How are economic and social change addressed in Hard Times? How did industrialism affect the individual during the Victorian Era in general?

Industrialism brought significant social change to England. England at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 was largely a pastoral, agrarian island. Most people lived on farms or in small villages.
The population numbered only nine million in 1812, the year of Dickens's birth. By 1854, when Dickens wrote Hard Times, it was seventeen million, and more than half the population now lived in cities and towns. Conditions around factories, where there was no zoning, were often horrible— overcrowded and with no infrastructure, so that human waste was piled in the streets and then covered in ashes. People once used to vistas of clear skies and pastures where sheep grazed now had to get used to railroads, factories belching black smoke, and other blots on the horizon.
Industrialism impacted the working class people the most. Many were displaced from farm life, where, if the work was very hard, there was much time spent outdoors and the toil had a rhythm that provided breaks. Ideally, the relationship between farm worker and lord of the manor was paternalistic, meaning the lord knew his workers personally and looked out for their welfare. This may have been more myth than reality, but it was a powerful myth of how social relations should be organized.
In Capital, Marx describes the conditions of the women and children toiling in factories for very low wages in dehumanizing environments: working incredibly long hours, as many as sixteen in a row, at the mercy of a machine that never stopped; fainting on the factory floors for exhaustion; never seeing sunlight; getting sick and weak; and often dying early.
In Hard Times, Dickens critiques industrialism and the philosophy of utilitarianism, which promotes efficiency. To Dickens, the factory, with its endless concentration on producing the maximum profit, running with ruthless efficiency, and not caring about people as more than part of a larger machine, reflects the ways society is losing out under industrialism. Factory life is dreary and repetitive, lacking any poetry or beauty. Coketown is a "triumph of fact," where the factory workers

do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow.

Dickens focuses on the damaging effects of a utilitarian education on his main characters, a form of education that to him reflects the dreary, soul-killing ethos of industrialism. Gradgrind embraces utilitarianism, insisting his own children be raised on it, of which he says:

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

This extreme rationality reflects the logic of the factory. His children learn nothing of poetry, nothing of the magical or the fairy tale. They do not learn to value beauty, imagination, or love. In contrast to this is the circus that comes to town, a symbol of the magical, poetical, and whimsical that the Gradgrind children are forbidden.
Not surprisingly, their utilitarian education stunts the Gradgrind children. Louisa marries for money, not love, and comes to bitterly regret this hardheaded decision, saying to her father:

"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!”
She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

Dickens also criticizes the dehumanizing effects of a factory system in which the owners and masters know nothing of the lives of their workers. People are no longer individuals in this situation, but "ants or beetle" seen as a mass. Louisa feels this when she visits Stephen Blackpool's home:

For the first time in her life, Louisa had come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life, she was face to face with anything like individuality in connexion with them. She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce, in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of toiling insects than of these toiling men and women.

Dickens dislikes the way industrialism blights the landscape and ruins the lives of working people, as well as how it sacrifices beauty, love, and poetry to profit. However, he does not support unionization or chartism, which would have extended the vote to all males (at that time only a small percentage of property-owning males and no women could vote in England), thinking both these ideas too destabilizing. He focuses instead on changing individual people's hearts, hoping that enlightening and softening the sentiments of the powerful will lead them to want to change and improve the lives of the working people. While that was overly utopian thinking on his part, his novel does nevertheless shine an important light on the abuses of industrialism. He might share views with a slightly later writer, William Morris, who wrote in "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" in 1885:

As long as the work is repulsive it will still be a burden which must be taken up daily, and even so would mar our life, even though the hours of labour were short. What we want to do is to add to our wealth without diminishing our pleasure. Nature will not finally be conquered until our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our lives.