Community Impacts of Technological Change: Toward a Longitudinal Perspective

Although sociologists have made advances in understanding the coinmunity-level impacts of technological and environmental change, attention to date has focused almost exclusively on the relatively brief development stage of construction and rapid expansion. Significant social changes can allo take place both before and after the phases of the most intense physical activities (construction, production, expansion), and pathways of influence can be social as well as physical. At the outlet, during the opportunity-threat stage, most social and economic impacts are associated with opportunities and/or threats to biophysical, economic, social, cultural, and psychological systems of the human environment. If development proceeds, the opportunities and threats are joined by the impacts of visible, physical perturbations that have received most of the attention to date. Over time, both of these sets of impacts are increasingly joined by the accumulation of experience. While human systems do adapt to changes or impacts, even apparently functional short-term responses can lead over the Jonger term to overadaptation. The social consequences of environmental and technological changes, long a focus of interest for sociologists (e.g. Cottrell 1951, Ogburn 1922), began to receive much greater attention with the growth of social impact assessment (SIA) in the 1970s. While many important sociological advances have grown out of such applied fields of research in the past, much of the work on social impacts has been relatively weak, atheoretical, and characterized by a focus on topics selected for their policy or pragmatic importance rather than for their sociological significance. * This is a revised version of a article initially presented at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociologica! Society, Norfolk, Virginia. Preparation of the article was made possible in