Course Catalog
The course catalog is constantly evolving.
For more detailed scheduling information about these courses, please visit the registrar's office.
Department of Sociology
Tentative Listing of Graduate Courses 2009-10
30001. Sociological Inquiry 1. Introduces students to an active and critical engagement with research traditions in sociology. The course will address the structure of major debates, the characteristics of fruitful lines of research, and the qualities of questions that are worth asking. This course is required for all first-year students. Laumann, Waite. Winter.
30002. Sociological Inquiry 2. Gives an overview of the major methodological approaches in sociology, focusing on how theoretical questions and different types of evidence inform research design. This course is required for all second-year students. Martin. Winter.
30003. History of Social Theory. This course is a basic introduction to classical social theory. It considers Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Mead. Other authors are read as well. Abbott. Autumn.
30004, 30005. Statistical Methods of Research 1, 2. A two-quarter comprehensive introduction to quantitative methods. The first quarter includes analysis of variance and multiple regression; the second quarter covers logistic regression, time series analysis, and network analysis. 30004: Raudenbush. Winter. 30005: Yamaguchi. Spring.
30101. Organizational Analysis. A systematic introduction to theoretical and empirical work on organizations broadly conceived, such as public and private economic organizations, governmental organizations, prisons, health-care organizations, and professional and voluntary associations. Topics include intraorganizational questions about organizational goals and effectiveness, communication, authority, and decision-making. Using recent developments in market, political economy, and neo-institutional theories, we will explore organizational change and interorganizational relationships for their implications in understanding social change in modern societies. Laumann. Autumn.
30102. Social Change. This course presents a general overview of all types of social change. After a theoretical introduction, it considers the various units of change: cohorts, peoples, nations, institutions, and so on. It then considers a variety of types of changes: routine ones like labor force turnover and technological advancement, extraordinary ones like the AIDS epidemic and stock bubbles, regularly patterned ones like life course development and routinization, and irregular ones like tradition and drift. It then turns to various forms of planned change, those originating in institutions (consumption patterns, economic growth) as well as in dominant classes (neoliberalism) and in oppositional social movements (civil rights, environmental movement). Lee. Spring.
30103. Social Stratification. Social stratification is the unequal distribution of the goods that members of a society value -- earnings, income, authority, political power, status, prestige, etc. This course introduces various sociological perspectives about stratification. We will look at major patterns of inequality throughout human history, how they vary across countries, how they are formed and maintained, how they come to be seen as legitimate and desirable, and how they affect the lives of individuals within a society. The readings incorporate classical theoretical statements, contemporary debates, and recent empirical evidence. Stolzenberg. Autumn.
30104. Urban Structure & Process. This course reviews competing theories of urban development, especially their ability to explain the changing nature of cities under the impact of advanced industrialism. Analysis includes a consideration of emerging metropolitan regions, the microstructure of local neighborhoods, and the limitations of the past American experience as a way of developing urban policy both in this country and elsewhere.. McRoberts. Spring.
30106. Political Sociology. A general social science course. Analytical perspectives: citizen preference theory, public choice, group theory, bureaucrats and state-centered theory, coalition theory, elite theories, political culture. These competing analytical perspectives will be assessed in considering middle range theories and empirical studies on central themes of political sociology: the social bases of politics, social stratification and political organization, citizen preferences and political activation, voting behavior, social movements and mobilization, voluntary associations and "special interest groups," political parties, elected officials, government policy outputs, including public goods and free rider problems, separable goods and patronage, policy continua and alternatives to traditional left-right classifications. Local , national, and cross-national analyses. Clark. Spring.
30107. Sociology of Human Sexuality. After briefly reviewing several biological and psychological approaches to human sexuality as points of comparison, we shall explore the sociological perspective on sexual conduct and its associated beliefs and consequences for individuals and society. Topics are addressed through a critical examination of recent national and international surveys of sexual practices and beliefs and related empirical studies. Substantive topics covered include gender relations, lifecourse perspectives on sexual conduct in youth, adolescence and adulthood, social epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections (including AIDS), sexual partner choice and turnover, and the incidence/prevalence of selected sexual practices. Laumann. Spring.
30108. The Institution of Education. This course is a general survey of the properties of education considered as an institution of historical and contemporary societies. Particular attention is given to institutional formation and change in education and to education's role in processes of social control and social stratification. Bidwell. Winter.
