Social Change and Reintegration

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Abstract
Planning is concerned both with the im pact of social changes and their causes, but lacks a theoretical framework that can integrate these two concerns. Hence, it often seems caught between palliating the hardships of change or protesting against hardships it is powerless to affect. The paper puts forward a way of thinking about adaptation and change in terms of the structuring of meaning. Social pro cesses can be understood as reproducing, reinforcing or disrupting the structures of meaning on which each of us depends to make sense of our lives. Hierarchies of power, by the way they distribute uncer tainty, influence the kinds of meanings which different sorts of people are able to sustain, and whose lives will be most vulnerable to the loss of the attachments and purposes about which we construct meaning. When these structures of mean ing break down, we experience grief. Grieving is essentially a painful process of retrieving and reconstructing a sense of meaning, which has its collective counterparts. Social changes can provoke a process of rejection and redefinition of relationships, as people work through a shared sense of loss. The concept of meaning relates the unique experience of each individual to the structure of social relationships, as the way this experience is publicly acknowledged, supported or disparaged. Planning is essentially con cerned with this mediation between public and private meanings.

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