by It’s about time that I got to Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (hereafter Macrohistory) edited by Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah. I suspected it covered ground similar to what we do in Houston Foresight as “Social Change” class. Indeed, in my view, they are similar if not synonymous. Macrohistory came out in 1997. Our Social Change course was developed by Peter Bishop 
shortly after I graduated in 1990.
The definition of macrohistory –the study of the histories of social systems, along separate trajectories, in search of patterns….focused on stages of history and the causes of change through time – fits with my sense of what we are talking about in social change class.
It was interesting that the authors Macrohistory asked upfront why there is so little of study of it. When Peter wrote the Social Change chapter in Teaching about the Future, he the raised the same question about why so little social change is taught.
The Macrohistory approach is interesting in focusing primarily on the theoreticians. They review the ideas of 20 big thinkers on the topic and look for commonalities/themes. We came at it from the others side, if you will, in that we started with the theories – originally 8 and now 10 — and look to the theoreticians for support and examples.
Macrohistory sees the shape of change described by its macrohistorians as either linear or cyclical. We divide the linear into two of our ten theories: progress and development. Progress, as the name implies suggests the direction is toward things getting better – development suggests a common direction toward greater complexity over time, but takes out the judgement of whether it is better or not. We also have cycle theory as one of our ten, but I would say that Macrohistory puts more emphasis on this than we do. This is likely due to the views of the macrohistorians that were profiled. I think it’s fair to say it also reflects a high-level East vs West difference, with cycles more a part of Eastern thinking and linear more a part of Western – a matter of emphasis, really.
One theoretician’s idea on the shape of change was described as oscillating and the idea of a spiral approach is present as well. One idea we might add to the shape of change is “none.” We don’t have a separate theory on that, although our evolution theory comes closest to saying that. We in part distinguish development and evolution by saying there is no inherent direction to evolution – it is an ongoing interaction between the social and the environment that may go one way or another. [That said, one of alums, John Smart, suggests that evolution follows a development track with his evo-devo theory.] The same might also be true of our emergence theory — change arises from the interaction of agents pursuing their individual goals in a system of other agents – in that no direction is suggested.
I enjoyed reading the ideas of the thinkers: Chi’en, Augustine, Khaldun, Vico, Smith, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Spencer, Pareto, Weber, Steiner, Spengler, Teilhard de Chardin, Sorokin, Toynbee, Gramsci, Sarkar, Eisler, Gaia (Lovelock). And there are several chapters after the presentation of their ideas that interpret them. An appendix depicting each of the 20 in a summary graphic was quite useful. I ended up with several pages of notes, and it took a while to read, as I was continually pausing to reflect. Social Change and Macrohistory are useful to us in terms of providing clues to where a view about the future is coming from, that is, what theory of change is influencing their perspective, rather than providing predictive or forecasting power. My own work, for instance, is from a development perspective and is strongly influenced by the role of ideas, as evidenced by my work on values. I think it is useful not only for audiences using our work to know this, but also for us as practitioners to be aware of our own tendencies. Andy Hines
Hi Dr. Hines, thank you for sharing this with us. I want you to know that I appreciate all of your posts so much. Cindy Frewen was my social change instructor. She is an awesome instructor , as are all of the Foresight instructors at UH. During her course I realized how much drivers and influencers have been important in creating social & political change throughout history. It seems to me, however, that change and the conflict it sometimes creates was a much slower process in the past. A much more gradual process. I’m not sure today that a large percentage of the population realizes how much society is changing, how fast it is changing and in which direction it is changing. All the components of change in the past are present today: new technology in some form or another, new knowledge and ideas, clashing religions & beliefs, different cultural interaction, etc.. BUT (forgive the grammatical error of starting a sentence like that) all of these components are so much more amplified and speedily distributed into society now. They are not “seeping” in and slowly spread into communities as before. I wonder how many in our society today are going to be able to absorb the influx of change at such a fast pace enough to survive and thrive. This causes me to worry about how volatile the conflict stage will be in our time.
Greetings!
You’ve mentioned some powerful theorists, Andy! Since I started working toward a PhD in Sociology, I’ve had the opportunity to read some of Comte, Marx, Weber, and Sorokin. Additionally, I’ve read some of Durkheim, Simmel and Tonnies as well., all of whom have had important things to say about social change. One of the things that has become apparent to me in the process is that all sociological theory has an element of social change to it, even if only implicitly. Sociological theories describing society is in the present tell us that society is the way it is because of some particular factor or combination of factors. if we change that factor or those factors, we change society and, in the process, the future.
Right now, I’m working through a course in stratification which, among other theorists, brings Durkheim back into my intellectual life. In looking at neo-Durkheimian class analysis, Grusky notes that Durkheim’s theory in The Division of Labor in Society was rooted in action at “the site of production”, and was thus a micro-level class theory. To the extent that what works at the micro-level works upward and is included in the macro and global levels of society, it seems to me that we need to be aware of social change that occurs at the micro level: it’s not just macro level processes that matter.
Joyce, you wrote, “BUT (forgive the grammatical error of starting a sentence like that) all of these components are so much more amplified and speedily distributed into society now. They are not “seeping” in and slowly spread into communities as before. I wonder how many in our society today are going to be able to absorb the influx of change at such a fast pace enough to survive and thrive.” In rereading my notes from my Classical Sociological Theory course, I see that Weber and Tonnies both wrote about the pace of change in their times. I also see that Weber and Tonnies wrote about the adaptations people made about the rate of change. I’m inclined to believe that we will successfully adapt to changes that seem earth shattering but really aren’t. Futureshock isn’t a new phenomenon, and most of the changes that seem to be systemic probably aren’t either. Things that seem to go by at a bewildering rate to us represent the normal rate of change to the latest generation.