30111. Survey Analysis-1. How to analyze and write up previously collected survey data: the basic logic of multi-variate causal reasoning and its application to OLS regression, percentage tables, and briefly log odds. Emphasizes practice in writing. NOT a course in sampling methods. Davis. Autumn.
30112. Applications of Hierarchical Linear Models. A number of diverse methodological problems such as correlates of change, analysis of multi-level data, and certain aspects of meta-analysis share a common feature--a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical linear model offers a promising approach to analyzing data in these situations. This course will survey the methodological literature in this area, and demonstrate how the hierarchical linear model can be applied to a range of problems. Raudenbush. Spring.
30116. Global-Local Politics. Globalizing and local forces are generating a new politics in the United States and around the world. This course explores this new politics by mapping its emerging elements: the rise of social issues, ethno-religious and regional attachments, environmentalism, gender and life-style identity issues, new social movements, transformed political parties and organized groups, and new efforts to mobilize individual citizens. Clark. Winter.
30118. Survey Research Overview. This course is focused on research design and is appropriate for students planning to gather original data through open-ended or close-coded interviews. The final product of the course is a proposal – a detailed plan of action for carrying out your study. No data is actually collected during the course. Rather, students develop a research question and a proposal addressing this question that includes a plan for sampling (either probability or purposive), a draft questionnaire or interview guide, and a proposed set of practical steps for data collection and analysis. Emphasis is on developing a realistic research design that addresses your research question within the limits of time and money available to you. Eight weekly assignments, each one addressing sections of the final proposal, will be commented by the instructor to provide feedback. A final complete proposal, due at the end of the course, will be graded for quality. van Haitsma. Autumn.
30120. Urban Policy Analysis. This course addresses the explanations available for varying patterns of policies that cities provide in terms of expenditures and service delivery. It also covers urban and ethnic reading materials for the Ph.D. Prelim exam in Sociology. Topics include theoretical approaches and policy options, migration as a policy option, group theory, citizen preference theory, incrementalism, economic base influences, and an integrated model. Also examined are the New York fiscal crisis and taxpayer revolts, measuring citizen preferences, service delivery, and productivity. Clark. Autumn.
30122. Introduction to Population. This course provides an introduction to the field of demography, which examines the growth and characteristics of human populations. It also provides an overview of our knowledge of three fundamental population processes: fertility, mortality, and migration. We cover marriage, cohabitation, marital disruption, aging, and population and environment. In each case we examine historical trends. We also discuss causes and consequences of recent trends in population growth, and the current demographic situation in developing and developed countries. Waite. Spring.
30129. Economic Dev in the Inner City. This course will explore conceptually what the issues are around the economic position of cities in the early 21st century, and how to think creatively about strategies to generate economic growth that would have positive consequences for low income residents. Community Development Corporations, empowerment zones, housing projects, business development plans through credit and technical assistance will all be considered. Taub. Winter.
30131. Social and Political Movements. This course provides a general overview and a synthesis on theories of social and political movements. Emphasis will be on the importance of state and state society relations to the rise and outcomes of a social or political movement. Zhao. Winter.
30148. Social Studies of Science. This course examines science as an institution, drawing primarily on research from sociology, but also economics, philosophy, history and interdisciplinary approaches. We examine the culture and practice of science, the many-layered organization of scientific activity, ways in which the scientific system draws inputs from society (e.g., money, students) and produces outputs for it (e.g., technologies, scientists and engineers, articles, certainty), the role of science in governments and economies, and the influence of these and other institutions on the evolution of scientific knowledge. (Although the course touches on areas in the sociology of scientific knowledge and the broader arena of science studies, more attention is given to these fields in the Introduction to Science Studies course taught by Johns and Knorr in Autumn 2009.) Evans. Spring.
30157. Mathematical Models. This course examines mathematical models and related analyses of social action, emphasizing a rational-choice perspective. About half the lectures focus on models of collective action, power, and exchange as developed by Coleman, Bonacich, Marsden, and Yamaguchi. Then the course examines models of choice over the life course, including rational and social choice models of marriage, births, friendship networks, occupations, and divorce. Both behavioral and analytical models are surveyed. Yamaguchi. Spring.
