Sociocultural Direction
<p ><b>Sociocultural evolution(ism)</b> is an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_term" title="Umbrella term" >umbrella term</a> for theories of <b>cultural evolution</b> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_evolution" title="Social evolution" >social evolution</a>, describing how <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture" title="Culture" >cultures</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society" title="Society" >societies</a> have changed over time. Note that "sociocultural evolution" is not an equivalent of "sociocultural development" (unified processes of differentiation and integration involving increases in sociocultural <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity" title="Complexity" >complexity</a>), as sociocultural evolution also encompasses sociocultural transformations accompanied by decreases of complexity (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneration" title="Degeneration" >degeneration</a>) as well as ones not accompanied by any significant changes of sociocultural complexity (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladogenesis" title="Cladogenesis" >cladogenesis</a>).<sup id="cite_ref-World_Religions_and_Social_Evolution_of_the_Old_World_Oikumene_Civilizations:A_Cross-cultural_Perspective_0-0" class="reference" ><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural#cite_note-World_Religions_and_Social_Evolution_of_the_Old_World_Oikumene_Civilizations:A_Cross-cultural_Perspective-0" >[1]</a></sup> Thus, <b>sociocultural evolution</b> can be defined as "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form."
Most 19th century and some 20th century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind" title="Humankind" class="mw-redirect" >humankind</a> as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_development" title="Social development" class="mw-redirect" >social development</a>. The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the development of socio-cultural systems was done by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons" title="Talcott Parsons" >Talcott Parsons</a> on a scale which included a theory of world-history. Another attempt both on a less systematic scale was attempted by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_systems_theory" title="World systems theory" class="mw-redirect" >World System</a>approach.
Many of the more recent 20th-century approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea of directional change, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_progress" title="Social progress" >social progress</a>. Most <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology" title="Archaeology" >archaeologists</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_anthropology" title="Cultural anthropology" >cultural anthropologists</a> work within the framework of modern theories of sociocultural evolution. Modern approaches to sociocultural evolution include <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoevolutionism" title="Neoevolutionism" >neoevolutionism</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology" title="Sociobiology" >sociobiology</a>, the theory of modernization and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_post-industrial_society" title="Theory of post-industrial society" class="mw-redirect" >theory of postindustrial society</a>.</p>