There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
    The Restaurant at the end of the Universe, Douglas Adams.  Harmony Books.

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Classical theories of social change
 

Haferkamp, Hans, and Neil J. Smelser, editors Social Change and Modernity. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6000078s/   Available free on line from University of California Press Scholarship Editions   http://content.cdlib.org/ucpress/    See our other page for further listings.
 

MODERNIZATION THEORY AND THE LAWS OF SOCIAL CHANGE http://www.rrojasdatabank.org/capital8.htm   very brief review of a few main classical theories of change, by Róbinson Rojas.
 

Comprehensive Theory of Social Development, by Garry Jacobs, Robert Macfarlane, and N. Asokan    http://www.icpd.org/development_theory/comprehensive_theory_of_social_development.htm   "This paper identifies the central principle of development and traces its expression in different fields and levels of social advancement."
 

Elliott Parker's Comparative Economic Systems at   http://www.coba.unr.edu/faculty/parker/econ305/   includes notes on growth  and change    http://www.coba.unr.edu/faculty/parker/ec301/ec301s02lec2a.html  and  http://www.coba.unr.edu/faculty/parker/ec301/ec301s02lec2c.html
 These are lecture notes on brief reviews of some main theories of economic change.
 

The Science of Economics, by Fred Foldvary    http://www.foldvary.net/economics.html    on line text.  Especially see chapter 14, with a review of economic growth.
 

Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution    http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7967/index.html    paper by David F. Ronfeldt on a theory of social evolution.  Full text is available here.
 

Tanner Lectures   http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/    has lectures at   http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/index.html   One lecture is by S.N. Eisenstadt, "Cultural Tradition, Historical Experience, and Social Change: The Limits of Convergence." This lecture is about "the nature of the relations between, on the one hand, the values, the basic premises, and the traditions of civilizations and, on the other hand, some central aspects of their social and cultural dynamics." This topic is "closely related to the challenge of understanding many aspects of the contemporary scene, and especially to whether we are witnessing the development of one world-wide civilization." (quotes from the paper)
    Another lecture is by Jared Diamond, "The Broadest Pattern of Human History"
 

CULTURE  CHANGE: An Introduction to the Processes and Consequences of Culture Change    http://anthro.palomar.edu/change/    brief reviews of the process of cultural change, acculturation, and global change.

Social Change lecture notes, from Russel Long     http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/intro/change.htm    brief reviews of theories of change.
 

E. Wilma van der Veen   http://husky1.stmarys.ca/~evanderveen/wvdv/    had a class on social change   http://husky1.stmarys.ca/~evanderveen/wvdv/social_change/sc_course_documents.html    that includes reviews of theories, causes and patterns of social change.

Social Structural Change   http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/social_structural_changes/     from Beyond Intractability.org,Overview of social change.

I'm looking for other pages reviewing or describing classical theories of social change.  If you have any or know of any, please let me know!
 

Theories and approaches to development, globalization, economic growth, political change
 

Democracy, Social Change, and Economies in Transition  http://books.nap.edu/html/transform/sec-5.htm   by Charles Tilly.  This is a chapter in the on line book,  Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies  http://books.nap.edu/html/transform/     edited by Joan M. Nelson, Charles Tilley, and Lee Walker, for the Task Force on Economies in Transition, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council.  "This ...volume focuses on the interaction between political, social, and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. It includes a wide selection of analytic papers, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars in diverse fields, and an agenda for future research."   Also see Understanding Economic Change, Douglass C. North   http://books.nap.edu/html/transform/sec-1.htm 

A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History   http://www.mercatus.org/Publications/pubID.3902/pub_detail.asp    by Douglass North, John Wallis, Barry Weingast, April 2007.  In certain "societies, open access and entry into economic and political organizations sustains economic and political competition. Social order is sustained by competition rather than rent-creation. The key to understanding modern social development is understanding the transition from limited to open access social orders"

Development, Social Transformation and Globalisation http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/012castles.htm   by Stephen Castles.   This essay briefly reviews: some major approaches to development; some of the approaches to and issues in globalization and social transformation; and, very briefly, economic history of Asia since 1945.
 

Nonzero http://www.nonzero.org/  This book, by Robert Wright, argues that there is a direction or arrow in human history.  "Mostly this book is about how we got where we are today, and what this tells us about where we're heading next."  He describes his views of the logic of history.  This site has an introduction, excerpts, links to some other articles he wrote.
 

Explaining Large-Scale Historical Change http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/ This paper is at Daniel Little's page.
 

Summary of Wallerstein on World System Theory http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerstein.html In the Modern History Sourcebook.
    Also see my brief review and critique.  http://gsociology.icaap.org/wst2.htm
 

Evolutionary World Politics homepage http://faculty.washington.edu/modelski/ The subject of this site is "Evolutionary world politics is the employment of evolutionary theory in the study of long-term (structural) transformations in world-wide political arrangements."  Many essays and papers from George Modelski, from a World Systems perspective.
 