30160. Social Behavior and Health. This course surveys major literature in Medical Sociology with a focus on social behavior and health. It provides an overview of a broad range of topics including social construction of illness, medicine as an institution of social control, stress process theory and models, socioeconomic status and health, and the behavioral models of health care utilization. Yang. Spring.
30169. Global Society and Global Culture: Paradigms of Social and Cultural Analysis. This course introduces students to major theories of globalization and to core approaches to global society and global culture. We discuss micro- and macroglobalization, cultural approaches to globalization, world systems theory, glocalization and hybridization approaches and the "strong program" in globalization studies. Empirically oriented topics include global love, global finance, global terrorism and the globalization of nothing. The empirical ethnographies of the global are chosen to illustrate the interest and feasibility of globalization studies and of critical studies of dimensions of globalization. Knorr Cetina. Autumn.
30179. Labor Force and Employment. This course introduces key concepts, methods and sources of information for understanding the structure of work and the organization of workers in the United States and other industrialized nations. The course surveys social science approaches to answering key questions about work and employment, including: What is the labor force? What determines the supply of workers? How is work organized into jobs, occupations careers and industries? What, if anything, happened to unions? How much money do workers earn and why? What is the effect of work on health? How do workers and employers find each other? Who is unemployed? What are the employment effects of race, gender, ethnicity, religion and other ascribed characteristics? Stolzenberg. Winter.
30181. From the Transhuman to the Postsocial. What do we mean by the "transhuman" and "transsocial"? What are all the phenomena and processes associated with a "postsocial" environment? Are our Western societies becoming more postsocial, or are we simply experiencing a postmodernist turn? Which particular developments feed into and sustain a postsocial world? How can these developments be theorized and related to a knowledge society, to globalization and consumption? Do transhuman tendencies affect our notion of agency, meaning, and identity? What empirical examples are there of some of these tendencies? The class includes literature that points beyond traditional sociological concepts as well as readings based on psychology, economics and neurophysiology. Knorr Cetina. Winter.
30182. Population and Development of Russia and the Former Soviet Union. This course covers the past and contemporary demographic situation in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, including current challenges of depopulation, high working age mortality and population aging. Gavrilov. Winter.
30184. Political Culture, Social Capital, and the Arts. Many analysts like Robert Putnam hold that bowling alone signals a decline in social capital, with major consequences for trust and legitimacy of the political system. But new work finds that certain arts and cultural activities are rising, especially among the young, in many countries. This course reviews core related concepts -- political culture, social capital, legitimacy-and how they change with these new developments. We lay out new concepts and related methods, such as a grammar of scenes, measured for 40,000+ U.S. zip codes. Scenes, nightlife, design, the internet, and entertainment emerge as critical drivers of the post-industrial/knowledge society. Older primordial conflicts over class, race, and gender are transformed with these new issues, which spark new social movements and political tensions. The course has two halves: first to read and discuss major works and complete a mid-term exam, second to continue as a seminar where the main requirement is writing a paper. Clark. Autumn.
30191. Social Change in the United States. This course provides students with concepts, facts and methods for understanding the social structure of the contemporary United States, recent changes in the U.S. social structure, survey data for measuring social structure and social change in contemporary industrial societies, and data analysis methods for distinguishing different types of change. This course is taught by traditional and nontraditional methods. The traditional part is taught by a combination of readings, lectures and discussions. The nontraditional part will be taught by in-class, “live” statistical analysis of the 32-year (1972-2004) cumulative file of the NORC General Social Surveys (GSS). Stolzenberg. Autumn.
30192. The Effects of Schooling. From at least the Renaissance until some time around the middle of the 20th Century, social class was the pre-eminent, generalized determinant of life chances in European and, eventually, American societies. Social class had great effect on one’s social standing, economic well-being, political power, access to knowledge and even longevity, health and height. In that time, there was hardly an aspect of life that was not profoundly influenced by social class. In the ensuing period, the effects of social class have receded greatly, and perhaps have even vanished. In their place formal schooling has become the great generalized influence over who gets access to the desiderata of social life, including food, shelter, political power, medical care, etc. So it is that schooling is sociologically interesting for reasons that go well beyond education. The purpose of this course is to review what is known about the long term effects of schooling. Stolzenberg. Winter.
