Ecological-evolutionary Theory
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Ecological-evolutionary Theory
Ecological-evolutionary theory (EET) is a sociological theory of sociocultural evolution that attempts to explain the origin and changes of society and culture.Elwell (2013), p.92 Key elements focus on the importance of natural environment and technological change. EET has been described as a theory of social stratification, as it analyzes how stratification has changed through time across different societies. It also has been viewed as a synthesis of the structural functionalism and conflict theory. Proposed by Gerhard Lenski, the theory perhaps is best articulated in his book, ''Ecological-Evolutionary Theory: Principles and Applications'' (2005).Elwell (2013), p.91 His major collaborators, Jean Lenski and Patrick Nolan, also are said to have contributed to EET. Theory Lenski notes that society and culture evolve through symbols, which makes this process much more rapid, deliberative, and purposeful, compared to biological evolution. However, just like in the biological survival ...
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Sociological Theory
A sociological theory is a that intends to consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality from a sociological perspective,Macionis, John and Linda M. Gerber. 2010. ''Sociology'' (7th Canadian ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. . drawing connections between individual concepts in order to organize and substantiate sociological knowledge. Hence, such knowledge is composed of complex theoretical frameworks and methodology. These theories range in scope, from concise, yet thorough, descriptions of a single social process to broad, inconclusive paradigm In science and philosophy, a paradigm () is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. Etymology ''Paradigm'' comes f ...s for analysis and interpretation. Some sociological theories explain aspects of the social world and enable prediction about future events, while others fu ...
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Agrarian Society
An agrarian society, or agricultural society, is any community whose economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland. Another way to define an agrarian society is by seeing how much of a nation's total production is in agriculture. In an agrarian society, cultivating the land is the primary source of wealth. Such a society may acknowledge other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses the importance of agriculture and farming. Agrarian societies have existed in various parts of the world as far back as 10,000 years ago and continue to exist today. They have been the most common form of socio-economic organization for most of recorded human history. History Agrarian society were preceded by hunters and gatherers and horticultural societies and transition into industrial society. The transition to agriculture, called the Neolithic Revolution, has taken place independently multiple times. Horticulture and agriculture as types of subsistence developed among h ...
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Neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism as a social theory attempts to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution while discarding some dogmas of the previous theories of social evolutionism. Neoevolutionism is concerned with long-term, directional, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures. Sociological neoevolutionism emerged in the 1930s. It developed extensively in the period after the Second World War—and was incorporated into anthropology as well as into sociology in the 1960s. Neoevolutionary theories are based on empirical evidence from fields such as archaeology, paleontology, and historiography. Proponents say neoevolutionism is objective and simply descriptive, eliminating any references to a moral or cultural system of values. While the 19th-century cultural evolutionism attempted to explain how culture develops by describing general principles of its evoluti ...
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Accelerating Change
In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change. Early observations In 1910, during the town planning conference of London, Daniel Burnham noted, "But it is not merely in the number of facts or sorts of knowledge that progress lies: it is still more in the geometric ratio of sophistication, in the geometric widening of the sphere of knowledge, which every year is taking in a larger percentage of people as time goes on." And later on, "It is the argument with which I began, that a mighty change having come about in fifty years, and our pace of development having immensely accelerated, our sons and grandsons are going to demand and get results that would stagger us." In 1938, Buckminster Fuller introduced the word ephemeraliza ...
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Disruptive Technologies
In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The concept was developed by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, and has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans generalized this term to identify disruptive science and technological advances from more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014. Their work was featured as the cover of the February 2019 issue of ''Nature'' and was selected as the Altmetric 100 most-discussed work in 2019. Not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. For example, the first automobiles in the late 19th century were not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive ...
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Social Inequality
Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. It posses and creates gender cap between individuals that limits the accessibility that women have within society. the differentiation preference of access of social goods in the society brought about by power, religion, kinship, prestige, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and class. Social inequality usually implies the lack of equality of outcome, but may alternatively be conceptualized in terms of the lack of equality of access to opportunity. This accompanies the way that inequality is presented throughout social economies and the rights that are skilled within this basis. The social rights include labor market, the source of income, health care, and freedom of speech, education, political representation, and participation. Social inequality is link ...
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Cultural Diffusion
In cultural anthropology and cultural geography, cultural diffusion, as conceptualized by Leo Frobenius in his 1897/98 publication ''Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis'', is the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages—between individuals, whether within a single culture or from one culture to another. It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and iron smelting in ancient times, and the use of automobiles and Western business suits in the 20th century. Types Five major types of cultural diffusion have been defined: * Expansion diffusion: an innovation or idea that develops in a source area and remains strong there, while also spreading outward to other areas. This can include hierarchical, stimulus, and contagious diffusion. * Relocation diffusion: an idea or innovation that migrates into new areas, leaving behind its origin or source of the cult ...
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Resource Depletion
Resource depletion is the consumption of a resource faster than it can be replenished. Natural resources are commonly divided between renewable resources and non-renewable resources (see also mineral resource classification). Use of either of these forms of resources beyond their rate of replacement is considered to be resource depletion. The value of a resource is a direct result of its availability in nature and the cost of extracting the resource, the more a resource is depleted the more the value of the resource increases. There are several types of resource depletion, the most known being: Aquifer depletion, deforestation, mining for fossil fuels and minerals, pollution or contamination of resources, slash-and-burn agricultural practices, soil erosion, and overconsumption, excessive or unnecessary use of resources. Resource depletion is most commonly used in reference to farming, fishing, mining, water usage, and consumption of fossil fuels. Depletion of wildlife popul ...
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Division Of Labor
The division of labour is the separation of the tasks in any economic system or organisation so that participants may specialise (specialisation). Individuals, organizations, and nations are endowed with, or acquire specialised capabilities, and either form combinations or trade to take advantage of the capabilities of others in addition to their own. Specialised capabilities may include equipment or natural resources as well as skills, and training and combinations of such assets acting together are often important. For example, an individual may specialise by acquiring tools and the skills to use them effectively just as an organization may specialise by acquiring specialised equipment and hiring or training skilled operators. The division of labour is the motive for trade and the source of economic interdependence. Historically, an increasing division of labour is associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and the increasing complexity of ...
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Natural Law
Natural law ( la, ius naturale, ''lex naturalis'') is a system of law based on a close observation of human nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of positive law (the express enacted laws of a state or society). According to natural law theory (called jusnaturalism), all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason." Natural law theory can also refer to "theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality." In the Western tradition, it was anticipated by the pre-Socratics, for example in their search for principles that governed the cosmos and human beings. The concept of natural law was documented in ancient Greek philosophy, including Aristotle, and was referred to in ancient Roman philosophy by Cicero. References to it are also to be found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and were later expou ...
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Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in ''Principles of Biology'' (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book ''On the Origin of Species''. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism. Riggenbach, Jeff (24 April 2011The Real William Graham Sumner, Mises Institute. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolutionism, evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, a ...
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Thomas Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus (; 13/14 February 1766 – 29 December 1834) was an English cleric, scholar and influential economist in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book '' An Essay on the Principle of Population'', Malthus observed that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to utilize abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the "Malthusian trap" or the "Malthusian spectre". Populations had a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to war famine and disease, a pessimistic view that is sometimes referred to as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe tha ...
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