Sociology Department

SOC 211 - Introduction to Sociology

An introduction to sociological perspectives on patterns of human conduct ranging from fleeting encounters in informal gatherings to historical processes of institutional persistence and change. Topics of discussion and research include the stratification of life chances, social honor and power in human populations, and the differentiation of these populations by gender, race, age, ethnicity, and other characteristics both achieved and ascribed; the integration of differentiated roles and statuses into systems capable of maintaining their structure beyond the life span of living individuals, and capable as well of revolutionary and evolutionary social change; and the interrelationships of familial, economic, political, educational, and religious institutions in the emerging world system of late modernity.

SOC 231 - Organizations

This course provides a broad introduction to the analysis of organizations in sociology and related fields. Organizations are a ubiquitous feature of social, economic, and political life, and involve a striking variety of cases, ranging from corporations, community nonprofits, and state welfare providers to firefighting teams, symphony orchestras, hospitals, rape crisis centers, and universities. They represent social sites in which we spend a substantial proportion of our daily lives, profoundly shaping opportunity, power, identity, and everyday interactions both within their boundaries and in the broader society. We address variation and change in the nature of organizations, and the consequences of organizational structure and form for how organizations operate, what and who individuals and groups can and cannot do or become, and how societies evolve. Topics include organizational types and forms (e.g., hierarchical vs. network; corporations, nonprofits, cooperatives; standing vs. temporary organizations); organizations and power; organizational ecologies or systems; organizations, inequality, and social stratification; organizations and community; and organizations, mobilization, and social movements.

SOC 280 - Social Movements

Why do some social movements fail, while others succeed? The goal of this course is to introduce students to sociological theories of social movement success and failure. Through a review of classical and contemporary theories and case studies of women's liberation, gay liberation, abortion, civil rights, environmentalism, and the peace and disarmament movements, we will identify key analytical questions and research strategies for studying contemporary social movements in depth. Among the perspectives reviewed will be classical approaches (de Tocqueville, "mass society," and "relative deprivation"), as well as more recent perspectives that focus on rational choice, resource mobilization, political process, and new social movements.

SOC 311 - Research Methods

The primary objective is to provide background for empirical research in the social sciences. Specific objectives include deepening understanding of the logic of inference by exploring the relationship between empirical observations and causal models and introducing basic research techniques. Topics include the logic of inference, the nature of evidence, and a nonmathematical introduction to quantitative social analysis, emphasizing regression.

SOC 322 - Gender and Work

Gender is a central organizing principle in social relations and is deeply embedded in how work is organized, rewarded, and experienced. This course provides an overview of the theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions of scholarship in the area of gender, work, and organizations. Emphasis on the intersection of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and class. Topics include inequalities in the labor force, low wage and informal work and poverty, sex/sexuality in the workplace, masculinity/femininity at work, work/family conflict and the division of labor in the home, and how the institution of family, gender, and work culture are integrated into work practices, policies, and programs.

SOC 326 - Science and Social Difference

Is race biological? Do men and women have different brains? Categories such as race and gender are often presumed to be socially constructed classifications linked to difference. At the same time, references to scientific claims that prioritize the biological underpinnings of behavior and outcomes are common. This raises questions about the role of biology in determining differences between men and women, among racial/ethnic groups, and regarding sexuality, and how these ideas relate to the design of science policy and practice. Considering a series of contemporary cases, students in this course will examine the reciprocal relationships between scientific inquiry, science politics, social identity, and belonging. The course does not attempt to resolve these often contentious topics, but rather focuses on the processes by which ideas about difference are transmitted to students of science and the public; how social groups and identities are taken into account in science research, technological design, and clinical studies; who gets to "do science"; and the people and groups invested in the outcomes.

SOC 327 - Sociology of Friendship

Friendship and friendship groups are a central feature of social life that foster support, solidarity, and shared connection among people. Friendships are socially structured and patterned, making them of interest to those who study group relations and group formation. This course engages with scholarly debates on the meaning and significance of friendship across the life course. It focuses on social boundaries and identities reproduced and/or challenged through the experience of friendship, and examines the development and effects of hierarchies of status and power and of friendship norms and social pressure. Particular emphasis will be on the role of networks, technological developments, organizations, and institutions in structuring trust, connection, and social solidarity among people. A focus on friendship also invites broader dialogue regarding other forms of social connection (or lack thereof), such as acquaintanceship, intimate relations, contractual ties, isolation, and the role of strangers in our lives.