30193. Religious Politics in the Neo-Liberal Epoch: Islamic Political Discourse in Turkey and Western Europe. Over the past several decades, political Islam has become increasingly a central element in global politics, conflicts and disputes. This course focuses on the rise of Islamic politics in Turkey and, to some extent, in Western Europe. We utilize the current body of research and literature on sociology of Islam, history, and political sociology. Our goal is to understand the rise of Islamic politics as a historically unique cultural and political formation that has its social origins in the structural transformation of social relations in Turkish modernity. Kadakal. Winter.
30197. Race and Ethnicity. This course surveys classic and contemporary understandings of racial and ethnic groups within the sociological tradition, which emphasizes the social constructionist framework. Specifically, the course exposes students to the different ways that sociologists 1) have conceptualized racial and ethnic group difference 2) have analyzed systems of racial and ethnic categorization and 3) have provided proscriptions for racial equality. While the course’s main focus is to examine race and ethnicity in the United States, readings on other countries will be drawn on to illuminate how epistemic cultures of race/ethnicity emerge in different institutional environments. Mora. Spring.
30301. Organizational Decision Making. This course examines the process of decision making in modern, complex organizations (e.g., universities, schools, hospitals, business firms, public bureaucracies). We also consider the impact of information, power, resources, organizational structure, and the environment, as well as alternative models of choice. Padget. Winter.
30303. Urban Landscape as Social Text. This seminar explores the meanings found in varieties of urban landscapes, both in the context of individual elements and composite structures. These meanings are examined in relation to three fundamental approaches that can be identified in the analytical literature on landscapes: normative, historical, and communicative modes of conceptualization. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the explicitly visual features of the urban landscape. Students pursue research topics of their own choosing within the general framework. While mainly a graduate course, advanced undergraduates may be admitted. M. Conzen. Autumn.
30313. Sociology of Morality. Although much foundational work in sociology was anchored in a critique of the economistic model of action, recent sociologists have lost sight of some of the principal objections to the model -- tradition, habit, unconscious motivation, and morality, along with social interaction pressures. This course retrieves major formulations regarding the sociology of morals, from Adam Smith, Comte, Marx-Engels, and Sumner to Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, and Merton. We ask about the genesis, forms, substance, and purposes of morality in social life. The course will climax with communal work on a paradigm for the sociology of morals. D. Levine. Winter.
40101. Basic Demographic Analysis. This course is an introduction to the concepts and methods of demographic analysis. It is intended to provide students with a general understanding of the processes that shape population size, structure, and dynamics and with the logical bases for the most frequent measures of these processes. The emphasis will be on measurement issues in human population while making clear the broader relevance of demographic analysis to the study of any population or system. Yang. Autumn.
40109. Loglinear Analysis. Introduction to basic and intermediate level loglinear and logbilinear models and methods for the analysis of categorical data with an emphasis on applications to social science analysis of categorical data with an emphasis on applications to social science research (procedure Loglinear for SPSS procedure Loguistic for SAS, and in CDAS are used for applications). Topics include hierarchical loglinear models, logit and multinominal logit models, loglinear and logbilinear models, loglinear association models for two-way and multi-way table analysis, fixed and variable distance models, and cumulative logit models for ordinal dependent variables. Yamaguchi. Autumn.
40110. Introduction to Max Weber. The class offers an introduction to Weber's most important writings from all periods of his life. We focus on four major themes: 1. the early texts on the decline of the Roman Empire and the agrarian question in Germany, 2. the methodological writings, 3. the Economic Ethics of the World Religions, 4. major sections of Economy & Society, and 5. political writings. Riesebrodt. Autumn.
40112. Ethnographic Methods. This course explores the epistemological and practical questions raised by ethnography as a method -- focusing on the relationships between theory and data, and between researcher and researched. Discussions are based on close readings of ethnographic texts, supplemented by occasional theoretical essays on ethnographic practices. Students also conduct original field research, share and critique each other's field notes on a weekly basis, and produce analytical papers based on their ethnographies. McRoberts. Winter.
40133. Content Analysis. Introduction to the analysis of textual content for social insight. Students in course will: 1) survey recent advances in natural language processing, information extraction and computational linguistics that can be leveraged to analyze textual content; 2) develop a computational toolkit that implements some of these advances; and 3) design and execute projects that analyze textual data for social inference. Specific topics include text clustering, classification, relevance ranking, and latent semantic indexing. Evans. Winter.
