Macionis and Plummer stated that sociology is “the systematic study of human society”. The power of this study is to demonstrate just how strong the social forces that organize society in very different ways are. Just like any discipline, sociology can be defined “through the set of concepts that it employs to guide observation and to provide the means to describe and explain what is observed” (Harris 7). In this paper, two of the sociological concepts will be declared and discussed as to their relatedness to each other and to the external environment. The chosen concepts are the population growth and social change. In the beginning, to provide a sufficient ground for the discussion, it is necessary to take a look at each of the concept’s core ideas and contemporary applications.

Nowadays, with the world population already exceeding 6.5 billion people, the problem of rapid population growth raises a wide concern in the society. It has come to the point where all spheres of human practice from demographic to social, from infrastructural to economic are being influenced by it. One can argue that from the stand point of sociology the more people there are, the greater the opportunities to study and research various types of group behavior and structural communication are. But, at the same time, the problems that are being caused by the increased number of people inhabiting the Planet, especially in the field of countries’ economic development, cannot be underestimated. From my point of view, the size of the population has a significant influence on the development of the economy and society and vice verse. One the one hand, with overpopulated regions, businesses are not able to provide workplaces for everyone willing and able to work. People try to find alternative ways of earning for a leaving, but still, in most cases, it is not enough to ensure the satisfactory level of life. As a result, the poverty and unemployment levels are rising, bringing with them increased crime rates and social disturbance. The active labor force is unable to provide all the necessary financial and social support, as the domestic businesses are not able to pay adequate wages and international ones are more concerned with cutting down their own expenses by means of using cheap labor. The last one is called off shoring and is among the most recent discussions in the business environment. On the other hand, however, undeveloped infrastructure of certain regions and their unattractiveness to foreign investments are among the essential identifiers of the social and economic degradation of those regions. Lacking financial support and any kinds of work opportunities, people go back to using all the available natural resources in order to provide some kind of nutrition for the family. In the above situations, keeping in mind the absence of social education, lack of the established health system and abundance of free time, the population of the regions grows at rapid rates, exposing even bigger numbers of human lives to poverty, lack of educational background and unemployment.