“Science and Technology are major forces accelerating the process of social change.” Comment. (2011)
The statement makes a claim about rate, not about cause. It says science and technology compress the time in which social change occurs — and that is largely defensible. It becomes indefensible only if read as saying they also decide the direction of change, or that every part of society speeds up together.
Why the claim holds: pace and scale
- William F. Ogburn (Social Change, 1922) supplied the mechanism of acceleration in his idea of the exponential growth of the culture base: the larger the existing stock of inventions, the greater the number of combinations from which new inventions can be made. Invention therefore multiplies rather than adds, and diffusion carries it outward faster at each round.
- Hartmut Rosa (Social Acceleration, 2005; English edition 2013) distinguishes three linked speeds — technical acceleration, the acceleration of social change itself (institutions, occupations and relationships now change within a single lifetime rather than across generations), and the acceleration of the pace of life. Modernity, on his reading, is defined by this escalation.
- India illustrates the compression. More than 200 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses were delivered within roughly eighteen months of the programme’s launch in January 2021, coordinated through a national digital registry — a mobilisation of the population that no earlier administrative technology could have achieved at that speed.
But acceleration is uneven: cultural lag
- Ogburn’s decisive point was that acceleration is differential. Material culture changes faster than the adaptive culture of law, custom and belief, and the interval of maladjustment is cultural lag — which is where social problems collect.
- Indian instances are current. Platform work scaled for a decade before Rajasthan’s Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023 and Karnataka’s law of 2025 began to regulate it. Personal data had been commercially exploited for years before the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose rules were notified only in November 2025; India’s first AI governance guidelines appeared the same month, long after the technology had diffused.
- The concept has limits. Deciding which element is “lagging” involves a value judgement about what ought to adjust, and Ogburn’s framework tends to assume, rather than demonstrate, that the material element is the independent variable.
What technology alone cannot do
- It changes techniques faster than it changes values. Mechanised sewer-cleaning equipment exists, yet the government told Parliament that 498 people died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between 2019 and mid-2026, because the work remains caste-assigned. The obstacle is the social relation, not the machine.
- M. N. Srinivas showed the characteristic Indian pattern: Westernisation of technique coexists with Sanskritisation of ritual, so new means are enlisted to serve older status goals.
- Identical technologies produce opposite outcomes in different structures, which is precisely what a force acting alone could not do.
Conclusion
The statement is right about speed and incomplete about causation. Science and technology are accelerators: they shorten the interval between an idea and its social consequences, and they widen the scale at which consequences spread. What direction that change takes — greater equality or deeper stratification — is settled by property, politics and values, which is why the lag Ogburn identified is the real site of sociological work.