Course Catalog
The course catalog is constantly evolving.
For more detailed scheduling information about these courses, please visit the registrar's office.
Course Offerings 2011-12
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. Martin. 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: Raudenbush. 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 causal processes of macro-institutional level social changes. It considers a variety of types of cross-national, over-time changes such as economic growth, bureaucratization, revolutions, democratization, spread of cultural and institutional norms, deindustrialization, globalization and development of welfare states. It also covers various forms of planned changes in oppositional social movements (civil rights, environmental, women’s, and labor movements). 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. Winter.
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.
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. 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. Spring.
30142. The Chicago School of Sociology. This course will introduce students to the classical work of the Chicago School and to the research stance that has characterized Chicago sociology from its beginnings. The course will emphasize reading original works rather than covering the history, although there will be some study of the relevant historiography. Although the course will focus on the First Chicago School, it will also consider the Second Chicago School period and other revivals. Texts to be studied could include The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, The Hobo, The Gold Coast and the Slum, The Gang, The Taxi-dance Hall, and Black Metropolis, as well as such general works as Introduction to the Science of Sociology and The City. From later periods we might consider works from such authors as Goffman, Becker, Strauss, Turner, Freidson, Janowitz, and Suttles. Since the course will be largely reading based, it must be limited to 25 students. Abbott. Winter.
30152. Migration & Immigration: Causes/Consequences. Reviews basic concepts, research methodology, and theories (economic, demographic, sociological and social-psychological) for all forms of spatial mobility: local moving, internal migration, and immigration. Equal emphasis is given to the U.S. and other world regions. This course is intended to prepare students for independent research and/or policy investigation on a wide range of topics and issues pertaining to the voluntary and involuntary spatial movement of people in the modern world. Each student will have an independent term project. Bogue. Spring.
30169. Global Society and Global Culture. Subtitle: 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.
30171. Law, Organizations, and Markets. Why are corporations considered legal individuals, and how did they come into being? What happens when they break the law? Why are some contract disputes brought to court, while the vast majority are solved with a quick handshake? How do global economic transactions get structured outside of national legal systems? This course examines these and related questions at the intersections of economic sociology, organizational theory, and the law. We begin with an overview of theory from sociology and economics before turning to an examination of the ways in which the law structures organizational and economic behavior, as well as how markets and organizations structure legal institutions. Lancaster. Spring.
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. Spring.
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. Winter.
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. Spring.
30203. Emotions and Culture: Paradigms of Empirical and Theoretical Analysis. The sociology of emotions is of increasing interest to contemporary societies. We believe now that even intelligence is dependent on emotions, and we find, in a variety of settings, that emotions and emotional energy directly influence situational and organization outcomes. The course gives an overview of the current state of the analysis of emotions in social science fields. Students will be asked to read, analyze and discuss major works in the in the social studies of emotions in class, and to think about ways to apply emotional concepts in future research. Particular attention will go to analyzing the challenges for theorization and empirical specification. Knorr Cetina. Winter.
30204. Sociology of Civil Society. This course examines how civil society interacts with the state and market. After a theoretical overview of classical theories of civil society and more modern theoretical variations, it explores the various topics of civil society from institutional, organizational, and cultural perspectives. Topics include: civil society and social movements, civil society and welfare states, civil society and identity politics, civil society and market, and transformation of civil society and public sphere. Lee. Winter.
30206. Demographic Methods: Measurement and Analysis in Population Studies. This course introduces students to the analysis of population processes using demographic methods. It emphasizes formal theory and modeling assumptions as well as the practical estimation and interpretation of demographic measures. The course covers the construction of cohort and period life tables (including single, multiple-decrement, and multi-state examples) and analyses of changes in population size and composition. Students are introduced to demographic databases and develop skills in the manipulation of data using the statistical computing language R. Applications include international mortality and health trends, as well as fertility and population change. (Background in calculus preferred but not required.) Engelman. Winter.
30208. Internet and Society. The course explores the Internet and its influence on modern life. We consider the history, growth and structure of the Internet, email and the World Wide Web; the meaning and consequence of the "digital divide" between rich and poor; online identities and intimacy; social media and community; political participation and polarization; media sharing, mash-ups and cultural diversity; the knowledge economy, online markets and the evolution of intellectual property; immersive and virtual reality; information overload; searching, surfing and distributed intelligence on the Internet. The course surveys a wide variety of arguments about these issues, generates new questions and theories about Internet and society, and interrogates them all in discussion and through online investigation and experiments. Evans. Spring.
30212. Urban Cultures, Local Politics and Globalisation. Cities across the world experience globalization pressures which may enhance social exclusion and cultural homogenization, as well as offering local opportunities for entrepreneurship, civic engagement, and bottom-up politics. States and policy-makers have long used cultural policies for civic advancement and education, nation-building, institutional stability and power representation. More recently local governments and marketing experts have discovered culture to promote the economic location as well as social cohesion and political support. But urban symbols can also serve alternative power claims and expressions of discontent. These various functions of urban culture do not easily combine in cohesive development strategies, often causing interest conflicts and public contestation. We will discuss how various conceptions of power and culture result in different urban ideas, and how these might also be grounded in varying realities, e.g. in US and European cities. de Frantz. 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. Padgett. Winter.
