SOC 312: AMERICAN SOCIETY

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Summary

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

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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