Introduction to Sociology

Where to find the readings:

= E-reserves or Video Reserves
= Blackboard course materials.
= World Wide Web (hyperlink from syllabus).
= Firestone Library 3 hour reserve.

There is only one book for purchase: Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
For more information on the course, go to "What's Expected and Who's Who in 101."

Introduction.
Wedneday 9/11. Key Sociological Questions (Duneier and Starr)

Week One.
Monday 9/16. Us and Them: National Identity and Race (Starr)

F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 1-30, 51-58.
Robert Putnam, "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century," Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2007), 137-174.
Two music videos: compare "Way Out Here" (2010, with Josh Thompson) and "The House I Live In" [start at 2 min 45 secs into video] (1945, with Frank Sinatra).

Wednesday 9/18. Us and Them (Duneier)

Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007), 324-379.
Tara McKelvey, Monstering (Carroll and Graff, 2007), 36-45 (Ch. 3).
Duneier, Sidewalk, 173-187.
Glyn Williams, The Death of Captain Cook (Harvard University Press, 2008), 1-60.

Week Two
Monday 9/23. The Sociological Imagination (Duneier)

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959), 1-8 (Ch. 1, "The Promise").
Malcolm Gladwell, "Getting In," The New Yorker (October 10, 2005), 1-6.

Wednesday 9/25. Methods of Sociological Research (Duneier)

Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. Appelbaum, and Deborah Carr, Essentials of Sociology, 24-31.
William F. Ogburn,"The Folkways of a Scientific Sociology" (1930, 1-8.
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton University Press, 1994), 6-13.
Howard Becker, "Whose Side Are We On?" Social Problems (1967), 239-247.

Week Three
Monday 9/30. Social Interaction in Everyday Life (Duneier)

Erving Goffman, "Tie Signs," in Relations in Public (Basic Books, 1971), 188-238.
Erving Goffman, On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction," Reflections 4 (2003), 7-13.
Mitchell Duneier, "Talking to Women," Sidewalk, 188-217

Wednesday 10/2. New Technology and Everyday Life (Starr)

Sherry Turkle, "Always On/Always on You: The Tethered Self," in James Katz, ed., Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (2008), 121-137.
danah boyd, "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications," In Zizi Papacharissi, ed. Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (2010) 39-58.
Video: "Using the Web for Sociological Research," Paul Starr interviews Matt Salganik.

Week Four
Monday 10/7.Classical Perspectives: Order and Change (Starr)

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Ch. 13.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Chs. 1-3.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Part I of "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848), in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader , 2d ed. (W.W. Norton, 1978), 473-483.

Wednesday 10/9. Classical Perspectives: Social Action, Social Structure, and Institutions (Starr)

Max Weber,"The Pure Types of Legitimate Authority"; "The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization"; "Bureaucracy"; and "Social Stratification and Class Structure in Modern Society," in Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 46-77, 201-208 [39 pages total]

Week Five
Monday 10/14. Alone, in Groups, and in Networks (Duneier)

Kingsley Davis, "Final Note on a Case of Extreme Isolation," American Journal of Sociology 53 (1947), 432-437.
Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo (Penguin, 2012),1-17 (Introduction); 211-232 (Conclusion).
Solomon Asch, "Group Forces in the Modification and Distortion of Judgments," in Social Psychology (1952), 450-459.
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected (Little, Brown, 2009), 156-158.

Wednesday 10/16. The Social Basis of Democracy (Starr)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835, 1840): "Of Individualism in Democratic Countries"; "That the Americans Combat the Effects of Individualism with Free Institutions"; "Of the Uses which the Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life."
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (Simon and Schuster, 2000), Ch 1.

Week Six
Monday 10/21. In-class review session (Starr and Duneier)

Wednesday 10/23. Midterm

Fall Recess Week (10/28-11/3)

Week Seven
Monday 11/4. "Give Me a Child Until He Is 7 and I Will Show You the Man": The Up Series (Duneier)

View the film 21 Up
Mitchell Duneier, "Michael Apted's Up Series: Public Sociology or Folk Psychology through Film?" Ethnography 10 (2009), 345-349.
Michael Marmot The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity (New York: Holt), 1-36.

Wednesday 11/6. Inequality Today (Starr)

Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, "Class in America: Shadowy Lines that Still Divide," New York Times (May 15, 2005).
Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 1-50 (Chs. 1-2).
Annie Lowrey, "The Rich Get Richer through the Recovery," New York Times. September 10, 2013.

Week Eight
Monday 11/11. Race and Discrimination (1) (Duneier)

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Harper & Brothers, 1944), xiv-lix (Introduction) and 573-604 ("The Basis of Social Inequality").
Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Beacon Press, 1963), 3-24 (Introduction, Ch. 1) and 156-165 [Text of Supreme Court opinions]
Daniel Patrick Moynihan,"The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" (U.S. Department of Labor, 1965), reprinted in Lee Rainwater and William L, Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (MIT Press, 1967), 41-94.[Listed under "Rainwater" in E-Reserves.]

Wednesday 11/13.Race and Discrimination (2)(Duneier)

George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2002), 1-13.
Peter Bearman, Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 38-63 and 102-138.
Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (Norton, 2011). 249-273.
Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology 108(2003), 937-975.

Week Nine
Monday 11/18. The Transformation of Contemporary Society (Starr)

Daniel Bell, "The Axial Age of Technology, Foreword 1999," in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (Basic Books, 1999 [orig. ed.1973]), ix-xx.
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2006), Ch. 1.
"Print Me a Stradivarius: How a New Manufacturing Technology Will Change the World," The Economist (February 10, 2011).

Wednesday 11/20. Mechanisms of Social Change (Starr)

Joseph Schumpeter, "The Process of Creative Destruction," in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Harper, 1942), 82-86 (begin on 82 with "The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process.")
Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." American Sociological Review 48 (1983), 147-160.
"Gendercide: The Worldwide War on Baby Girls," The Economist, March 4, 2010.

Week Ten
Monday 11/25. The Political Sociology of Health Care (Starr)

Paul Starr, Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform rev. ed. (Yale University Press, 2013), xi-xii, 1-24 (Preface to the Revised Edition, Introduction).
Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore, Gender and the Social Construction of Illness 2d ed. (AltaMira Press, 2002), 1-36 (Ch. 1: Overview; Ch. 2, "Women Get Sicker But Men Die Quicker: Social Epidemiology").

Week Eleven

Monday 12/2. Guest Lecture: The Sociology of Robots (Prof. Janet Vertesi)

Michael Klesius,Our Favorite Martians," Air and Space Magazine, March 2010.
Maggie Koerth-Baker, "How Robots Can Trick You into Loving Them," New York Times Magazine September 17, 2013.

Wednesday 12/4. Ethnographic Methods (Duneier)

View "Sidewalk," (the film) in advance of this lecture
Duneier, Sidewalk, 3-114, 173-188, 253-292, 333-358.

Week Twelve
Monday 12/9. Sidewalk Subjects Visit with Class (Duneier)