Graduate Program in Sociology Instructor: E

Spr 2007

Graduate Program in Sociology Instructor: E. Doyle McCarthy

Contemporary Social Theory SOGA 6101.001 Tues. 5:30-7:20

Office: Dealy Hall 405A (inner office)

718-817-3855 voicemail

office hours for graduate students: Tuesdays 2-4 PM and by appointment;

ordinarily, I am not available directly before or after class to meet with students;

please make appointments for other times.

Course description

A course on contemporary schools and approaches in social theory across the disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities. There are no prerequisites; however, some background in classical social theory (Karl Marx,Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel) would enable the student to benefit more from the course. The course combines lectures and discussions on the required readings.

The approach to the study of social theory taken in this course is historical; the development of social theory over time is understood as part of modern history in its early (seventeenth to eighteenth century), classical (nineteenth to early twentieth), and late modern or postmodern (late twentieth and early twenty-first century) phase. This is in contrast to the study of social theory as principally a formal and systematic body of work that develops according to its own rational and systematic logic and body of empirical inquiries, in other words, an approach that understands the development of social theory as a process that has more to do with its own rational coherence than with its resonance with larger historical and cultural forms and contexts. The historical approach used throughout this course views the development of social theory as itself part of “history” and “culture,” not outside of these, but integral to modernity (in its various phases), its practices and institutions. The theories we discuss here are understood as cultural (and discursive) developments of modern and late modern social configurations; and they form part of our own “situation” and “context.”

This course in contemporary social theory outlines some of the new and distinguishing theories and methods of the period from mid-twentieth century until the present; it understands these theories as parts of other contemporary cultural formations and discourses: sociology has always been (and has to be) a discipline that is peculiarly permeable to changes in the moral and political temper of its time, but it is also a discipline that registers changes in its sister disciplines (anthropology, political science, history), so changes in these fields will also reverberate in ours (and sociology will direct disciplinary changes in other disciplines as well).

Also relevant to these issues of mutual influence and interpenetration of disciplines and discourses is an argument that forms the centerpiece of Anthony Giddens’s “structuration theory,” that sociology and sociological theory bears a special relationship to what we refer to as “social reality,” that our theories and findings have practical consequences, such as when sociological descriptions are converted by social actors into rules of conduct. As Giddens remarked (in The Constitution of Society, 1984 p. 284), “Sociological descriptions have the task of mediating the frames of meaning within which actors orient their conduct.” Or, to use another example, presented by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur: sociology, like psychoanalysis, becomes part of culture by interpreting it, by means of representations provided by its perspectives; both provide their own hermeneutics of culture. (Ricoeur’s “Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture,” 1974 reprinted in Rabinow & Sullivan).

The overall theme of this course on contemporary social theory is the “cultural turn” in the social sciences since mid-twentieth century, along with the focus on language and culture in the study of social reality, whether in the study of groups, social movements, social organizations, communities, or modern nation-states. The course opens with a discussion of what this new cultural focus has brought to the forefront of sociology and how it differs from earlier theories and methods in the social and human sciences, as well as from earlier presuppositions of the discipline.

The course presents—in the form of an historical overview—some of the dominant theoretical fields, topics, and approaches in contemporary social science today, including:

cultural sociology and cultural criticism in the work of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and others.

sociologies of everyday life and social phenomenology, in the work of Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann.

feminist social theory and the study of discourse in the work of feminist writers from Simone de Beauvoir to Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Patricia Clough, and others.

The study of human agency and social interaction in the work of G.H. Mead,

Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, R.S. Perinbanayagam, and others.

changes in industrial capitalism and theories of capitalism since mid-twentieth century: Immanuel Wallerstein, Stanley Aronowitz, Theda Skocpol, Anthony Giddens, Daniel Bell.

studies of globalization, ethnic conflicts, and social movements: and the related themes of nationalisms and social identities in the works of Benedict Anderson, Craig Calhoun, and others.

media studies in the works of Stuart Ewen, Douglas Kellner, Todd Gitlin, and others.

narrative studies in the works of symbolic interactionists (David Maines), cultural sociologists, and in writers like Ken Plummer, Joseph Davis, and others.

new approaches to ethnography in the works of many, including James Clifford, George Marcus, John Van Maanen, Loic Wacquant.

emotion studies in the writings of sociologists like Arlie Russell Hochschild, Thomas Scheff, Jack Katz, Eva Illouz, and Peter Stearns.

studies and theories of risk and the risk society: such as in the theories of Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (2000).

Course Readings: Available at the university bookstore, McGinleyCenter, and on Amazon.com

Books appear in the order we will read them.

I have selected them so that several of the topics enumerated above will be represented in the readings.

Required readings:

Charles Lemert SOCIAL THEORY: The Multicultural & Classic Readings 3/e 2004. Westview.

We will use this collection throughout the course as a primary reader.

Those who have not studied classical theories can also supplement their readings with some of the readings here from Marx, Weber, and Simmel, and Durkheim.

Norbert Elias THE CIVILIZING PROCESS: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. [1939] 2000. Blackwell.

This is considered by many to be an important and, for many years, overlooked classic work of twentieth-century sociology. It stands alone as a masterful work on the long-term transformations of modern Western societies; its analysis is distinct in its ambitious examination over centuries of both changes in human behavior (self-monitoring, self-control and regulation, and the “intimization” of all bodily functions) and changes in social and political organizations.

Erving Goffman THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE. 1959. Doubleday/Anchor.

An early and major work by one of the foremost sociologists of the twentieth century.

Goffman introduces here his dramaturgical approach to social life and to the social actors whose everyday lives entail the regular activity of staging performances in social settings. The work concludes with a statement about Goffman’s theory of the social self and its relationship to social encounters. A work that should be included in all collections of sociological studies of the self.

Todd Gitlin MEDIA UNLIMITED: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. 2002. Henry Holt/ A Metropolitan Owl Book.

A work by a prominent sociologist about our environments today as driven by mass media and by the speed of its operations and images. The media is portrayed as “an entire way of life” and this book as an attempt to describe the totality of the media phenomenon itself.

Ken Plummer TELLING SEXUAL STORIES: Power, Change, and Social Worlds. 1995 Routledge.

A book that examines the phenomenon of personal narratives and confessional disclosures as part of popular culture. Plummer is a symbolic interactionist from the UK (University of Essex) who works in the fields of contemporary sexualities and narrative sociology. In this book he explores the question of why it is thatstory-telling has emerged as an important part of our lives in the twenty-first century. Another book in this field is Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self by Joseph Davis (2005) which examines the contemporary popularity of “victimization” and trauma psychology and the recent discovery of child sexual abuse.

Loic Wacquant BODY & SOUL: Notes of an Apprentice Boxer. 2004. Oxford.

A work by a distinguished sociologist and ethnographer of urban poverty and prisons in the US and Brazil.He is also known as one of the most well-known students of Pierre Bourdieu. This worked has provoked some controversy about its claim to be an “ethnography” and has been heralded by others (like Philip Manning Freud and American Sociology) as an important example of the new genre “autoethnography.” This work brings together two major contemporary themes in sociology, narrative sociology and the new forms of ethnography. Wacquant is currently co-editor of the journal Ethnography and has edited a special issue, “Pierre Bourdieu in the Field” (Vol 5, No. 4 Dec. 2004).