Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The thesis of cultural lag formulated by the North American sociologist William F. Ogburn can be considered among the earliest sociological attempts to explain social change from social cultural premises and not from psychobiological ones. Indeed, social change is one of the most important theoretical problems in sociology. Almost all those sociologists who belonged to so-called classical sociology sought to understand the process of social change ( Sztompka 2004 : 17). The cultural lag thesis is well known among scholars of technology because Ogburn has been considered a technological determinist for his explanation of social change with respect to material culture (or technology). If, according to Staudenmaier (1985 : 134–48), technological determinism can be characterized by two main premises and three corollaries, Ogburn is considered as the prototype of a scholar who develops the first of these corollaries. This corollary is formulated as follows: the relationship of society to technological change is always one of adaptation . Ogburn first described the theory of cultural lag in 1915, although he began developing it as early as 1912, mainly in Social Change With Respect to Cultural and Original Nature , published in 1922 (cf. Ogburn 1966 ). Throughout the book Ogburn builds the explanatory key to social change, but he does not appeal to the traditional explanation in terms ... log in or subscribe to read full text