40137. Introduction to Science Studies. This course explores the interdisciplinary study of science as an enterprise. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists all raised interesting and consequential questions about the sciences. Taken together, their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science studies." The course provides an introduction to this field. Students will not only investigate how it coalesced and why, but will also experience the practical application of science-studies perspectives in asking and answering questions about science today. Among the topics we may examine are: the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications; actor-network theories of science; constructivism and the history of science; images of normal and revolutionary science; and accounts of research in the commercial university. Knorr Cetina, Johns. Autumn.
40141. Historical Sociology. This course provides an overview of research in historical sociology. We will cover several topical areas within the field, as well as methodological and theoretical approaches common within the area. Zhao. Winter.
40152. Qualitative Work in Questionnaire Design. The Survey Lab will design a mail questionnaire for a nationally representative sample of psychiatrists that focuses on moral and ethical issues in psychiatric medical practice. Students in the course carry out qualitative work needed to develop and test survey questions for this study. In addition to the qualitative interviews and cognitive testing needed to develop items for the questionnaire, students learn how to format questions for self-administration in ways that reduce non-response error. van Haitsma. Winter.
40154. New Research in Urban Inequality. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an explosion of interest in urban sociology, particularly on questions such as economic restructuring, residential segregation, middle-class migration, and welfare policy. The first decade of the 21st century has brought to the fore new perspectives on urban inequality focused on culture, organizational processes, networks, globalization, and migration. We examine these works from theoretical, substantive, and methodological perspectives. Students must have taken 30104 or a similar course in urban sociology; exceptions granted with permission of the instructor. Small. Winter.
40155. Imagining the Social: Reformation, Enlightenment, Modernity. During the 19th century among North Atlantic people, a particular way of thinking through and feeling human beings' relationships with each other emerged which deviated significantly from the "social imaginaries" of their forebears. The centerpiece of this social imagination is that of "society" as an inescapable, centerless, emerging and self-reproducing institutional order. This class tracks the historical development of this imaginary in theoretical treatises, as well as (I hope) fiction and painting from the Reformation to the classical statements of sociological theory. The temporal focus of the class will be on the 16th and 17th century. Familiarity with the writings of Marx, Weber and Durkheim is presupposed. Glaeser. Spring.
40156. Hermeneutic Sociology: Classical Readings. The central assumption of the hermeneutic social sciences is that the ways in which people understand the world (in performances, words, images, feelings) somehow shapes their actions and thus the institutional orders in which we live. Privileging meaning, they present themselves methodologically as a double hermeneutics (the academic hermeneutics of the practical hermeneutics of the everyday). This class engages with some of the foundational and contemporary statements of hermeneutic social science jumping over the writings of Weber and Simmel which are presupposed. Readings include texts from Vico, Herder, Humboldt, Dilthey, Freud, Panofsky, Bakhtin, Ricoeur, Taylor and Mitchell. Glaeser. Spring.
40159. Comparative International Development and Globalization. This course gives an overview of macro-level social changes in an increasingly interdependent world. The course examines theories and cases of development, democracy, inequality, and globalization. Topics include: the state and development, development and democracy, development and inequality, race/class/gender and development, globalization and divergent organizational trajectories, globalization and welfare states, and global relations/networks. Lee. Spring.
40162. Punishment and Social Theory. Since the modern period, the discourse on punishment has cycled through three sets of questions. The first, born of the Enlightenment itself, inquired into the foundations of the sovereign's right to punish. With the birth of social sciences and critical theory, a second set of questions arose exploring the function of punishment -- what is it that we do when we punish? A series of further critiques -- of meta-narratives, of functionalism, of scientific objectivity -- softened this line of inquiry and helped shape a third question: What is the cultural meaning of our punishment practices? Through readings in social and political theory -- including Durkheim, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School -- as well as more contemporary writings on punishment, this course will explore these modern debates over punishment practices and institutions. Students can elect either a take-home exam or paper project for a grade. Harcourt. Autumn.
