CONCEPT
Maladjustment (Ogburn)
The specific social suffering produced by cultural lag—not technology's inherent effects but the gap between material change and inadequate adaptive culture; measurable, predictable, remediable through institutional construction.
Maladjustment, in Ogburn's framework, is the operational term for the social problems that cultural lag produces: unemployment when skills lag labor demand, legal ambiguity when statutes lag technological capability, psychological dislocation when identities lag material conditions, institutional dysfunction when organizational structures lag workflow reality, economic turbulence when valuations lag repricing necessity. The concept shifts causal attribution from technology itself to the gap—the same material innovation absorbed by adequate adaptive culture produces expansion; the same innovation encountering inadequate adaptive culture produces crisis. Maladjustment is not a mood or a diffuse social anxiety but a measurable structural misalignment between what the material conditions require and what the adaptive culture provides, manifesting in specific, identifiable dysfunctions across regulatory, educational, organizational, psychological, and economic domains.
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Ogburn's theory predicts that every major material change produces maladjustment during the lag period, and that maladjustment's severity correlates with the gap's width and opening speed. The automobile produced traffic fatalities (regulatory lag: traffic laws designed