| The Concept of Social Change
“Of all the things in the world the only permanent thing in life is change”. This cliché attests to the fact that change is a phenomenon that permeates the social structure and culture of human beings. This means that every human society must experience change at one point or the other. Change occurs in various forms for instance, since people in different societies are engaged in constant social and physical interactions with one another, change is certain to occur. This is more so when ideas, norms and institutions spread from one society to another, even in the most isolated and primitive societies which also experience some form of change from time to time as their members adapt to new conditions that are found in their daily environment (Peil, 1978). Social change can therefore be defined as the alteration, re-arrangement or total replacement of an activity value, a phenomenon or process through a chain of events (Odetola and Ademola 1985:202).
The implication of the above definition is that there is a marked or observable difference between the periods before and after social change has taken place. The form of social change to take place will depend largely on the intentions of the initiator(s) of the change. For instance, it may be a total eradication of a phenomenon or an era such as the wiping out of the regime of the Tsar of Russia in 1917 by the Bolshevic revolution and its replacement by communism. In Nigeria, an example of social change could be notices in the change in the consumption patterns of many Nigerian workers when the Udoji salary award was introduced in the 1970s with its corresponding massive importation of goods from overseas. The opposite was however the case when austerity measures were introduced by the Shehu Shagari regime in the early 1980s and when the prices of petroleum products were increased by the Obasanjo administration in 2002 and 2003.
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