Sociological Analysis and Social Change

Abstract

Social change involves society or specific aspects of social life in an ongoing way, affecting the culture, the economy, the politics and the demography. Similar phenomena can recur in different ways and with different timings. In the context of sociological theories, social change has been described and interpreted using concepts which aim at defining empirically the boundaries of a phenomenon and at measuring the presence and the qualitative and quantitative relevance of such phenomena. The sociologist is requested to analyse the phenomenon, its boundaries and its dynamics. However, every day life shows characteristics that are not always easily referred to clear models. Phenomena and the indicators that are used to measure social change are sometimes unclear with regards to their semantic definition and their measurement. In this paper, after a short presentation of the concept of social change in some sociological classical authors, I discuss the aspects of the phenomenon which can be analysed in the context of fuzzy logic.