40168. Comparative Welfare States and Social Policies. This course gives an overview of the political economy of social policy in advanced industrial democracies. The course explores how organized social forces, partisan politics, business interests, international pressures, and demographic changes have shaped and transformed the welfare state regimes. Topics include: Theories of the Welfare State, Welfare State Regime Typology, Bargaining Regimes and Welfare Regimes, Partisan Politics and Politics of Growth, Development of American Welfare State, Gender and Welfare State Regimes, Post-industrial Economy and Welfare States, Varieties of Capitalism, Globalization/Financial Crisis and Welfare States. Lee. Winter.
40172. Maverick Markets: Cultural Economy and Cultural Finance. What are the cultural dimensions of economic and financial institutions and financial action? What social variables influence and shape 'real' markets and market activities? 'If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?' is a question economists have been asked in the past. Why isn’t it easy to make money in financial areas even if one knows what economists know about markets, finance and the economy? And why, on the other hand, is it so easy to get rich for some participants? Perhaps the answer is that real markets are complex social and cultural institutions which are quite different from organizations, administrations and the production side of the economy. The course addresses these differences and core dimensions of economic sociology; it is not focused on the sociology of organizations. Knorr Cetina. Winter.
50003. Sociology of the State. Many modern nation states tax nearly half of the people's income. A nation state develops relationships with other states and takes charge of territorial defense. It monopolizes the use of violence within a territory. It also regulates many aspects of our lives from education, working, marriage, retirement, redistribution of wealth to daily activities such as parking, driving and garbage disposal. State power is, therefore, the principal dimension of political power. This course introduces theories of states with a comparative-historical perspective. It is organized around several empirical issues, including the origin and development of pre-modern state forms, the rise of nation states, state and economic development, state and social change, state-society relations and states in the post-industrial world. The course provides an overview on the cutting-edge research in the field. It is also intended to guide those who are interested in political sociology or macro-comparative sociology to develop empirical projects with the state as an important dimension. Zhao. Winter.
50007. Seminar: Social Stratification. The goal of this advanced seminar is to identify, review, and critique selected historical and contemporary approaches to stratification and inequality. The emphasis will be on innovative theoretical perspectives, their relationship to classic traditions, and their insights into longstanding and emerging forms of inequality. Readings will be eclectic, spanning levels of analyses and sub-disciplinary borders. For example, we will explore current social psychological research on the emergence of power and prestige orders in small groups and occupational communities, contemporary studies linking the social organization of schools to inequality, and current research on the various forms of human, social and cultural capital in generating inequality. Laumann. Winter.
50023. Organizations and Environments. Contemporary perspectives on organizations emphasize the interaction between organizations and the environments in which they operate. This Ph.D. course introduces students to contemporary theory and research on how the distribution and structure of resources in the environment affect organizations and, conversely, on how organizations interact to shape the structure of organizational environments. In addition to covering the major sociological approaches to this topic (emphasizing on inter-organizational network theory, but we also discuss organizational ecology, transaction cost economics, learning theory, and institutional theory), we survey recent advances in theory and research that extend and combine these approaches in interesting ways. In assessing different theories, one of our primary concerns will be evaluating the quality of empirical evidence. Finally, we devote time to discussing how to become a producer of top-tier quality research. The course should benefit students in two ways. First, it aims to help students develop the skills needed to critique current organizational theory and research. Second, the course aids students in identifying promising areas for future research and in designing effective means of addressing them. Phillips. Autumn.
50026. Modern Sociological Theory. The purpose of this class is to offer an overview of contemporary developments and debates in sociological theory in the U.S. and Europe. The guiding thread of the course lies in the following questions: What is human action? How is social order possible? What are the mechanisms of social change? How do we have to understand contemporary societies? The point of departure for this class is Talcott Parsons's attempt at synthesizing the classical sociological theories. This attempt dominated sociology in the world after 1945. The different schools of a critique of Parsons (rational choice; symbolic interactionism; ethnomethodology; conflict sociology) will then be presented. After that the course will focus on later developments from the 1980s until today. These last decades can be characterized as the age of a "new theoretical movement" with several new attempts to come to a new theoretical synthesis (Habermas, Luhmann, Giddens, Touraine, Bourdieu, neofunctionalism, neopragmatism, new sociology of power). The whole course is based on my book "Social Theory", written with W. Knoebl, published in German in 2004, English translation Cambridge University Press 2009. Joas. Autumn.