30302. Problems of Policy Implementation. Once a governmental policy or program is established, there is the challenge of getting it carried out in ways intended by the policy makers. Obstacles emerge because of problems of hierarchy, competing goals and cultures of different groups, and because of difficulties in achieving complex new patterns of change. We explore how these obstacles emerge and may be overcome particularly between groups; and between creators and those responsible for implementing programs. We also look at varying responses of target populations. Taub. Spring.
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. M. Conzen. Autumn.
30306. Human Capital. This course covers both micro and macro aspects of human capital. Investments by parents in the education and other human capital of their children. Intergenerational transmission of inequality. The links between specialization in particular types of human capital and coordination costs, general knowledge, and the extent of the market. The relation between human capital, population change, and economic growth is also emphasized. Becker. Spring.
30316. Simmel’s Views of Life and Religion. Georg Simmel’s testamentary masterwork, Lebensanschauung–The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays, was described as “the final conclusion of his wisdom . . . a cornucopia for all who understand how to receive that wisdom.” Summing his life-long engagement with Kant’s principle of “Form” and Goethe’s “Life,” VIEW sought an integrated understanding of the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms and the sources of authentic individuality. Our close reading of this text will be supplemented by forays into other pertinent writings. In particular, we shall examine his rich corpus of writings on religion, which include essays on religion and art, religion and personality, the sociology of religion, and religion and modernity. In the course of exploring Simmel’s questions regarding forms of art, religion, self, and social experience, and how they can be interpreted from the “view of life” itself, students will have an opportunity to sit in on an international conference of scholars convened on campus to celebrate the first complete English translation of his long-neglected masterpiece. Levine. 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. 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. Lancaster. Winter.
40142. Library Methods for Social Sciences. This course is a graduate introduction to the methods involved with "research with records" -- that is, material like manuscripts, books, journals, newspapers, ephemera, and government and institutional documents. (Such material has been typically printed but may now be stored electronically as well as physically.) The course covers the essentials of project design, bibliography, location, access, critical reading, source evaluation and provenance, knowledge categorization and assembly, and records maintenance. The course is a methodological practicum and will involve both small-scale exercises and a larger project. Major texts include Thomas Mann's Oxford Guide to Library Research and Booth, Colomb, and Williams, The Craft of Research. Abbott. Winter.
40152. Survey Practicum: Qualitative Research for Questionnaire Design. The survey practicum provides an opportunity for students to learn interviewing and questionnaire design methods with a real, hands-on project. This year’s practicum will partner with Prof. Amanda Sharkey, a sociological economist at the Booth School, who is investigating the status hierarchy of industry or business categories. She theorizes that industry status categories are based on non-economic factors such as perceived virtue (e.g. hospitals vs. video arcades), social desirability (e.g. waste management vs. University administration) or how well an average person understands the kind of work done in the industry (hedge funds vs. trucking) as well as on factors more indicative of economic value. However, the status hierarchy determined by non-economic factors may feed into investment decisions, particularly under conditions of uncertainty. Our task as a class will be to investigate the underlying dimensions that drive business category rankings across a range of respondents using one-on-one, open-ended interviews. As a class we will use this qualitative information to design a self-administered web survey, then pre-test this survey using cognitive-style interviews with pre-test respondents. The class will work as a team to develop and test a fixed-choice survey instrument. Students will learn how to devise a quota sample for the qualitative interviews, how to conduct an open-ended interview, how to use qualitative findings to design a web-suitable survey, and how to use cognitive-style interviews to test the fixed-choice survey we compose. Each student will be trained for interviewing and will complete several face-to-face and phone interviews supervised by the instructor. The class is limited to 10 students to keep the team to a manageable size. van Haitsma. Spring.
40156. Hermeneutic Sociology. This class introduces students to the central ideas of hermeneutic social scholarship with its emphasis on analyzing the cultural and historical diversity and the dynamics of societies in terms of the ways in which people interpret the world. The issue which thus centers this class’ is the historicity of interpretation as practice and its connection to actions and institutions. This course also offers a hands-on introduction to key hermeneutic analytics such as narrative, rhetoric, performance, iconology, voice, implied reader etc. Readings include selections from Vico, Herder, Dilthey, Panofsky, Wittgenstein, Burke, Goffman, Ricoeur, Derrida, Eco, Searle. Glaeser. Winter.
