PART I: ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. What is sociological imagination, according to C. Wright Mills?
2. Who are the power elite and what are the social reasons for their existence?
3. What does Habermas mean by the reconstruction of historical materialism?
4. Discuss in detail Habermas’s notions of lifeworld and sytem.
5. What is standpoint theory and how do Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins resemble and differ in terms of their relation to the theory?
PART II: CONCEPTS
I. C. Wright Mills
Conflict Theory; Critique of the Social Order; Sociological imagination; Abstracted Empiricism; Grand Theory; Personal Troubles and Public Issues; Authority and Manipulation; Power Elite; The Power Elite and the Revolving Door; Military-Industrial Complex; Collective Biography; Mass Society; The “Big Three” Institutions; White Collar; Status Panic; Political Fragmentation and Authoritarianism; Sociologists and Politics;
II. Jurgen Habermas
Critical Theory; Subjective Reason; Objective Reason; Individualistic Rationality; technological Rationality; Culture Industry; Surplus Repression; Repressive Desublimation; Communicative Action; Ideal Speech Situation; Lifeworld and System; Steering Media; Colonization of the Lifeworld; Public sphere,; New Social Movements;
III. Dorothy Smith & Patricia Hill Collins
Feminist Theories; Standpoint Theory; Bifurcation of Consciousness; Relations of Ruling; Institutional Ethnography; Standpoint Epistemology; Matrix of domination; Black Feminist Thought