A Formal Analysis of Power Relations and Culture Change.

A basic problem in the analysis of social change has been the search for regularities--patterns of recurrent social phenomena. In the past, this search has been postulated on the assumption that such regularities exist and are discoverable. It is possible to quarrel with this assumption, but that does not obscure the fact that it is a reasonable and justifiable assumption, and argument about it merely obscures a more fundamental problem. Implicit in the concept of reversibility is an assumption that coexistent phenomena can be observed repeatedly and in any order. The structure is not altered by the order in which elements are observed Social phenomena, however, are sequential-- the units of behavior occur only as irreversible sequences. This means that the order of observation can neither legitimately be reversed nor repeated. In another sense, irreversibility manifests itself in the fact that physical organization tends to decrease over time whereas social or cultural organization tends to increase Entropy is, in effect, reversed in social phenomena. This is, of course, the distinction between a closed and an open system.