Sociocultural Evolution

Sociocultural evolution, also called sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution, is a family of theories of cultural evolution that describe how societies and cultures change over time. It differs from sociocultural development, which follows only the processes that increase complexity, because it also takes in processes that reduce complexity or that produce variety without any clear change in complexity. Most nineteenth century approaches and some twentieth century ones tried to model the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that societies had reached different stages of development. The most ambitious general theory centred on sociocultural systems is the work of Talcott Parsons, and from the 1970s the world-systems approach of Immanuel Wallerstein gave a less systematic attempt. Recent approaches look instead at changes specific to single societies and reject a presumed linear scale of social progress.