would still not have seen the picture. There may, in all such cases, be a system or organization in the whole that is not apparent in the parts. In this sense, and in no other, is there a difference between society and the individuals of which it is composed; a difference not residing in the facts themselves but existing to the observer on account of the limits of his perception. A complete view of society would also be a complete view of all the individuals, and vice versa; there would be no difference between them. (p. 37)
In keeping with this idea that a true understanding of society includes study of both the small and the big pictures, the theorists under consideration in this discussion offer ideas along a continuum of perspectives: from the very specific, focusing on the individual; to the very broad, inclusive view of the relationships inherent in human systems and organizations.
It is from this understanding of the shifting nature of the study of people that a working definition of societal change is generated. For the purpose of this discussion, the working definition of the term “societal development” will be: Societal development refers to the continually evolving nature of the interactions that characterize human relationships. These relationships include those among and within groups of people, between individuals, and within an individual’s own inner self. Discussion of the theorists’ views on societal change will begin by proceeding sequentially along this continuum–from the views of Lev Vygotsky and C. H. Cooley, who focus most particularly on the influences which shape the human and social development of individuals; to the slightly broader analysis of Tamara Hareven, who considers the interaction of the individual to the family under changing historical conditions; to the still wider perspective of Beth Rubin, who examines relationships between and among the family and social systems. In this way, a synthesis of the perspectives presented may form the basis of a personal understanding of the changing nature of society and of the American family; an understanding which draws from insights along a range of viewpoints, allowing for an appreciation of the beauty and power of the big picture as well as of the brilliance and contribution of the individual brushstrokes of which it is composed.
Perspectives on Societal Development
The work of Lev Vygotsky, a seminal thinker in the field of developmental psychology, focuses specifically on the development of the human individual, which he held to be a socially-mediated process during which a child is transformed, through his interactions with others, from a feeling, reacting organism to a thinking, planning member of the society in which he lives (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 94). This was, in Vygotsky’s view, a transformation rooted in the child’s culture and engendered through the uniquely human use of spoken language (1978, p. 24). Such importance is ascribed to the role of spoken language that Vygotsky states that “the most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously independent lines of development, converge” (p. 24).
Spoken language is thus not only a means for social communication; it becomes a necessary prerequisite to a child’s ability to plan, to problem solve, to think. And, speech, it is noted, exists first and foremost as a social behavior taking place between the child and the people in his environment–his family members (Vygotsky, 1986, p.34).
From the very first days of the child’s development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behavior and, being directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child’s environment. The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. The complex human structure is the product of the developmental process deeply rooted in the links between individual and social history. (1978, p. 30)
The child’s attribution of meaning to his behavior goes beyond simple problem solving. Indeed, language and perception, itself, are seen to be linked (p. 33), allowing human beings to perceive objects that are meaningful.
Vygotsky observes that humans do not perceive through shape, color, and texture alone: We would not, for example, perceive only an object that is round and black and hard (as an animal might), but would identify the object as a clock, which we recognize and which performs a function we understand. This ability to intellectually categorize our sensory perceptions is a result of the impact of spoken language on our thought processes (p. 33). How powerful, then, is the influence of the family’s cultural and social understandings upon the individual that this child will grow to become? If language, rooted in the social interactions within the family, is the very foundation of the way that the child comes to perceive and interact with his world, then its role is immensely significant in determining how that child will develop into a functioning member of his society.
At this juncture, it becomes obvious that the previously discussed idea of a continuum of perspectives, from the specific to the broad, for considering societal development is insufficient to account for the complexity of the task. For, considering Vygotsky’s theories of human development, one can see that the influence does not proceed in only one direction. Not only will the individual influence the greater society of which he becomes a member, but the greater society and culture of which his family is a part will also have an enormous amount of influence on the manner in which the individual develops into an adult. More a cycle than a linear continuum, this mutual influence contributes to both who a child will become and how he will interact with and affect others as a part of his world.
Cooley (1962, p. 4) supports the conception of mutual
influence between individuals and the greater social order, promoting the view that society is not an agreement among individuals but a function of their organized interaction with each other and that “reciprocal influence” results in a world in “which everything that takes place...is connected with everything else, and so is an outcome of the whole.” Where Vygotsky’s work revealed the enormous importance of social interaction for the development of the individual, Cooley builds on this idea in considering how individuals interact with each other, and with themselves. Indeed, Cooley supports the view that humans are, even in thought, hard-pressed to consider themselves except as a part of a larger social group.
