Social Change in Turkish Social Sciences

While Turkey has been undergoing a continuous and rapid social change, it is hard to claim that in Turkish sociology this issue is being handled as it ought to be. It is quite astonishing that full-fletched theories and thorough empirical analyses in regard to social change are not yet being practiced. On the other hand, the issue of social change has generally been handled together with modernity. In sociological literature, the modernizational approach used in examining the changes in nonWestern societies, has come to be a foundational approach in the world of Turkish social sciences also in examining social changes. Perhaps it is reasonable to search for the most important reason of the weakness relating to change. In this article, approaches of Mumtaz Turhan, Mubeccel B. Kiray, Serif Mardin and Kemal H. Karpat who all maintain coherent analyses in their own context and represent relatively different perspectives from one another will be explained and evaluated, thus consequently the reason why comprehensive theories that explain social change are absent from the literature will be discussed. On the basis of the explanations of these four figures, possibilities of a change analysis that goes beyond the modernizational approach will be dealt with.