ABSTRACT
The most profound sources of social change are changes that have a direct bearing on human lives: where people live, how many of them are born, and when they die. Both invention and discovery can cause social change from within or from without a given society. Another way in which change can come from the outside is the process of cultural diffusion, in which practices, customs, or other cultural elements are adopted from another society. Max Weber felt that the increasing prevalence of bureaucracy was inevitable with modernization, because despite their shortcomings bureaucracies are the only way to govern large, complex social organizations with any kind of efficiency. Two influential pioneering social scientists, Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tonnies, devised typologies that are also useful in understanding the social changes that have taken place in the modernization process. The mechanical solidarity that held a pre-modern society together was, according to Durkheim, a "solidarity by similarities".
