TEXT BOOKS
-Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory: Text and Readings. Authors: Scott Appelrouth & Laura Desfor Edles. Edition: First. Year of Publication: 2008. Publisher: Pine Forge Press. ISBN # 978-0-7619-2793-8.
-Dictionary of Contemporary Social Theory. Compiled by (with comments): Alem Kebede. (Please note that parts of this teaching material cannot be reproduced or posted on the Internet without the permission of the instructor.)
EXAMNINATIONS, PAPERS, AND GRADING
Grades will be based on three exams (185 points total]), attendance and participation in class (15 points [No attendance points if a student misses three classes, including classes that are not attended in full.]), and a conceptual term paper (100 points). A term paper should not be less than 8 pages, nor should it exceed 12 pages. Guidelines for the term paper will be discussed in class. There will be penalty for not submitting papers on the due date.
Grades will be assigned using the standard grading system: 100-90=A; 89-80=B; 79-70=C; 69-60=D. The final grade for the course will be determined as follows: 300-270=A; 269-240=B; 239=210=C; 209-180=D.
ATTENDANCE
You are required to attend all classes. An absence will be regarded as excused if and and only if verification of the reason for the absence is provided and this reason is such that a) attendance would have been detrimental to the health of the student, b) attendance would have put other students at risk, c) a case of personal emergency or tragedy, or d) the instructor approved the reason for the absence at least one week in advance of the missed class. The instructor will be happy to discuss any aspect of the course with any student during office hours or during a mutually agreed to meeting time. However, it is unprofessional to approach the instructor seeking information that was missed as a result of unexcused absence.
Active participation and attending class on a regular basis can raise your grade in borderline cases. Excessive absence will result in the letter grade of “I” (Incomplete).
CURVES, MAKE-UPS, ETC.
No grading curves or other such means will be employed during the determination of any grades for this course. There will be no extra credit options unless assigned by the instructor following an excused absence. There will be no make-up exam except in cases where an exam was missed due to an excused absence. If an exam is missed as a result of an excused absence, then either a make-up exam will be scheduled, or the weight assigned to other elements in the course will be adjusted.
ACADEMIC DISHONESTY
Any form of academic dishonesty will not be tolerated during this course. It is the responsibility of each student to learn what academic dishonesty includes. The Office of Student Conduct can provide useful information on this topic. The instructor will seek the gravest possible penalty in accordance with CSUB policies and regulations.
SPECIAL NEEDS
Any student with a disability or having special needs should notify both the instructor and the Office of Disabled Student Services as soon as possible. The instructor welcomes any student who wants to discuss issues pertaining to his/her academic progress, ambition, or problem. Just e-mail, or call me, or drop by to my office anytime.
COURSE OUTLINE
Please note that the following outline does not exhaust all the key social theorists that we will be discussing in class. Also the depth of treatment that a particular theorist receives in class depends on the intellectual impact that his/her perspective has on social analysis.
I. INTRODUCTION
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 1-20; Kebede TBA
II. STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM: ROBERT MERTON
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 382-394; Kebede TBA
III. DRAMATURGY: ERVING GOFFMAN
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 478-518; Kebede TBA
IV. EXCHANGE THEORY & PHENOMENOLOGY: PETER BLAU & BERGER AND LUCKMAN
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 454-473; 553-578; Kebede TBA
EXAM I: January 28, 2010
V. CRITICAL THEORY: C. WRIGHT MILLS & JURGEN HABERMAS
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 409; Mills 1-20; Appelrouth & Edles 719-752; Kebede TBA
VI: FEMINST THEORIES: DOROTHY SMITH & PATRICIA HILL COLLINS
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 581-621; Kebede TBA
EXAM II: February 18, 2010
VII. POSTSTRUCTURAL AND POSTMODERN THEORIES: MICHEL FOUCUALT & JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 632-682; Kebede TBA
VIII. CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL SYNTHESES: ANTHONY GIDDENS & PIERRE BOURDIEU Read: Appelrouth & Edles 684-718; 753-786; Kebede TBA
IX. THE GLOBAL SOCIETY: IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN & EDWARD SAID
Read Appelrouth & Edles 787-837; Kebede TBA
TERM PAPER DUE: March 4, 2010
EXAM III: March 16, 2010
Edward Said
With the publication of Orientalism (1978), Said was catapulted to international academic fame. The book presented his ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism (1978) and other works proved pioneering in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence that and several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East. Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.