Social consciousness, or awareness of society, is inseparable from self-consciousness, because we can hardly think of ourselves excepting with reference to a social group of some sort, or of the group except with reference to ourselves. The two things go together, and what we are really aware of is a more or less complex personal or social whole, of which now the particular, now the general, aspect is emphasized (1962, p. 5).
Personal experience bears out Cooley’s observation: Ask individuals to identify who they are and the answers will invariably come back as some variation of, “I am a wife, husband, mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, friend, nurse, teacher, soldier.” We define ourselves through our relationships with others.
Among these relationships, Cooley (p. 26) counts family and neighborhood groups as “primary groups,” and holds that they provide the individual “his earliest and completest experience of social unity.” This conception supports the work of Vygotsky in the significance it places upon the interactions that take place between child and family members. In fact, Cooley describes our very human nature as being developed only through “those simple face-to-face groups that are somewhat alike in all societies; groups of the family, the playground, and the neighborhood....In these, everywhere, human nature comes into existence” (p. 30).
Even as the influence of society at large, and the family in particular, shapes the individual; so too does the family, itself, play a role in the shaping of the larger culture in which it is positioned. The work of social historian Tamara Hareven builds neatly upon the foundation laid by Vygotsky and Cooley. Hareven considers the family to be “the ‘missing link’ between individual lives and the larger processes of social change” (2000, p. xv), and has undertaken a life-course approach to understanding the relationships between individuals and the family as a collective unit (p. xvii).
Hareven rejects conceptions in which the family is portrayed as a passive object upon which social change is enacted. Rather, she presents the family as an active agent, playing a central role in the larger processes of social change due to the family’s function as “an arena in which many of the relations between individuals and social change are acted out. The family also serves as a broker between individuals, institutions, and social change” (2000, p.321).
Hareven’s work neither contradicts nor negates that of Cooley and Vygotsky, but simply differs in its focus, examining the function of the family as a collective unit with its own unique set of strategies and responses to the pressures and opportunities of its surrounding environment. These strategies have led, in many instances, not only to a transformation of the family by the larger forces of society, but also to reciprocal change in the greater social, economic, and political systems and organizations by virtue of the family’s interaction with them. Where Vygotsky and Cooley have contributed to the concept of the individual, as influenced by the culture in which his family operates; Hareven adds an additional dimension by providing a platform from which the individual also exerts influence upon the greater social structures and processes-and that platform is the family.
Hareven (2000, p. 23) cites the importance of the timing and decisions inherent in such familial choices as “when to send a son or daughter to another community...; when to join other kin; and when to change residence.” Families are described as having purposeful strategies that help them to face decision-making in life situations including “calculated trade-offs in order to find employment, achieve solvency, buy a house, facilitate children’s education or their occupational advancement...” Such strategic choices, shaped by the family’s values, culture and tradition, have the potential to affect social and economic structures.
Offering a still-wider perspective, sociologist Beth Rubin analyzes the dynamics of interrelationships among the large forces of society; paying particular attention to the roles of the economy and the workplace, and the impact that their fluctuations may have upon American society. In Rubin’s view, much of the change and turmoil of America’s twentieth century is centered in shifts in the nature and availability of work (1996, p. 7). She maintains that the declining levels of security and stability offered by the workplace have profound results upon how individuals and families live their lives. While Rubin’s view differs from Hareven’s in its focus on the impact of major social institutions, rather than on the power of the family to adapt to and affect change; both theorists embrace the idea that what is truly important in the arena of social change are the individual people who must come to terms with the conditions that influence their day-to-day choices.
The work of Vygotsky, Cooley, Hareven, and Rubin differ markedly in their perspectives and approaches to studying the nature of social change; however, these differences do not indicate disagreement or discrepancy. Rather, the inclusion of varying viewpoints offers a richer vantage point from which to consider the complex nature of what is meant by the terms “society” and “societal development.” Certainly, it seems evident that the individual, the family, and the larger social systems and organizations which they form all have dynamic, interwoven, and influential roles to play.
Family in a Changing Society
Beginning with Rubin’s wide “macro-level” view, this portion of the discussion intertwines related threads from each of the theorists considered here. While societal change is considered at various levels, particular attention is paid to the evolving role and composition of the modern American family in our changing society.
