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The Utility of the Equilibrium Model in the Study of Social Change *, 1
Author(s) -
GLUCKMAN MAX
Publication year - 1968
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1968.70.2.02a00010
Subject(s) - institution , duration (music) , criticism , argument (complex analysis) , subsistence agriculture , positive economics , scale (ratio) , social structure , epistemology , social system , sociology , economics , social science , history , law , political science , philosophy , politics , geography , art , biochemistry , chemistry , literature , cartography , agriculture , archaeology
There has been considerable criticism of the use of the equilibrium model by social anthropologists. The argument of this paper is that much of this criticism is due to a misunderstanding arising because though all social life exists in time, and all processes in time involve changes, we have to define several different kinds of “time” as well as distinctive types of “change.” It is contended that each type of social institution, or cultural pattern, has a particular kind of time scale in its very structure. Thus the structure of a family system can only be analyzed in four generations, and in subsistence systems perhaps only in five to six generations. Other institutions have other built‐in time scales. It is proposed to call the time scale of an institution its structural duration. One important way of studying an institution is to analyze its structural duration. In an analysis of this kind, the emphasis is on the manner in which the institution would operate through time if internal contradictions or external intruding events did not interfere with its passage through its structural duration. Therefore an analysis of the structural duration of an institution is necessarily in an equilibrium model. Many studies have taken this form, but have been misread as if they were dealing with what happened in actual historical time. It is argued that since changes are of several kinds in a suggested range, from repetitive or recurrent changes of personnel through limited structural changes to radical structural changes, it is possible to assess what kinds of changes are occurring only by examining them within the structural durations of institutions, held steady as a first step in analysis as if in actual equilibrium. But this provides only a heuristic scheme in which to handle the observations; it is not a theory giving us a set of interdependent propositions. More and more actual changes may be fed in as the analysis tries to cope with greater ranges of reality. The argument is illustrated with examples from studies of several social spheres. There is also a discussion of how the method enables the analyst to analyze observations collected over a limited period of time in terms of a much longer period in order to assess the types of change that are occurring.