SOCIOLOGY 339 Section 1, Winter 2012
INSTRUCTOR: Ralph B. Brown
TIME and LOCATION: Tuesday/ Thursday --12:05 ‑ 1:20 Room B030 JFSB
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday, Thursday --9:30 - 11:00
CONTACT INFORMATION: (Phone#) 422-3242 (Office) 2034 JFSB
(email)
FEAST or FAMINE!
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Before we get too far into this, a word of caution; this is going to be a different course than many of you may be accustomed to. Oh, it’s full of the regular academic stuff for sure, lectures, grades, readings, and so forth. However, it is going to be centered much more round your role in the delivery of the materials than on my role – I am going to be far more a facilitator than a lecturer. It will be more “Seminar” format. For example, you will be required to read, think about, understand and authoritatively critique (both verbally and in writing) a considerable amount of material (remembering that critique does not just mean loading your double-barreled intellectual shotgun with disgust and blowing things to smithereens. It also means identifying and discussing those aspects that the author got right or did well, etc.). You will be required to present results from your thinking in presentation and writing at an advanced college undergraduate level. You will be required to think about issues to which there are arguably (and that is why they are arguable) no correct answers and to express your best thinking on these issues in class. You will also be required to research a social change organization and write an in depth critique of the organization and its ideology, domain assumptions, and methods. Finally, you will be required to prepare and present some aspects of the lecture for class. The success of this class literally rests in your hands. If you come to class prepared we will have more material than we could ever hope to cover to discuss. If you don’t come prepared, the class will fall woefully short of its potential. So please, come prepared.
Now, even a cursory examination of the above paragraph should tell you that you will be responsible for much of what happens in this course (it should also tell you that I am going to be parenthetically pulling things all over the place when I see a connection that can be made). My teaching style is more conversational, if you talk and participate and give me material to work with, there will be all the more connections we can make and you will get far more from the course. So, to try and assure that happens as much as possible, I have taken the liberty to structure it in where I can. Finally, I am asking you to commit yourself to doing what this course (well, me actually) requires of you. If you cannot commit to that please drop it and take something else. Here is my principle with a promise: If you stick this out, give it all it asks of you (and maybe a little bit more), you will learn more sociology, more about sociology, and more how to use your sociological imagination concerning social change than you ever realized. I design this class to be your proverbial Mr. Miagi “Wax-on, Wax-off” course.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
A basic element in the origins of the discipline of sociology was the observation of three distinct but related phenomena: 1) There is a Social World that exists in addition to the individual; 2) That that Social World appears to be ordered, i.e., there are patterns that can be observed and predicted--social organization and structure, and 3) That this ordered Social World is subject to change. It was through attempts to understand and account for the massive social and economic changes occurring in European societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the original sociological concepts of social structure and change were generated.
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Even with this brief introduction, it should be apparent that one cannot talk of social change without understanding first what it is that is supposedly changing--social order and the structure of society. So, what is social structure and how does it change? These are the issues that you will explore in this course. You will explore them through a comprehensive overview of the biological, ecological, social, political, and economic foundations of our modern era and how these are organized, how they change and have changed over time. You will immediately come to realize that depending on what one considers social structure to be, will determine to a great degree the various mechanisms available to create change. In other words, we will purposely be stepping off the terra firma of “objectivism” (there is a social world out there governed by immutable laws, and to change it, one must first understand the laws that govern it) and settling ourselves instead into the subjective world of ideas and definitions (there is a social world out there constructed of our interactions with it, and to change it, requires our changing our interactions with it) that can be objectified. Yet another precautionary word: clearly, taking such a standpoint obviates me from taking a supposed neutral standpoint that all theories of social structure and change are equally acceptable. I will argue specific perspectives. My title is “Professor” my job is to “profess” in an informed manner. I find it impossible to profess neutrality if I don’t believe in it. Therefore, if you are looking for a course that is an “objective” information dump sans opinion (I will also make the argument that even the “objective” view of the social world is just that -- a view, and thus subject (sorry about the pun, but it does serve my purposes) to subjectivism. It doesn’t mean, however, it is without merit), this is not the right place for you; let me make that very clear from the start. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre, I believe we all have the capacity to act at any time, if we claim we cannot, we have committed an act (note the irony) of “bad faith.” So, please be aware this is NOT a neutral course, nor do I believe it is my job as a professor to try and “profess” neutrality. It is your job to think through the informed opinions of those who profess and carve your own terra firma. Thanks.
I will present the course materials in 3 major sections outlined below.
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Section 1) The first section of the course is informed by four articles and three books and will explore the problems of defining social structure and how these definitions, in turn, determine the various theories of social change (for example, are changes in structure teleological--historically inevitable? Is structure malleable, able to be altered through planned human intervention? If humans have the ability to create history through their choices, do they have the ability to create the history of their choice? etc). Therefore, the first question of Social Change is: “What is it that Changes?” And the answer is “social structure”. The problem with this answer is that it does not address what we include in, or consider components of, social structure. Social scientists have always assumed that to understand social organization/structure and social change, the uniquely human dimension of the issue cannot be excluded. It must be accounted for as humans and the institutions they create are unique--this is the domain of human culture. In this context we will discuss the dilemma of history for sociology as a discipline and its contemporary concepts of social structure and social change. I will argue that anything that has a social (meaning built and reproduced by human action) history also has structure; and if it has structure, it also has culture. So, is it structure or culture that changes in social change? These are not flippant questions. Depending on how one answers them, will determine how free the individual is to make changes in his or her society (or whether the “individual” even exists at all).