SOC 331 - Topics in Organizational Analysis

Topics vary. For current offerings, review the schedule of classes. Omnipresent in "modern" settings, organizations are a potent structuring force in social, economic, and political life, and provide a wealth of possibilities for sustained inquiry in a topics course. May be repeated for credit.

Organizations: Cooperatives and Nonprofits
Organizations are central to our daily lives. They reflect and shape opportunity; create or contest status hierarchies of gender, race, and privilege; generate and alter power relations; and are products and producers of social capital. This course examines in depth two kinds of organizations-cooperatives and nonprofits. Despite the emphasis in our capitalist society on corporate hierarchies, individual profit seeking, and the market, we rely to a striking extent on cooperatives, nonprofits, and kindred forms to organize our efforts and get work done. This course will explore these organizing strategies, critically addressing 1) their history, evolution, and prospects; 2) their important role in public policy and everyday economic life; and 3) their service as platforms for broader projects, including contesting corporate capitalism, promoting workplace democracy, fostering community and economic development, overcoming dependency, empowering poor or marginalized groups, and achieving social justice.

SOC 337 - The Collapse of Communism

This conference focuses on selected research areas that span between the sociology of capitalism and sociology more broadly. We will broaden our understanding of the cultural and social processes involved in the production of social inequality and identity in contemporary societies that were ruled by communist states throughout the twentieth century and have been deeply affected by the return to capitalism. We explore contemporary sociological and anthropological studies examining the production of new social identities and symbolic boundaries, with a focus on how preexisting gender, ethno-racial, and institutional cultures and subcultures created during communist rule are being changed and challenged by contemporary economic restructuring, in tandem with the rise of new capitalist economic relations. The role of gender in the refashioning of collective identities will be highlighted through the readings.

SOC 340 - American Capitalism

This is a comparative historical course on the development of American capitalism, focusing on the rise of mass markets and giant corporations as its dominant organizing principles. We survey theoretical approaches used to explain American capitalism and engage historical analyses of the key turning points in the development of our economy. A central objective is to document the existence of more efficient, democratic, and decentralized alternatives to the type of capitalism that came to prevail in the United States. Topics include the role of culture, politics, and finance capital in the development of the corporation; the rise and fall of cooperative, regionally based systems; mass production; populist responses to economic centralization; American labor; and state regulation.

SOC 342 - Social Technologies of Belonging

This seminar examines how historical and contemporary social technologies of belonging have shaped Asian and Asian American formations in the United States. Centering sociological and interdisciplinary research, we will examine the sociohistorical relational constructions of "Asians" and "Asian Americans." The course is organized around four themes: (1) disciplinary constructions of Asians in the United States from sociology and Asian American studies; (2) citizenship, rights, and policy; (3) identity and community formation; and (4) emerging directions in research. Students will learn key theoretical frameworks and how significant historical moments such as the Chinese exclusion acts, World War II, the Third World Liberation Front, the rise of the model minority myth, and 9/11 shaped and reshaped the racial formation of Asians in the United States.

SOC 343 - Sociology of Race and Racism

What is race? Race is a social construction. But what does it actually mean for race to be a social construction? In this seminar, we will examine how sociologists, social scientists, and legal scholars in the United States have theorized, debated, and researched the constructions of race and the practices and consequences of racism. Struggles over the meaning of race are entanglements over assertions of power so we will engage with scholars who demonstrate the coconstitution of race with other structures of power such as class, gender, sexuality, law, and colonialism. Students will gain an understanding of key paradigms that explicitly center or decenter race, including internal colonialism, the "underclass," racial formation theory, and women of color feminisms.

SOC 348 - Race, Economy, Public Policy

This course examines the social and institutional structures of economic life, economic policy, and their effects on race, stratification, and the system of ethnic relations in the contemporary United States. It examines those dynamics through the lenses of economic and organizational sociology, which view economic activities and outcomes as socially structured via networks, corporate and state hierarchies, systems of association and interpersonal exchange, and ecologies of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Topics include the rise and fall of the mass production corporation; the role of unions, ethnic enclaves, and employment networks in allocating resources; the effects of civil rights law on corporate practices; how the state, the law, and neighborhood associations shape segregation, housing market dynamics, and the differential accumulation of wealth; the nature of and transformations in the welfare state; and the role of nonprofit enterprise and small-business formation in shaping the fates of African Americans and other groups.