Rubin (1996, p. 4) argues that our society is in a state of transition, and in particular that “contemporary American society is changing from a social world characterized by long-term, stable relationships to one characterized by short-term, temporary relationships.” This transformation of the nature of social relationships she attributes directly to changes in the economy, as it adapts itself to emphasize flexibility rather than stability in its use of resources, resulting in what Rubin terms “shifts in the social contract” (p. 6). In order to understand Rubin’s claims, it is first necessary to consider what social contracts are and just how they may be seen as shifting.
Rubin’s premise (1996, p. 6) is based upon the nature of supply and demand that operates in a market economy, such as that of the United States. In such a marketplace, both implicit and explicit contracts underlie exchanges between individuals and groups. An example of an explicit contract might be a written document in which one person agrees to trade a certain amount of one resource (money, for example) for a certain amount of a different resource (say, fresh fruit) from another person. An implicit contract, “understood but unspecified” (p.6), might be that the buyer would be expected to pay only if the fruit were fresh, ripe, and free from disease.
Rubin (p. 7) contends that many institutions in American society operate on explicit and implicit contracts that mirror the regulation of fair trade in the marketplace. Examples of some of these might be the explicit “contract” between a man and a woman as represented by a marriage license; an implicit contract in which a wife and husband negotiate equitable division of household and career responsibilities; and the “historically implicit contract between children and their parents” in which parents nurture and support their children and in return, might expect their children to care for them when they are no longer able to do so themselves. “Like the fair exchange that occurs in the market, the implicit contract across generations also has assumed a similarly fair exchange” (p. 7).
For many years, economic prosperity and wealth created from post-World War II investments and expansion contributed to the fulfillment of the American Dream, in which anyone, through hard work, education, luck and motivation could achieve a good job, a home, and a happy family (p. 8). The economic successes of those times allowed for rapid expansion of both blue collar and white collar businesses, providing many Americans with good jobs, regardless of their level of education. Unions further added to the stability of industrial workers’ jobs by negotiating protections, seniority protocols and benefits. Women who had filled in for men in many jobs during the war returned to the home, as men coming back from war filled those positions; and the breadwinner-homemaker model became dominant for the working-class family, as well as for the middle class, due to the fact that even blue collar jobs paid well enough to allow a single income to provide for a family. During this time, families became much more focused on parenting as an end in itself (as opposed to as a means for increasing the labor capacity, and therefore the income of, the family). Families became, as well, major units of mass consumption, as available credit and a flourishing economy led to a rush to participate in the lifestyles portrayed on television by the purchase of cars, homes, furniture, and appliances (p. 98).
Hareven (1987), also notes that the family’s functions and values underwent key changes during this time frame. “The family has turned inward, assuming domesticity, intimacy, and privacy as its major characteristics as well as ideals, and the home is viewed as a retreat from the outside world” (p. xvi). Hareven explains that the “preindustrial family served as a workshop, church, reformatory, school, and asylum”, but that these functions began, during this period, to be relinquished to other social institutions, allowing the family to focus its attentions chiefly on consumption and the nurturing of children.
Herein lies the basis for the implicit social contract that existed between workers and industry from approximately 1945 to 1970, which Rubin labels “the labor-capital accord”: During the era of mass production manufacturing, there was a basic understanding–an implicit social contract–in which workers, in exchange for being productive, loyal, and dependable, could expect jobs that were well-paid and secure (p. 27). However, the nature of industry began to shift as businesses began to face rising costs and international competition, as well as to diversify rather than to develop and produce new products. These factors led to decreasing profits and motivated business owners to begin exploring new ways to maintain profitability.
One result was that business owners sought to reduce the cost of labor through weakening the influence of unions, by strategic use of bankruptcy proceedings, through relocating and/or restructuring, and through globalization made possible by emerging technological innovations (p. 41). The effects of these corporate strategies upon the American worker, and hence the American family, were great. The breadwinner-homemaker model for family life, with its gender-based division of labor (he earned the wages, and she cooked, cleaned, reared the children, and managed the home and the family’s social life) was threatened by the fact that jobs no longer offered long-term, stable employment. As business sought to become more specialized and flexible, it required workers that were also specialized through being highly trained in specific areas, and flexible enough to travel where the work was. The implicit social contract that rewarded loyal, productive workers with secure, well-paying employment was breaking down (Rubin, p. 61).
