Examine any two theories of social change in detail. (2017)
Two theories are worth examining together because they answer one question in opposite ways. Evolutionary theory locates the engine of change inside society, in its own growing complexity; dependency theory locates it outside, in a society’s position within a world economy.
I. Evolutionary theory
- The claim. Societies move from simple and undifferentiated to complex and differentiated forms. Herbert Spencer traced a passage from simple to compound, doubly and trebly compound types through differentiation and integration, and from militant to industrial societies.
- Mechanism. Émile Durkheim (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) gave the most defensible version: rising material and moral density intensifies competition, and specialisation is the peaceful resolution, carrying society from mechanical to organic solidarity.
- The neo-evolutionary repair. After 1950 the family survived by dropping unilinearity. Leslie White measured advance by energy captured per capita; Julian Steward‘s multilinear evolution traced parallel lines in comparable ecologies; Talcott Parsons (Societies, 1966) restated evolution as rising adaptive capacity through differentiation, adaptive upgrading, inclusion and value generalisation, identifying evolutionary universals such as money, bureaucracy and a generalised legal order.
- Evidence. India’s structural shift fits: agriculture’s share of workers fell to 43.0% and regular wage employment rose to 23.6% in the 2025 Periodic Labour Force Survey, while inclusion advanced through the 106th Constitutional Amendment (2023) on women’s legislative reservation.
- Limits. Teleological, Eurocentric and, in its classical form, empirically wrong, since societies borrow, stagnate and skip stages. Crucially, it treats every society as a self-contained organism and is therefore silent on colonialism, conquest and world-market position.
II. Dependency theory
- The claim. Underdevelopment is not an original condition but a produced outcome. Rich and poor regions are two sides of one historical process, not two rungs of one ladder.
- Mechanism. The Prebisch–Singer thesis held that the terms of trade of primary exporters decline against manufactures, so ordinary trade transfers value upward. Andre Gunder Frank (Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, 1967) supplied the model of a metropolis–satellite chain expropriating surplus at every link — the “development of underdevelopment”. Samir Amin added unequal exchange; Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World-System, 1974) replaced the nation-state with a single capitalist world-economy of core, semi-periphery and periphery.
- Evidence. India’s electronics boom is assembly-led: domestic value addition remains around 18–20%, with the government targeting 35–40% in mobile phones. Data is generated in India while models, cloud infrastructure and platform rents are owned in the core — dependency by contract rather than by colony.
- Limits. Ernesto Laclau objected that Frank defines capitalism by exchange rather than by relations of production, and the East Asian newly industrialising countries developed while tightly linked to the core. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto‘s associated dependent development is the durable correction: industrialisation and subordination can coexist, their shape decided by internal class alliances and the state.
Conclusion
Evolutionary theory explains internal differentiation but has no account of power between societies; dependency theory explains that hierarchy but underrates internal agency. India shows both at once — real occupational differentiation, inside a global division of labour that decides where the value settles. Cardoso’s synthesis, not either theory alone, is where the explanation now lies.