SOC 352 - Sociology of Money

Is money a self-propelling medium of exchange, solely about mundane financial calculations, transactions, and interests? Do we only use it to quantify various qualities into a standard metric to exchange them? What happens when money penetrates what is typically considered priceless, such as our norms, emotions, intimate relations, bodies, or nature? In today's world, it is common for various economic, legal, and social institutions to place financial values on things as profound as human life, death, blood, organs, justice, sexual or romantic partnerships, and wildlife. Does this exercise flatten, commodify, corrode, and corrupt, as many scholars, legalists, activists think it does? Or, does it operate interdependently with our moral principles, cultural practices, interpersonal relationships? Then, how can those supposed corrosive commodification practices, in reality, turn into meaningful relations within which our lives, values, and ties are construed, maintained, and shaped? This conference invites its participants to grapple with these fundamental problems and more. Drawing on neoclassic economic theory to its Marxist critics, critical socio-legal scholarship to moral philosophy, cultural studies to economic sociology, we'll delve deep into the social life of money. Thus, we'll examine money not merely as a financial instrument but with the social and cultural processes mediating its significance from within.

SOC 361 - Power, Hegemony, Resistance

This course invites its participants to treat politics as grounded in everyday life, as arising from power and agency, and as a medium of domination and change. It introduces key sociological debates on relations of power in which, as Karl Marx famously suggests, individuals generate their thinking and acting not as they please but under the restrictions of structural contexts and social inequalities. Those social forces, however, do not divest individuals from becoming agents. People almost always have potentials for resisting and changing. When, why, and how people realize these possibilities are undoubtedly central concerns of this class. But why people are resigned to and how they participate in their own domination are equally crucial. This course thus calls as much attention to those individualistic and collective forms of resistance as it does to their absence.

SOC 362 - Culture and Inequality in Contemporary Communities

How do cultural processes reinforce social inequality? What meanings and practices serve to hide, normalize, or validate stratifications between individuals and social groups? What makes subordinate groups create subversive cultures in the struggle for community, dignity, and equity? This conference draws on cultural sociology to address all these questions and more. We start with classical texts, establishing key concepts (such as symbolic boundaries and intersectionality) in the field of study. We then focus on case studies tackling issues as diverse as elite education and privilege, poverty and social aids, economic restructuring and gentrification, sexual minorities and the city. Throughout these studies, we pay attention to the cultural processes within which class, gender, and race inequalities are rendered invisible or unproblematic and thus socially normalized. Further, we look at the process of contestation through which communities use social relations and cultural frames to defend themselves against top-down economic, social, and political changes.

SOC 363 - Sociology of Culture

The course surveys recent sociological studies of cultural production. It surveys how cultural materials are used to establish and maintain boundaries that differentiate among middle-class status groups in contemporary America and how diverse organizations such as museums, art galleries, and record companies manage the production and distribution of cultural symbols for a diversified market.

SOC 364 - Law and Society

This course is intended as an introduction to law and society scholarship. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates over legality and illegality, legal pluralism, human rights, access to justice, legal consciousness, law and social inequality, law and social control, and legal mobilization, we focus on social and cultural dimensions of the law through varied historical and geographical contexts. Among the specific problems we cover are: With what concepts and methods can we explain the affinities between law and society? What are the sources, workings, and consequences of the law's legitimacy? How does the law reinforce or mitigate class, gender, and race-based inequalities? Who mobilizes the law-how and with what results? In grappling with these questions, we examine the law as constitutive of the status quo and social change.

SOC 380 - Networks and Social Structure

Social network dynamics influence phenomena within communities, neighborhoods, families, work life, scientific and technical innovation, terrorism, trade, alliances, and wars. Network theories of social structure view actors as inherently interdependent, and examine how social structure emerges from regularities in this interdependence. This course focuses on the theoretical foundations of structural network dynamics and identifies key analytical questions and research strategies for studying network formation, organization, and development. Attention is paid to both interactionist and structuralist traditions in network analysis, and includes a focus on the core principles of balance and centrality, connectivity and clustering, power and hierarchy, and social structure writ large. Substantive topics include social mobility and stratification, group organization and mobilization, patterns of creativity and innovation, resource distributions, decision-making, the organization of movement and belief systems, conflict and cooperation, and strategic interaction. This course couples theoretical and substantive themes with methodological applications. Approximately one-third of course time is spent on the methodology of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting social network data. 

SOC 470 - Thesis

SOC 481 - Special Topics

Work is restricted to special fields in sociology-demography, communication analysis, and community surveys.