Other factors began to have an impact on the traditional family structure, as well. Hareven (2000) noted that the domestic, privatized family of the industrial age “became child-centered, and motherhood emerged as a full-time career” (p. 25). However, that situation began to change as “in increasing numbers, highly educated women in the suburbs, frustrated with the limitations of the homemaker role, sought access not only to traditional women’s jobs (teachers, secretaries, nurses) but also the professions (medicine, law, management)” (Rubin, 1996, p. 100). The addition of married women and women with young children to the female work force resulted in greater competition for positions, and in a greater level of consumption within a family model that now often included two bread-winners. However, the luxury of having two wage earners in the household became, in the 1960’s, a necessity, due to a period of rapid price increases that made the family’s established standard of living more difficult to maintain (p. 101).
Changing gender roles combined with other challenges to existing values and beliefs in a time that became characterized by greater emphasis on the needs, desires, and equality of individuals, regardless of their gender, nationality, or sexual orientation. A demand for the freedom to choose, and greater levels of permissiveness in many areas added to the turbulent and rapidly shifting nature of the relationships upon which our society was based. Cooley points out the inherent risk that can accompany increased levels of personal freedom:
Choice is like a river; it broadens as it comes down through history...and the wider it becomes the more persons drown in it. Stronger and stronger swimming is required, and types of character that lack vigor and self-reliance are more and more likely to go under. (1964, p. 76)
As tendencies toward individualism, based upon choices made by separate family members (rather than by the family as a whole), advanced, changes to the structure and values of the family, itself, were inevitable.
Though writing several generations before Rubin’s work was undertaken, Cooley (1962) had already documented a similar line of thought in relation to the individual basis for decision-making: “Among the phases of this domestic ‘individualism’...are a declining birth-rate..., some lack of discipline and respect in children, a growing independence of women accompanied by alleged neglect of the family, and in increase of divorce” (p. 358). Hareven (2000), as well, decries emphasis on individualism to the exclusion of the good of the family, saying that families in America “have been experiencing their members’ increasing preference to follow individual priorities and preferences over collective family needs. The major historical change from a view of the family collectively to one of individualization...has caused a...lag in the family’s adaptability” (p. 309).
Increasingly, individuals placed priority on their own careers and lifestyle choices, independent of the needs of the family at large. “Consequently, the timing of life transitions has become more individualized and subject to personal choice rather than to collective family needs” (Hareven, 2000, p. 100), and the long-term marriage contract between a husband and wife has declined in value and prominence, as has the value placed on parenting by society. “In the absence of work accommodation to parenting needs, negotiating work and family has become increasingly unwieldy” (Rubin, 1996, p. 180), and this can present an even greater challenge, depending upon the level of society in which a worker’s job places him or her.
Rubin (p. 104) proposes that the flexible economy is evolving into a two-tier system comprised of a primary and a secondary labor market. The primary labor market, which is shrinking in size, is composed of highly-skilled, educated professionals, experts, and technicians. Only families with one or more workers participating in this primary (or core) labor market can afford to maintain the traditional gendered nuclear family model. Other upper-middle class families must depend upon two incomes in order to maintain financial security. Business demands upon workers to be geographically mobile place additional pressures on these families, resulting in long-distance marriages (For example, one in which a spouse travels for work during the week and comes home on the weekend), as well as in the “hiring out” of services that have traditionally been the province of the woman of the house, particularly housekeeping, gardening, and child care. Another outcome of the competitive nature of the primary labor market is the postponement of childbearing by women workers, to avoid the possibility of risking career advancement opportunities.
If pressures of the flexible economy have had impact on the families of primary labor workers, the family lives of workers in the secondary labor market are even more acutely affected. This market is comprised of workers who fill part-time, temporary, or contingent jobs, mainly centered upon service rather than production. Such jobs generally pay substantially less well than those of the primary labor market, and so these working class families are unable to pay others to perform services such as housekeeping and yard maintenance, leaving the parents to “scramble to accomplish tasks both in and outside of the home” (Rubin, p. 106). The strain of these changes are more debilitating for some families than for others:
For some families, the pressures caused by deindustrialization, employment uncertainty, and increasing reliance on female employment have resulted in family breakup, alcohol abuse, and violence (see, for example, the study by Perrucci et al., 1988, on the consequences of plant closings). For these families economic stress severs the bonds of intimacy and support that families provide. (p. 106)
Even more grim are the effects of economic change for those whose families were already financially disadvantaged,
particularly those living in urban areas, where the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs has led to entrenched poverty.
