INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIETY
January 25
First day of class.
January 30
Emile Durkheim, "What is a Social Fact?" (in Intersections).
Ferdinand Tonnies, "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft" (in Intersections).
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, pp. 1-87.
Recommended:
Collins & Makowsky, chap. 6: "Dreyfus's Empire: Emile Durkheim."
Giddens, chap. 6: "Durkheim's Conception of Sociological Method."
Questions to guide reading
1. What are the defining features of social facts?
2. Which aspects of human behavior can be explained by social facts? Which cannot?
3. How do gemeinschaft and geselleschaft manifest different ways of understanding and interacting with people?
4. What is Durkheim's thesis about the division of labor's effects on social solidarity?
SOCIAL INTEGRATION: WHAT KEEPS SOCIETY TOGETHER?
February 1
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, pp. 101-125, 179-199.
Recommended:
Adam Smith, from The Wealth of Nations.
Questions to guide reading
1. How does the law serve to preserve mechanical solidarity? Organic solidarity?
2. How do Adam Smith and other economists' understandings of the division of labor, its benefits, and individuals' engagements with it differ from Durkheim's?
3. What is the relationship of individualism to the collective consciousness?
February 6
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, pp. 200-245, 291-309.
"In a Richer China, Billionaires Put Money on Marriage" (New York Times, January 24, 2006). [Registration required, or find on LexisNexis]
Recommended:
Giddens, chap. 7: "Individualism, Socialism and the Occupational Groups."
Durkheim's analysis of suicide rates
Questions to guide reading
1. What factors explain the growth of the division of labor?
2. What are the common forces behind suicide and class conflict?
3. Why does Durkheim think "occupational groups" can help promote harmony in modern society?
SOCIAL INEQUALITY: SOCIETY FOR WHOM?
February 8
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: pp. 49-91.
Recommended:
Collins & Makowsky, chap. 2: "Sociology in the Underground: Karl Marx."
Giddens, chap. 3: "The Relations of Production and Class Structure."
Montgomery Gentry, "You Do Your Thing" [iTunes download]
Questions to guide reading
1. In what ways does Marx admire the bourgeoisie? Why?
2. What drives class conflict?
3. Why does the proletariat differ from earlier oppressed classes?
February 13
Karl Marx, "The German Ideology: Idealism and Materialism."
Max Weber, "Class, Status, Party" (in Intersections).
Recommended:
Collins & Makowsky, chap. 7: "Max Weber: The Disenchantment of the World."
Giddens, chap. 2: "Historical Materialism."
Questions to guide reading
1. For Marx, why does human survival necessarily involve cooperation? How does private property transform this cooperation?
2. How does consciousness reflect the social relations of production?
3. For Weber, why do people who belong to the same status group engage in "communal action" (i.e., feel they belong together)? Why do people who belong to the same class not engage in communal action?
4. How does class threaten the status hierarchy?
February 15
Kingsley Davis & Wilbur E. Moore, "Some Principles of Stratification" (in Intersections).
Questions to guide reading
1. How is social stratification functional for society?
2. Why are technical specialization and economic competition likely to increase a society's levels of social stratification?
First set of take-home essays due.
C. Wright Mills, “The Promise of Sociology” (in Intersections).
Questions to guide reading
1. What are the three contexts of human behavior that the social imagination inquires into?
2. Why does viewing personal troubles as public issues offer "promise" but also a "terrible lesson" for how we understand our daily lives?
February 22
Karl Marx, "The German Ideology: The Illusion of the Epoch."
Recommended
Gang of Four, "Why Theory?" [iTunes download]
Questions to guide reading
1. Why does civil society only develop fully under the capitalist mode of production?
2. Why does the bourgeoisie "represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society"?
3. How do politics ("the State") and culture ("religion, philosophy, ethics, etc.") reflect the interests of the bourgeoisie?
GETTING BY IN POST-INDUSTRIAL AMERICA
February 27
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: Introduction, chaps. 1-2.
Questions to guide reading
1. In what ways are low-wage workers controlled by managers, technology, and workplace rules? Does this control make for good customer service?
2. How does Ehrenreich's low-wage status affect the ways other people perceive her?
3. What economic shifts have created greater demand for low-wage labor?
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: chap. 3, Evaluation.
Questions to guide reading
1. What other resources besides income do the working poor lack that affects their life chances to get ahead?
2. What group identities compete with class to frustrate Ehrenreich's attempts to organize her fellow workers?
3. What economic shifts have raised the cost of living for low-wage workers?
THE MICRO WORLD: SOCIAL IDENTITY, RELATIONSHIPS, AND INTERACTIONS
March 6
Charles Cooley, "The Looking Glass Self" (in Intersections).
W.E.B. DuBois, "On Our Spiritual Strivings" (in Intersections).
Recommended:
Collins & Makowsky, chap. 9 ( "The Discovery of the Invisible World: Simmel, Cooley, and Mead") and chap. 11 ("The Emergence of African-American Sociology: DuBois, Frazier, Drake and Cayton").
Questions to guide reading
1. How is the self influenced by social context?
2. For Cooley, what is the process by which one internalizes others' perceptions into self-evaluation?
3. For DuBois, what is the basis for African Americans' special insight into white America?
March 8
In-class midterm.
March 27
Jennifer Lee, Civility in the City.
