peatedly, giving rise to new and previously inconceivable forms of economic and social organisation (Marx [1848] 1964; see also Dahrendorf 1959). Dialectical materialism became the theoretical anchoring point for a school of thought in sociology and political economy influential to our day (Bourdieu 1990; Dobb [1947] 1963; Merton 1968a). With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that the concept of dialectics, ideal or material, is less a causal master-mechanism than a meta-theoretical metaphor pitched at such a high level of abstraction as to render it unfalsifiable. It is certainly possible to construct dialectical narratives a posteriori but, in contemporary society, it is difficult to specify what the thesis and antithesis might be or when the awaited synthesis will burst onto the scene. For this reason, Hegelian and Marxist dialectics are ultimately ‘sensitising notions’, general perspectives whose value lies in highlighting certain aspects of reality as worthy of attention, but without identifying specific causal sequences or mechanisms (Weber [1904] 1949; also Stinchcombe 1968). Sociology had to await the advent of the Parsonian Synthesis in the twentieth century to restore some balance to the contest between theories of social stability and change and, in the process, revive some of the long-forgotten themes of medieval scholastic thought. Parsons’ pattern variables did repeat the familiar nineteenth-century exercise about the stages of societal evolution, this time breaking them down into five subsets*from ‘ascription/achievement’ to ‘particularism/universalism’
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1539 (Parsons 1951). However, the bulk of his intellectual project was to construct a conceptual edifice isomorphic with society itself and where ‘pattern maintenance’ and ‘equilibrium’ were paramount. Social change in this system was relegated to a marginal place, where internally driven transformation occurred only gradually and where external ‘shocks’ to the system were to be decisively confronted in order to restore equilibrium (Coser 1956; Dahrendorf 1959; Parsons 1951; Parsons and Smelser 1956). Much of contemporary social theorising, arguably with the exception of post-modernism and other nihilist currents, consists of a continuing debate between post-Marxists and post-Parsonian advocates or, what is the same, between latter-day enactors of the historical contest between ideas of stability and change (Bourdieu 1990; Collins 1988; Kincaid 1996). Leaving these debates aside, we may ask what these centuries-old traditions have bequeathed us in the way of useful tools for the analysis of contemporary events. In other words, what have we learned? At the broadest level, such lessons may be synthesised in five points: 1. Stability and change co-exist. While it is true that ‘change is ubiquitous’, it is also the case that it could not happen if there was nothing tangible, no established structure to ‘change’ in the first place. 2. Sources of change are multiple and are not limited to the social system’s internal dialectics. 3. Effects of social change are similarly diverse. They can be organised in a hierarchy of ‘micro-processes’ affecting individuals and their immediate surroundings, ‘meso-processes’ affecting communities and regions, and ‘macro-processes’ affecting full societies and even the global system. 4. Change at each of these levels must be similarly prioritised into processes occurring ‘at the surface’ and yielding only marginal modifications of the social order, and those producing core systemic changes of the kind identified in everyday discourse as ‘revolutionary’. 5. Stability is reflected, at th
