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SOC 312: AMERICAN SOCIETY

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SOC 312: AMERICAN SOCIETY What is sociology? How is it organized? Sociological Boundaries Levels of analysis and focus (realms) are semi-permeable boundaries within ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: SOC 312: AMERICAN SOCIETY


1
SOC 312 AMERICAN SOCIETY
  • What is sociology?
  • How is it organized?

2
Sociological Boundaries
  • Levels of analysis and focus (realms) are
    semi-permeable boundaries within and between
    disciplines
  • Most of us specialize, but most of the
    interesting questions (and research) spills over
    (e.g., political economy)

3
Mills' Sociological Promise
  • Promise is the ability to connect personal
    troubles and public issues
  • smoking or drugs or deviance
  • unemployment
  • healthcare
  • Best work bridges levels and realms
  • last class on smoking and drugs
  • political economy of national healthcare

4
Contextualizing Mills
  • Mills published in 1959
  • sociology went from Progressive/Chicago School
    reformists to Conservative/Harvard Human
    Relations bureaucrats/advisors
  • Mills saw sociology as critical voice of the
    early 20th century
  • Mills feared the conservative/neo-liberal
    corporate conservative future of the discipline

5
Sociology Since 1959
  • Good News Sixties brought new challenges and new
    voices
  • critical/Marxist
  • feminist
  • race, class, and gender
  • Bad News Eighties brought conservative reaction
    and efforts to reinvent 1950s
  • consequently, Mills' vision and hopes and fears
    are still relevant today
  • Gitlin and I will attempt to explain that

6
Sociological Networks
  • Mills talks about cliques, but these are really
    social networks
  • people I know from graduate school
  • people I know from professional meetings and
    organizations
  • people whose work I read and assign to my
    students (here the network is often much less
    tangible and interactive I don't know all of
    these persons personally)

7
How is Sociology Organized?
  • The American Sociological Association and the
    Purdue Sociology Department are organized into
    sections
  • To some extent, these reflect levels of analysis
    and focus/realms/topics
  • To some extent, these are political or social
    organizations

8
Why Join Sections?
  • Max Weber distinguishes types of social action by
    motive or "subjective meaning"
  • habitual eventually, it all comes down to habit
  • affect if it feels good, do it (fun)
  • value rational the right thing to do (end in
    itself)
  • instrumental rational a means to an end

9
Sociology at Purdue
  • We currently have six sections
  • family and gender
  • law and society
  • religion
  • health and aging
  • social movements and political sociology
  • social inequality

10
What Do Sections Do?
  • Mostly, we teach classes
  • sections meet to determine which professors will
    teach which classes each semester
  • theoretically, each section has a three year plan
    for teaching
  • some department heads use sections more than
    others
  • some sections are more active than others

11
What Else Do Sections Do?
  • We also represent our needs as collective
    (departmental) needs
  • religion wants to replace Jim Davidson
  • social inequality wants to hire people of color
    and people who study race and ethnicity
  • theoretically, we defend these as teaching needs
  • actually, we sometimes argue that we need these
    people to be a better department

12
Sections Versus Foundations
  • Aside from our six sections, we have three
    foundational areas
  • theory
  • method
  • statistics
  • These foundational areas are associated with
    required courses for graduate and undergraduate
    programs

13
Foundational Areas
  • Theory includes Macro and Micro, although there
    is very little contact between these sections
    within the area
  • Methods and Statistics tend to function as a
    single Foundational area
  • but methods include qualitative and quantitative
    methods (separate from statistics)
  • thus three distinct sections here

14
Sections Are Functional?
  • Some people argue that we need sections
  • Diversity makes specialization necessary
  • we can't all know everything
  • we need to have a community of experts
  • we need to collaborate
  • If this is true then we should expect to see
  • diversity on graduate student committees
  • theory, methods, sections all represented

15
Sections Can Become Barriers
  • Others argue that sections impede work
  • Fighting for turf prevents collaboration
  • Competition for grants, faculty, and graduate
    students undermines collaboration
  • grad students and faculty tend to form sectional
    cliques
  • thus we become narrow, specialized, and generally
    ignorant

16
Summary
  • Generally, discipline of sociology involves
  • theory
  • method
  • topic
  • This is how we teach undergrads and train
    graduate students

17
Questions
  • Why are ASA and Purdue sociology organized into
    sections?
  • Why do people join sections?
  • Other ways to organize cliques?
  • political perspective
  • theory/method/paradigm
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