For the urban underclass, few opportunities for employment capable of supporting a family exist, often leading to fractured and unstable family structures, including unwed teenage mothers, and absentee fathers. Added to that condition are “the antifamily nature of welfare state provisions (highest benefits go to those with no breadwinner, thus discouraging husbands and boyfriends from staying in the house)” which only worsen conditions for this group, especially for women (Rubin, p. 110). Indeed, the number of impoverished female-headed households more than doubled between the years of 1969 and 1990, due to a range of factors including teen pregnancy, low wages for female occupations, unstable and temporary jobs, divorce, and welfare policies (p. 110). This “feminization of poverty” indicates that the flexible economy represents a challenge to female-headed households and the children who are born into them (p. 111).
Cooley (1962, p. 255) might disagree with Rubin’s economy-based perspective for explaining the social changes wrought in modern America’s families, as his writings make clear that he considered an economic view of social change to be but one of many stand-points from which to consider the matter. However, Cooley does concede that income “classifies people through creating different standards of living, those who fall into about the same class in this respect being likely to adopt about the same external mode of life” (p. 255). Given that Cooley wrote his essays on the nature of social order when President Lincoln was in office, it may be proposed that Cooley, had he had the opportunity to be present for the industrial and post-industrial periods of American life, might have attributed a greater weight to the impact made by such forceful economic factors.
Hareven’s (2000) historical view of the family as an agent of social change, rather than simply an object upon which such change is carried out, nevertheless acknowledges that “labor turnover, voluntary or nonvoluntary, has dramatized the vulnerability of workers as a continuing social phenomenon” (p. 321). This vulnerability is based on the fact that a lack of stability in work life has become the norm, and that this lack of security and stability in career life holds implications in the larger society. Still, Hareven’s view differs from Rubin’s in its emphasis on the principle that family strategies are “not guided strictly by economic need,” but by the family’s cultural and moral values as well. She points out that in deciding upon strategies to address issues “such as children’s or wives’ labor or family expenditure patterns, even economically marginal families did not always make the most prudent choices, from a purely economic point of view, if such choices were inconsistent with their own cultural values” (p. 325).
Vygotsky, alone of our four theorists, remains largely silent on topics relating to the causes of social and family change, which is consistent with his focused concentration on issues related to the human development of individuals. However, Vygotsky’s work was predicated on beliefs that all phenomena should “be studied as processes in motion and change”, and that “historical changes in society and material life produce changes in ‘human nature’” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 7), ideas which are clearly compatible with those supported by Rubin, Hareven, and Cooley, in which human beings are transformed by the choices they make in response the circumstances in which they find themselves; and in turn, transform others through the impact of those same choices.
Conclusions/Implications
A synthesis of ideas regarding the nature of social change, as seen through the varying lenses of Vygotsky, Cooley, Hareven, and Rubin, results in a conception based upon an intricate interweaving of mutual influences. Vygotsky’s work reveals that individuals are influenced from birth through their social interactions with their families and caregivers. These linguistically-mediated relationships are in turn rooted in the culture and historical social setting in which the family lives. At the same time, individuals also influence the lives of others with whom they interact: “Certainly everything that I say or think is influenced by what others have said or thought, and, in one way or another, sends out an influence of its own in turn” (Cooley, 1962, p. 4). On a slightly larger scale, Hareven presents a recognition of the family as an historically crucial link between the individual and the greater institutions and systems of society: “How the family both initiates and adapts to change and...translates the impact of larger structural changes into its own sphere are issues governing the richest area of intersection between the family and the process of social change” (2000, p. 18). Finally, Rubin provides an overview of the manner in which the large processes of social systems, particularly the economy and the conditions of workplace, exert a tremendous amount influence on the life strategies of both individuals and families as collective wholes.
The shifting nature of the theorists viewpoints, when composed into a whole, creates a conception that is greater than any of its individual parts. An understanding which values both the power of the individual to affect his world, as well as respecting the greater social process that shape individuals’ lives, holds important implications for further study and action. Given the complex, powerful, and reciprocal influences between individuals, families, and greater social organizations, it becomes apparent that reaching out to family members for the provision of any type of service must first take into account the life histories, needs, and preferences of those families. Families today are under tremendous pressure to maintain security and stability both inside the home, and in their working lives. Strategies designed to offer services intended to be helpful to them must be predicated upon an understanding and sensitivity to their individual and family needs.
The Depth component of this Core Knowledge Area Module demonstration will seek to build upon the understanding of social change created here. The demonstration will center on analyzing current research to determine the impact that social change and the dynamic nature of the modern family has upon the transmission of knowledge and cultural ideals, particularly as this transmission pertains to communication through linguistic interaction. In addition, the discussion will integrate those findings regarding social change issues as they apply to families whose young children have special needs.