Immanuel Wallerstein
Wallerstein began as an expert of post-colonial African affairs, which he selected as the focus of his studies after an international youth conference in 1951, and which his publications were almost exclusively devoted to until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic level. His early criticism of global capitalism and championship of "anti-systemic movements" have recently made him a gray eminence with the anti-globalization movement within and without the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky and Pierre Bourdieu.
Anthony Giddens
Giddens, the author of over 34 books and 200 articles, essays and reviews has contributed and written about most notable developments in the area of social sciences, with the exception of research design and methods. He has written commentaries on most leading schools and figures and has used most sociological paradigms in both micro and macrosociology. His writings range from abstract, metatheoretical problems to very direct and 'down-to-earth' textbooks for students. Finally, he is also known for his interdisciplinary approach: he has commented not only on the developments in sociology, but also in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, social work and most recently, political science. In view of his knowledge and works, one may view much of his life's work as a form of 'grand synthesis' of sociological theory.
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Michel Foucault
Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse has been widely discussed. In the 1960s Foucault was associated with Structuralism, a movement from which he distanced himself. Foucault also rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels to which he was often later attributed, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Kant. Foucault is particularly influenced by the work of Nietzsche; his "genealogy of knowledge" is a direct allusion to Nietzsche's genealogy of morals.
Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic who is best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and of technological communication. His writing, although consistently interested in the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects — from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
Dorothy Smith
In recognition of her contributions in "transformation of sociology", and for extending boundaries of "feminist standpoint theory" to "include race, class, and gender", Dr. Smith received numerous awards from American Sociological Association, including the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999) and the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology (1993). In recognition of her scholarship, she also received two awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association: the Outstanding Contribution Award (1990) and the John Porter Award for her book "The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology." (1990).
Patricia Hill Collins
Collins draws on black women's experiences and voices to explain concepts that have been obscured institutionally, philosophically, and ideologically. Collins's interdisciplinary methodology employs a "both/and" analytical approach to domination and subordination. Collins rejects oppositional thought because "either/or thinking categorizes people, things, and ideas in terms of their differences from one another" which requires objectification and subordination.
C. Wright Mills
Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism.
Jurgen Habermas
Habermas's works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.
Peter Berger
Berger was a fervent student of religion. He continuously contemplated his own Christian beliefs and spent a “very happy” year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied to be a minister. Indeed, Berger is just as well known for his work in the sociology of religion as in phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge. His now-classic Invitation to Sociology (1963) continues to be one of the most acclaimed and inspiring introductions to the discipline of sociology today.
Thomas Luckman
Luckmann is a follower of the phenomenological school of sociology, established by the German-American scholar Alfred Schütz. In his works, he has developed a theory, known as social constructionism, which argues that all knowledge, including the most basic common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions.
Peter Blau
Blau's sociological specialty was in organizational and social structures, in particular bureaucracy. He produced theories with many applications within social phenomena, including upward mobility, occupational opportunity, heterogeneity, and how population structures can influence human behavior.
Erving Goffman
Goffman was at the forefront of important movements within sociology, for instance, doing ethnomethodology before the ethnomethodologist and exploring the central role of language in social life (the "linguistic turn") well ahead of most of his sociological brethren.
Robert K. Merton
Theories include - deviance, drug addiction, friendship formation, medical education, technology, media, and the history of science.