Answer the pair of questions for each essay set in 4-6 pages total. Use your personal experiences and observations as the basis of each essay; do not discuss events or experiences that happened to someone else or are in the news unless these have a direct connection to your life. Cite the readings (author's name 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.
Write an essay for #1 and your choice of question in #2.
1. Describe a social setting that strangers can enter without permission. Is this a genuinely public space? What are the explicit or implicit rules for participating in this space? Do these restrict participants from a full range of social interactions (short of violating other people's civil and human rights)? Are there other barriers that prevent this space from fully incorporating the public? Based on your example, what do you conclude about the availability and desirability of democratic public space in society today?
This essay involves original research: making observations from a real social setting. You may choose a type of setting described in Fantasy City or another kind that is more convenient for your research. Your method of observing and recording what you witnessed can be informal, so long as you have enough observations to write this essay. Before you go out, however, it might be useful to review the ways sociologists conduct proper sociological fieldwork. Students who turn in 2 or more pages of optional fieldnotes may receive extra credit on this assignment.
2a. Using Weber's concepts of social action and authority, analyze a substantial conflict you had in within a social order: family, peer group, community, or an institution. What was the conflict about, and what did the parties to the conflict differ over? Describe at least 3 claims or perspectives that each party employed to persuade the others toward their side. How did the conflict resolve, and what does that indicate about the forms of authority that legitimate this social order? OR...
2b. Does the enchantment of social life still thrive in modern society? Present your argument based on a social activity, group, or setting that makes you happy or fulfilled. Is this activity, group, or setting sustained through rational forms (e.g., technology, bureaucracy, market exchange)? Does that erode the quality of enchantment that you experience? How does your argument square with Weber's concerns for the "iron cage of rationalization"?
1. Describe an instance of rationalization in a group, activity, organization, or setting that you take part in. (Note: rationalization refers to a process of change, so you will have to discuss your example both before and after rationalization happened.) What were the forces promoting rationalization: the need for efficiency, the use of bureaucracy or technology, etc.? In your opinion, has rationalization been a wholly positive change?
2. How much did social class shape your childhood upbringing? (Be sure to identify your class.) Did your daily schedule, use of language, and interactions with professionals and bureaucracies reflect the class patterns described by Annette Lareau? 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. Are the "ideas of the ruling class... the ruling ideas" (Marx, pg. 60)? Describe a popular value, belief, perspective, law, or concern that has influenced your life. Analyze this value, belief, perspective, law, or concern through Marx's concept of ideology. Does it promote a practical need of the ruling class? Does it obscure the rule of the ruling class? (Who is the ruling class today, anyway?) What does your argument suggest for the popular recourse to critical reason, as Marx used it?
2. Explain a social problem that has touched you somehow through the lens of Durkheim's idea of anomie. Which group(s) does this problem affect most? What is the social cause of this problem? (Do not confuse that with the problem's historic orgins; see Durkheim, pg. 291.) What does this reveal about the structure of society today, and what kinds of moral regulation could ease or solve this social problem?