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All those factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time; hence the application of the term "multilinear" to his theory of evolution. Marshall Sahlins, co-editor with Elman Service of Evolution and Culture (1960), divided the evolution of societies into 'general' and 'specific'. [70]
An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. [57] Proponents of the idea that modern-day global society is an information society posit that information technologies are impacting most important forms of social organization, including ...
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". [1] Cultural evolution is the change of this information ...
Social institution – Any persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community. The term "institution" is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society, as well as to particular formal organizations of government and public services.
For Marcel Mauss, Durkheim's nephew and sometime collaborator, a total social fact (French fait social total) is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres." [8] Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he came to call total social facts.
The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's The Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms evolution and progress were often used interchangeably in the 19th ...
The society installs these concepts in each individual's psyche in the manner first identified by Emile Durkheim, namely, by means of collective rituals such as initiation rites. Therefore, the problem of the origins of society boils down to the problem of the origins of collective ritual.
In a class society, at least implicitly, people are divided into distinct social strata, commonly referred to as social classes or castes. The nature of class society is a matter of sociological research. [26] [27] [28] Class societies exist all over the globe in both industrialized and developing nations. [29]