Answer the pair of questions for each essay set in 4-6 pages total. Draw from your personal experiences and observations or from current events (as reported in the news; give citations) as the basis of each essay. Cite the readings (title and page number) to support your sociological claims. The essays will be graded on the originality and insight of your analysis, and the accuracy and depth with which they integrate course ideas.
The essays are due at the beginning of class on each due date. Since the questions are available well in advance of the due date, I encourage you to begin thinking about and writing your essays as soon as we have covered the relevant course materials.
1. Describe a relationship, organization, or social context that you recently joined. Who is the social self that you are in this setting? How is it different than your social self elsewhere? To what extent have you carefully managed impressions of this self to other people in this setting? Conversely, to what extent have others' impressions of you self emerged out of a collective definition of the situation out of your control? (This essay will work best if you can analyze a set of interactions in some detail.)
2. How much did social class shape your childhood socialization? (Be sure to identify your class.) Did your daily schedule, use of language, and interactions with professionals and bureaucracies correspond to the class patterns described in Unequal Childhoods? At this stage in your life, to what degree do you believe your childhood socialization has prepared you to reproduce your parents' class position?
1. Use your sociological imagination to understand how a personal trouble of yours is also a public issue. What are the characteristics of this trouble? What other groups are likely to share it? What social forces and ideologies prevent us from recognizing that others share this personal trouble? (No need to limit yourself to a Marxian analysis in this essay.)
2. Describe your experiences as an employee in a retail/service establishment where you have worked before. (If you have never worked in such an establishment, then describe your experiences as a customer in a business of your choice.) What are interactions between employees and customers like: civil, conflictual, demeaning, etc.? How do the characteristics of this business organize interactions between employees and customers? What other aspects influence the social interactions here: class, gender, status, location, etc.? If commerce is the last bastion of the public sphere, then what do your experiences suggest for the fate of society?
1. Describe two different contemporary experiences, one corresponding to mechanical solidarity, the other to organic solidarity. How does each example respectively illustrate the dynamics of mechanical solidarity (as collective consciousness, the repression of deviance, etc.) and organic solidarity (as expression of individuality, anomie, etc.)? Which collectives did these solidarities bind you to in each case, and how? Which form of solidarity do you believe has influenced your life more, mechanical or organic?
2. Describe an on-going social, political, or economic problem in American society that involves (at least) two groups/organizations. Go into enough detail to make clear the clash of interests and unresolved issues between the parties. How can this conflict be explained according to Durkheim's perspective on anomie? And according to Marx's perspective on social conflict? In your opinion, which sociological theorist makes better sense of this problem, Durkheim or Marx?