Globality: historical change in our time http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/theory1.htm   chapter 1 in Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution. Cambridge University Press 2000  "This book proposes, therefore, that we should understand our historical transformation through three major concepts: globality, the global revolution and the global state. In this chapter I attempt to explain the need for these concepts, by examining existing models of contemporary change."
 

Development

Irma Adelman   http://are.berkeley.edu/~adelman/    has a  lot of papers and essays about development.

China Net for Modernization   http://www.modernization.com.cn/Index2.htm   (english version) has some theories of modernization.

Development and Conflict Theory   http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/development_conflict_theory/   Includes brief review of development theory

Economic Development   http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/develop.htm   brief review.

How to help poor countries   http://www.cgdev.org/content/opinion/detail/3287/   from Center for Global Development. What do rich countries really need to do.

The Global Development Network   http://www.gdnet.org/index.php   has a whole bunch of stuff, like this paper, " Paths towards sustainable global development",  http://www.gdnet.org/middle.php?oid=237&zone=docs&action=doc&doc=10956   and Explaining Growth papers   http://www.gdnet.org/middle.php?oid=399&gdn_activity_id=14   and many others

Human Development Reports   http://hdr.undp.org/   from the United Nations

Research Institute for Social Development   http://www.unrisd.org/   also from UN, various research reports.

Economic change
 

Douglas Norths papers are located at RePec http://ideas.repec.org/ Dr. North's papers are here    http://ideas.repec.org/e/pno11.html Papers include "The Paradox of the West" http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpeh/9309005.html and "Where have we been and where are we going?" http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpeh/9612001.html These are available as pdf files and some as html.  For a review of North's approach, see our literature review page.
 

Coming to Terms with Contemporary Capitalism  http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/2/6.html  Article in sociological research on line, arguing for the decline of global capitalism.  Full reference is Sociological Research Online, vol. 3, no. 2, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/3/2/6.html>
 

Economic and Structural Change  http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/ua/neice.html  This part is a section of Information Technology and Citizen Participation This is review of the New Economy Thesis (e.g., Drucker) and the New Growth Theory (e.g., Romer and Lipsey).   The author is David C. Neice and his site is  http://www.kw.igs.net/~neice/content.htm
 

Economic History Service   http://eh.net     They also have reviews of books that have significant impact on economic history.  For example, a review by Philip R. P. Coelho on Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, at   http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/coelho   These are part of their Project 2000 and Project 2001 series.
 

Gregory Clark's lectures on economic change   http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/index.html   These courses Econ 110 A or B have interesting readings but don't appear to be currently available (Sept 2007).  But see his paper, The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution in which he argues that "the Industrial Revolution was most likely the last of a series of localized growth spurts stretching back to the Middle Ages, as in the Netherlands from 1500 to 1660, and northern Italy in the fourteenth century."
 

Social change
 

THEORIES OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THEIR CURRENT DEVELOPMENT IN SOVIET SOCIETY  http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/csacpub/russian/mamay.html   A paper from the Sociology Summer School for Soviet Sociologists which was held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, between July and September 1990.  About social movement, but also seems to be about change.
 

A neoinstitutional theory of social change in Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Classs  http://www.elegant-technology.com/TVAtool.html    by Marc R. Tool
Professor Emeritus of Economics, California State University, Sacramento
 

Anthony Giddens' Runaway world debate on bbc. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_99/default.htm This site includes his lectures on the runaway world.
 

Peter Richerson's papers  http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Richerson.htm    lists a variety of papers, by Richerson, Robert Boyd and others,  on early aspects of the development of society or culture, including "Institutional Evolution in the Holocene: The Rise of Complex Societies", "The Pleistocene and the Origins of Human Culture: Built for Speed",   "Complex Societies: The Evolutionary Origins of a Crude Superorganism" and "Was Agriculture Impossible in the Pleistocene".
    These papers are on the "cultural evolution" page
 

Political
 

Excerpts from Three Lectures on Democracy   http://www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/extensions/sp98/lipset.html   by  Seymour Martin Lipset, lecture at the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma. Brief discussions of conditions for democracy.

Regarding Politics. Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change   http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0k40037v/   by Harry Eckstein, 1992.

International Centre for Integrative Studies http://www.icis.unimaas.nl/projects/nmp4/   studies operationalising ideas about transitions and modern governance.  See the 'transitions' page and also the publication (abstract in english is fairly long) of "Transitions & transitionmanagement".  There will be more on this site shortly.
 

Social Origins of Democracy    http://www.icpd.org/democracy/index.htm    also from ICPD, cited above.  Some history of democracy and a theory of how it developed.

OTHER
 

Second Annual Global Development Conference   http://www.gdnet.org/middle.php?oid=154   has two presentations: Douglas North on institutions and the performance of economies, and Amartya Sen on the relationships between culture and development.

IR Theory Knowledge Base  http://www.irtheory.com/   not exactly change, but very brief reviews (1 or 2 paragraphs) of theories of international relations.

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this page last updated  and verified 1/13/08