Questions to guide reading
1. How do the kinds of retail sectors that Korean immigrants dominate make them particularly vulnerable to conflict with their black customers?
2. What strategies do non-black storeowners use to preempt and manage potential conflicts with their black customers?
3. How is "black" a flexible category for African American customers? When does it promote solidarity with black immigrants? How can it be invoked to subordinate black storeowners?
4. What is the symbolic importance of "our community" for black customers? How does it motivate potential conflicts with Korean and Jewish merchants?
March 29
Herbert Blumer, "The Nature of Symbolic Interactionism" (in Intersections).
Erving Goffman, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (in Intersections).
David L. Rosenhan, "On Being Sane in Insane Places" (in Intersections).
Recommended:
Collins & Makowsky, chap. 14: "Erving Goffman and the Theatre of Social Encounters."
Questions to guide reading
1. How does the definition (meaning) of a situation develop out of the interactive interpretation of participants to a situation?
2. How do we inadvertently "give off" information about ourselves?
3. How does the context of the psychiatric hospital help define the behavior of "patients" inside? How do those definitions persist outside the hospital context?
Second set of take-home essays due.
Max Weber, "The Fundamental Concepts of Sociology" [read 1.1-1.7].
Georg Simmel, "Dyads, Triads and Larger Groups" (in Intersections).
Recommended:
Giddens, chap. 11: "Fundamental Concepts of Sociology."
Questions to guide reading
1. How do all our interactions with other people illustrate some combination of traditional, affective, value-rational, and/or goal-rational orientations?
2. What is borderline social about traditional social action?
3. How does a two-person group persist only to the extent that each member commits to it? How does a group of three or more people persist independently of its members' individual commitment?
SOCIALIZATION: REPRODUCING SOCIETY ONE PERSON AT A TIME
April 5
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, "Socialization: The Internalization of Society" (in Intersections).
Questions to guide reading
1. How do the primary groups (e.g., family) we belong to give us not just our identity, but also our sense of reality?
2. Why is socialization "never total and never finished" (pg. 118)?
3. Why does secondary socialization not require our emotional identification like primary socialization does?
April 10
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, chaps. 1-5.
"Families with Full Plates, Sitting Down to Dinner" (New York Times, April 5, 2006).
Questions to guide reading
1. What obligations and constraints do parents face in the "concerted cultivation" strategy of child-rearing? In the "accomplishment of natural growth" strategy?
2. Why are organized activities for children favored by middle-class parents? Why are working- and lower-class parents less likely to favor them?
3. Why are competition and resentment between siblings most prevalent among middle-class children?
April 12
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, chaps. 6-7.
Questions to guide reading
1. How do middle-class parents' verbal negotiations and encouragement of expression give children a sense of entitlement?
2. How do working- and lower-class parents' verbal directives and demands for respect give children a sense of social constraint?
3. Why are middle-class children generally less involved with extended family than working- and lower-class children?
April 17
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, chaps. 8-12.
Questions to guide reading
1. What burdens do their bureaucratic interventions place upon middle-class parents? What advantages do they confer upon their children?
2. To what extent do teachers approve of the concerted cultivation strategy of child-rearing? To what extent do they disapprove of it?
3. What recent social changes have given value to the concerted cultivation strategy of child-rearing? Especially if they were not likely to have been raised this way, are middle-class parents particularly aware that this strategy confers advantage to their own children?
THE IRON CAGE: RATIONALIZATION
April 19
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Author's Introduction and Part I.
Recommended:
Giddens, chap. 9: "Protestantism and Capitalism."
Questions to guide reading
1. What is the capitalist spirit? And what is the role of methodical calculation in it?
2. What advantages did a rational economic orientation give to a business over a traditionalistic orientation?
Third set of take-home essays due.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Part II.
Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Work?” New Yorker, November 29, 2004, pp. 154-150. [available on Blackboard: Course Documents]
Recommended:
Giddens, chap. 12: "Rationalisation, the 'World Religions,' and Western Capitalism."
Questions to guide reading
1. How did the duties of salvation become more worldly, rationalized, and supportive of a business calling over the evolution of Protestant sects?
2. What is the value of accumulating wealth in the Protestant ethic? In the capitalist spirit?
3. How does the Protestant ethic survive in today's secular world of capitalism?
CONSUMERISM: BREAKING THE IRON CAGE?
April 26
George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, chaps. 1-2.
Questions to guide reading
1. How have consumption and the service economy transformed America's economy from the industrial-manufacturing economy that Marx described?
2. What is new about the "new means of consumption"?
Bureaucratic hierarchy: the corporation
The Ford factory assembly line (circa 1914).
Kintergarden at Moscow factory.
Public housing, Manhattan, Upper West Side.
"Questions for Madeline Albright" (New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2006).
George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, chaps. 3-6.
Questions to guide reading
1. How do Marx and Weber help us understand the development of the new means of consumption?
2. How does McDonaldization rationalize not only business but the consumer as well?
3. Why do consumers seek (re-)enchantment in their daily lives?
May 3
George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, chaps. 7-8.
Questions to guide reading
1. How do the new means of consumption blur the organization of and divisions between the spheres of life that rationalization once promoted?
2. What are the social consequences of our hyperconsumerist economy?
May 8
In-class final exam.