Thus all “Theories of Social Change” will inevitably come back to issues of structure and agency and how this “duality” or “dualism” can be resolved. One approach is to redefine what we mean by social structure. Consequently, throughout the course we will be forced to address the question: Can culture be considered part of social structure? We will begin to examine this issue through a discussion on “structuration,” individual agency, social agency, rational choice theory, dualism, duality and how all of these relate to the problem of structure, culture and change. The Bates and Peacock article presents a “hard structuralist” approach to the issue which dismisses the subjective elements of the individual. You will then read two other articles which present two less “rigid” approaches to the problem of social structure -- Rubinstien and Hindess. The last article will introduce you to the agency/structure debate—Dawe-- and how it relates to social structure and change. You will read one of the new classics in sociological literature--The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman. The crux of the book is that humans are both subjects and social objects and the authors of social reality. We will follow up this discussion by reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic. Berger and Zijderveld do a marvelous job of showing that civil discourse can still be “civil” and that all “truth’ is dependent upon the acceptance of doubt as part of the equation. They juxtapose the “true believer” with the “relativist” and argue that both are equally removed from truth only in different ways. This will further inform our discussion on just how social structures are structured. Finally, you will read the first 5 chapters of John Parker’s Structuration. This book presents the various approaches which have been used to combine both the determining factors of structure and liberating factors of agency and choice. With this broad-based introduction under your belt, you will then begin in the next section to explore humans as the composers of social change and the creators-of-history argument.
Section 2) Two books form the corpus of readings for this second section of the course. The first reading--Charles Tilly--Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons will establish the importance of a historically-based sociology. Tilly argues that contemporary sociology has inherited what he refers to as “eight pernicious postulates” or harmful/erroneous assumptions from its 19th century roots which continue to plague sociology today making contemporary sociological theory and methods a-historical. To overcome this problem, Tilly argues that contemporary sociologists must examine social organization and change through four historical levels. We will approach the rest of the course through Tilly’s historical approach.
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The second reading is a classic book written at Tilly’s Macro-Historical level: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Writing in 1944, Polanyi, a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Nazi terror, tries to explain how something as socially repugnant as Fascism/Nazism could have developed in modern society where human behavior is perceived as the product of individuals’ rational and free choices. The basis of his argument is that there is universal primacy of the social over the economic and political spheres of human life. Therefore, to understand social change and the structure of our contemporary world we must concentrate our analysis at the social level as the basis of all social changes--be they political and/or economic (Wax-on, Wax-off). You will note that this argument flies 100% in the face of conventional wisdom today, i.e., that all social reality is premised on the basic economic ordering of individual greed kept in check by the “law” of supply and demand. You will find if you are willing to look at the history of the issue, you may feel compelled to draw a very different assumption as to the role of the human actor and his/her motivations. We will then take this revelation and apply it to social change contexts today in peasant and other agrarian economies for example.
Polanyi provides an incredibly comprehensive historical analysis of the rise of market economies in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. His thesis: It was only through creating “self-regulating” market societies that social agendas begin to be defined through economic agendas. Through Polanyi's eyes, we will examine the "Great Transformation" from pre-capitalistic forms of societies to our modern world. We will see how economies and polities (despite how independently "real" they may appear or how much "power" over human volition and human societies they seem to dictate--i.e., “reification” the interpretation of an abstract general concept as real) are ultimately the products of human action and are thus socially based. Therefore, to understand social organization and especially social change, one must look to the basis of that organization and change, in other words, toward those things that are uniquely human. Polayni’s book will further our discussion on the dilemma of history for sociology as a discipline and its contemporary concepts of social structure and social change. It will also illustrate how the seemingly micro-level-only concepts of Berger and Luckman’s Social Construction of Reality thesis can be applied at a macro-historical level.
In the latter part of this section we will briefly turn our attention toward some specific theorists who have grappled with these issues of organization and change as the world about them changed. We will begin to examine specific theories of social organization and change and the historical context of the theorists who proposed them. As you will discover throughout this course, the importance of recognizing the specific historical context of each theorist's writings and ideas is vital to an understanding of the larger issues of social organization and change. Specifically, attention to the development of (and changes in, as the social, economic, and political world changed) Marxian theory will be examined. We will use Marxian theory as an indicator of the inseparable connection of a theory of society to a particular historical time and place. We will see how successive theorists had to modify basic tenets of Marxism (considered one of the most structural of all theories of social change) or their own theories that simply no longer reflected their current social "reality". We will also briefly examine a Weberian approach to social change and the power of the subjective idea. This will prepare us to discuss contemporary issues of social change. Specifically, we will discuss in detail our current social world of “Jihad” versus the Western “McWorld” of advanced capitalism and consumer culture.