40164. Involved Interviewing: Strategies for interviewing hard to penetrate communities and populations. Imagine that you must interview someone who hails from a background unlike your own; perhaps you need to interview an incarcerated youth, or gather a life history from an ill person. Maybe your task is to conduct fieldwork inside a community that challenges your comfort level. How do we get others to talk to us? How do we get out of our own way and limited training to become fully and comfortably engaged in people and the communities in which they reside? This in-depth investigation into interviewing begins with an assumption that the researcher as interviewer is an integral part of the research process. We turn a critical eye on the interviewer’s role in getting others to talk and learn strategies that encourage fertile interviews regardless of the situational context. Hicks-Bartlett. 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.
40173. Seminar on 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.
40174. Researching Gender and Sexuality. This course is an introduction to qualitative methods for researching gender & sexuality as well as a research practicum for students. The course is designed to aid graduate students and advanced undergraduates in developing a solid, executable research study focused on gender and sexuality. Over the ten-week course, students read exemplary articles and books showcasing a variety of qualitative research methodologies. Additionally, they read methodology articles that highlight the benefits and limitations of various methodologies and study designs. Students are required to identify a research question at the beginning of the course. They analyze existing research on this topic, and conduct a limited amount of their own primary research on the topic. The course assignments build toward the formation of a final project: a research proposal complete with a literature review, methods section, preliminary data section, and a research hypotheses section. At the end of the course, students will not only have a deeper understanding of methodological approaches to gender and sexuality research, but also will have gained experience in collecting data and designing a viable research proposal. Schilt. Autumn.
40177. Coding and Analyzing Qualitative Data: Using Open-Source Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS). This is a graduate level course in coding and analyzing qualitative data (e.g., interview transcripts, oral histories, focus groups, letters, and diaries, etc). In this hands-on-course students learn how to organize and manage text-based data in preparation for analysis and final report writing of small scale research projects. Students use their own laptop computers to access one of two free, open-source software programs available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. While students with extant interview data can use it for this course, those without existing data will be provided text to code and analyze. This course does not cover commercial CAQDAS, such as AtlasTi, NVivo, The Ethnograph or Hypertext. Hicks-Bartlett. Spring.
40178. Imagining the Social: The Ancient Mediterranean World. The course begins with an exploration of the concept of a social imaginary to proceed then to use it in an analysis of social and political thought among ancient near eastern and European people. Mostly period texts but also some historical accounts will be consulted. Particular emphasis will be given to the relationship between the vagaries of political life and notions of the transcendental in a culturally heterogeneous and plural environment. Glaeser. Spring.
50068. Seminar: 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. Winter.
50076. Seminar: Logic of Social Science Inquiry. Largely drawing on the literature of social movement, revolution, and historical sociology, this seminar surveys the methodologies that social scientists use to construct stories for the cases that interest them, including deductive reasoning, simulation, correlative thinking, mechanism-based analysis, case-based comparison, historical method, dialectics, conceptualization, hermeneutics, and more. The course discusses the pros and cons of each of these methods and ways to combine these methods to achieve better strategies for telling stories about ourselves and about the past and present. Zhao. Spring.
50081. Seminar: Pragmatism and Religion. The American philosopher William James is not only one of the founders of pragmatism, but also the inaugurator of a methodological revolution in the empirical study of religion, namely of an approach that deals with religion not so much as a set of doctrines or institutions, but as articulations of intense experiences of self-transcendence. Starting with James's classical work "The Varieties of Religious Experience" of 1902, this class will also deal with the contributions of other pragmatist thinkers to the study of religion -- ranging from classical authors (Peirce, Royce, Dewey) to contemporary thinkers (Putnam, Rorty, John Smith) and my own writings in this area. Joas. Autumn.
50082. Seminar: Robert Bellah and the Historical-Comparative Sociology of Religion. This summer the opus magnum of the greatest living sociologist of religion is being published (Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press). Nobody since Max Weber has produced such an erudite and systematic comparative world history of religion in its earlier phases. One of the purposes of this class will be a close reading of this book. But this will also be a good opportunity to deal with some of Bellah's earlier work (on religion and modernization in Japan, on civil religion, on the different versions of American individualism, on the theological sources of Bellah's work, on his relationship to Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons). Joas. Autumn.
50083. Theories of Capitalism since Veblen. This class surveys the evolution of big picture portraits of the political economy of modern capitalism. The emphasis is on perspective and theoretical pre-occupation as much as it is on the history of advanced political economies. Are there themes that perennially preoccupy scholars as they seek to stylize the dynamics of their time? How can we understand changes in preoccupation and shifts in emphasis? Thematically the course will be concerned with the way each of the works characterizes the relationship between economy, society and polity; how they conceive of processes of reproduction and change; and how they locate their arguments in historical narratives of development. Authors to be read include: Veblen, Keynes, Hayek, Schumpeter, Baran & Sweezy, Galbraith, Chandler, Schonfield, Piore & Sabel, Womack, Jones & Roos, Rajan & Zingales, Hall & Soskice and Davis. Herrigel, Abbott. Winter.
