Cultural Lag

Ogburn's theory

In Social Change (1922), American sociologist William Fielding Ogburn divided culture into "material culture," such as tools, machines, houses and factories, and "nonmaterial culture," such as customs, beliefs, laws and institutions. He held that the main source of social change is the cumulative change of material culture through invention, discovery and diffusion. When material culture changes, the parts of nonmaterial culture that manage and adjust to it, which he called "adaptive culture," must also change, but this adjustment takes time. The resulting maladjustment is "cultural lag." Ogburn cited vested interests, habit and tradition, fear of the new and weak connections among parts of society as causes of delay. He directed the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, whose Recent Social Trends in the United States (1933) sought to measure the social effects of technological change systematically.

Classic examples

Ogburn's leading example was workers' compensation. As machinery spread rapidly through factories in the late nineteenth century, industrial accidents soared, yet the law still required workers to prove employer negligence. No-fault workers' compensation laws were widely adopted in the United States only in the 1910s, and in the meantime many workers and families bore losses without compensation. Lags between deforestation and conservation policy, and between mass car ownership and traffic law and urban planning, are also often cited. Studies like Fischer's (1992) history of the telephone, showing new technologies used in unexpected ways that gradually reshape social customs, connect to the cultural lag debate. The concept is also used to explain how labor, welfare and data-protection institutions trailed rapid industrialization and digitalization in countries such as South Korea.

Critiques and contemporary uses

Critics argue that cultural lag leans toward technological determinism, in which technology changes first and society follows. In practice, values and institutions also shape which technologies are developed and adopted, and material and nonmaterial culture are hard to separate cleanly. Judging what counts as "lag" also involves value judgments (Schneider, 1966). Still, the concept lives on in debates over regulating new technologies. David Collingridge (1980) posed the "Collingridge dilemma": early on, a technology's impacts are hard to predict, and by the time they are clear, the technology is entrenched and hard to control. Marchant et al. (2011) called the gap between emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and AI and legal-ethical oversight the "pacing problem," and Downes (2009) described a "law of disruption" in which technology changes exponentially while social institutions change incrementally. Social media, platform work and generative AI regulation are often cited as current cases, and risk society theory likewise addresses institutions failing to keep pace with technologically produced risks.

FAQ

What is cultural lag in simple terms?

Technologies like smartphones and AI advance quickly, but the laws, institutions and attitudes that govern them change slowly, and problems arise in the gap.

What are the limits of cultural lag theory?

It is criticized for leaning toward technological determinism, assuming technology changes first and society follows, and for underplaying how social values and institutions shape technology.

Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26

References

1. Ogburn, W. F. (1922). Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
2. Ogburn, W. F. (1957). Cultural lag as theory. Sociology and Social Research, 41(3), 167–174.
3. Ogburn, W. F., & Nimkoff, M. F. (1940). Sociology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
4. Ogburn, W. F. (Ed.). (1933). Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill.
5. Brinkman, R. L., & Brinkman, J. E. (1997). Cultural lag: Conception and theory. International Journal of Social Economics, 24(6), 609–627.
6. Schneider, L. (1966). Ogburn's cultural lag. In The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
7. Marshall, K. P. (1999). Has technology introduced new ethical problems? Journal of Business Ethics, 19(1), 81–90.
8. Volti, R. (2017). Society and Technological Change (8th ed.). New York: Worth.
9. Downes, L. (2009). The Laws of Disruption. New York: Basic Books.
10. Collingridge, D. (1980). The Social Control of Technology. London: Frances Pinter.
11. Marchant, G. E., Allenby, B. R., & Herkert, J. R. (Eds.). (2011). The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and Legal-Ethical Oversight: The Pacing Problem. Dordrecht: Springer.
12. Beck, U. (1986). Risikogesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
13. Fischer, C. S. (1992). America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.