50047. Seminar: Institutional Analysis. Institutional theories address the relatively durable configurations and conventions that shape political and social processes. Within societies, over time, and across nations, institutional analysis has sought to explain convergence across cases and persistence over time as well as those episodes of institutional change when organizational fields and political orders are significantly transformed. The course will include readings by sociologists, political scientists and institutional economists. Clemens. Spring.
50058. Seminar: Cohort Analysis and Social Change. This seminar examines the theories and methods of cohort analysis that are of enduring importance to the study of population processes and dynamics and social change. It first introduces the theoretical background and major principles of the cohort analysis paradigm. This is followed by a survey of key methodological and empirical studies within the frameworks of three common research designs in social research: 1) aggregate population level data in the form of age-by-time period tables; 2) microdata from repeated cross-section surveys; and 3) accelerated longitudinal data. The examples given include the evolution of mortality declines, dynamics and heterogeneity of subjective well-being, and social stratification of the life course. Discussion within each design emphasizes the substantive problems that result from the lack of adequate analytic strategies and the development of new models and methods that address these problems. The objectives are for students to obtain an understanding of key concepts, theories, methods, and research findings so that they can begin contributing to current research in a broad range of areas in which time and change are of concern such as mortality, fertility, migration, marriage and family, education, income, health, longevity, and quality of life. Yang. Autumn.
50061. Seminar: The Axial Age Debate. The debate about an "axial age", initiated by Karl Jaspers (1949), has recently become one of the most productive developments in comparative historical sociology. It can lead to new insights in the empirical study of the basic cognitive, religious, and political structures of several core civilizations. But it can also be interpreted as one of the most complex attempts of leading intellectuals of the 20th century and of our time to argue about the role of "transcendence" in existential and political matters. In an age of on-going secularization in Europe, a new awareness of the commonalities of the world religions, and conscious attempts to develop "de-transcendentalised" worldviews in philosophy and the "political religions" of the 20th century, the empirical questions take on a far-reaching importance. New light can thus be thrown on the writings of Max Weber, Eric Voegelin, Karl Jaspers, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Robert Bellah, among others, and their relationship to religious faith. Joas. Autumn.
50068. Logic of Inquiry in Case Study Methods. This seminar covers basic techniques for interpreting and analyzing case study data, whether ethnographic or historical. Our objective is to think more clearly and logically about case study methods. The seminar will tackle head-on important questions facing case study methods in sociology today: Is case study research, whether ethnographic or historical, scientific? By what criteria does it meet or fail to meet the standards of scientific evidence? Does this matter? What are the roles of induction and deduction in qualitative research? Do case studies effectively verify hypotheses, or only generate them? Do case studies have a small-n problem? Is such work generalizable? Are Mill's comparative methods appropriate for social scientists? Students must have taken at least two courses in graduate-level statistics or quantitative social science analysis. Small. Winter.
50069. Seminar: Theorizing Gender. This course provides an overview of sociological theories of gender. We begin by examining the discussion of women and gender in classic and contemporary sociological theory. Next, we move to theoretical interventions by women, including Marxist feminism, standpoint theory, Black feminist thought, and gender organization theory. We then explore the rise of theories of performativity and other "individual"-level approaches to gender. We conclude with an overview of recent scholarship in the sociology of gender theory. Schilt. Autumn.
50070. Seminar: Religion and Ritual. The class reviews theories of ritual from classical to contemporary. Special attention is given to questions of the content and meanings of rituals as well as of performance and dramatization. By specializing in one specific ritual of his/her choice and writing the final paper on it, each student explores the possibilities and shortcomings of various theories. Riesebrodt. Autumn.
50071. Seminar: Difference. This course will read a number of classic works on the subject of social differences, one per week. It is aimed at a serious theoretical engagement with the concept of difference. Possible authors include Vico, Stael, Herder, Marx, Weber, Beauvoir, Fanon, (E. Franklin) Frazier, Evans-Pritchard, Whorf, and Jakobson. Abbott. Winter.
50072. Seminar: Power. This course will read a number of classic works on the subject of power, one per week. It aims to develop a theoretical understanding of the concept of power. Possible authors include Maine, Gierke, Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Simmel, Gramsci, Parsons, Foucault, and Bourdieu. Abbott. Winter.
