Sociology 271B: Survey of

Contemporary Theory

Section 1. Tuesday 1-3, Thursday 2-3, SSC 3022

University of Western Ontario, Winter 2005

Dr. Doug Mann, SSC 5320

Sociology is an attempt to understand and explain social life. In this course we’ll look at a variety of theoretical approaches to this project from the twentieth century: functionalism, C. Wright Mills, the Frankfurt School, symbolic interactionism, labelling and neo-Marxist interpretations of deviance and subcultures, feminism, and postmodernism. The class will involve lectures and class discussions, and will encourage students to relate the theoretical approaches dealt with to both modern political, economic and cultural life, and to their everyday experiences.

Workload

Quizzes: 8% each, 32% total (best 4 out of 5, about every 2 weeks, no rewrites for any reason)

Report (due April 7): 23%

Final Exam (2 hours, covers whole course): 45%

Texts

Courseware Reader: Contains all the readings listed below except for the following books.

Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Synopsis of the Course [times are rough estimates]

Part I: Functionalism and its Critics (January)

1. The Sociological Imagination [2 lecture hours]

Macro vs. micro-sociology. Conflict vs. consensus. The sociological imagination. Individual troubles vs. social problems. Reading: q C. Wright Mills, “The Promise,” The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford UP, 1959), pp. 3-24.

2. Functionalism [3 hours]

Talcott Parsons on society as a self-maintaining structural-functional system. The functions of the system. Parsons’ theory of action. Pattern variables. AGIL paradigm. Robert Merton on manifest and latent functions. Reading: q Ruth A. Wallace and Alison Wolf, Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition, 5^th edition (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1999), pp. 16-19, 26-45.

3. Mills and the Power Elite [2 hours]

Mills’ view of American society as a pyramid ruled by a series of interlocking elites. q Reading: C. Wright Mills, “The Higher Circles,” The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 3-29.

Part II: Critical Theory (January and early February)

4. The Frankfurt School [3 hours]

Short refresher on Marxism. The Frankfurt school on consumer capitalism as producing one-dimensional people. The culture industries as new forms of social control & agents of mass deception. Readings: q Herbert Marcuse, “Chapter 1. The New Forms of Social Control,” One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 1-18.

q Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry Reconsidered," The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 85-92.

5. Lasch and the Culture of Narcissism [3 hours]

The devaluation of history, the propaganda of commodities, everyday life as a theatre, the sex war. Reading: q Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton, 1978, xiii‑xviii, 38‑41, 71-75, 90‑96, 151‑3, 187‑201, 235‑6.

Part III: Interactionism and Deviance (February to early March)

6. Symbolic Interactionism [4 hours]

George Herbert Mead on the “I” and the “Me”. Herbert Blumer on symbolic interactionism: social life as the generation of symbolic meanings. Readings: q Randall Collins & Michael Makowsky, “Mead,” The Discovery of Society 6^th edition (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), pp. 170-178. q Herbert Blumer, “The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism”, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 1-23, 47-60.

7. Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory [6 hours or more]

Erving Goffman on everyday life as a theatre where we all perform. Appearance, manner, setting, front and back stage, mistakes. Is the self a series of social masks? Reading: q Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 6, 7.

8. Subcultures and Deviance [2-3 hours: may be cut if we are seriously behind]

Labelling theory and deviance. Moral entrepreneurs. Becker’s outsiders (e.g. the marijuana user). Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Cultural Studies and the University of Birmingham’s CCCS. Class, subcultures, and style as an oblique form of resistance to the dominant culture. Mods, skins, punks. Readings: q Howard S. Becker, “Outsiders” and “Moral Entrepreneurs”, Chapters 1 & 8 of Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: The Free Press, 1973), pp. 1-18, 147-153, 155-163.

q John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, “Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview”, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1976), pp. 9-17, 30-33, 35, 38-41, 44-45, 47-57.

q Dick Hebdige, Chapter 1, “From Culture to Hegemony ”; Chapter 7, “Style as...”, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 11-19, 100-112, 161-163.

Part IV: Current Ideological Battles (late March and April)

9. Feminism [3-4 hours]

The three waves of feminism. Sexual objectification in the media. The culture of love and romance. Victim vs. power feminism.

Readings: q Shulamith Firestone, Chapters 6 & 7, "Love” and “The Culture of Romance,” The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 126-155.

q Naomi Wolf, “Inflexibility of Thought,” “Consensus Thinking,” “Ideological Purity,” “Literalized Theory,” “Two Traditions,” “Sex: Are Men Naughty by Nature?”, “Do Only Men Objectify the Opposite Sex?”, “Integrating the Bad Girl,” in Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the 21^st Century (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993), pp. 107-112, 120-123, 135-142, 180-90, 225-232.

10. Postmodernism [3-4 hours: may be shortened if we’re behind]

The death of the author, the subversion of the subject, the intertextual universe, and the terror of truth. Power/knowledge. Logocentrism and deconstruction. The four phases of the image. Reality and hyperreality: the third age of simulacra has arrived. Baudrillard on symbolic and sign value and consumer society.

Readings: q Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), selections on truth and methodology, pp. 77-91, 109-124.

q Doug Mann, “Jean Baudrillard, A Very Short Introduction.”

q Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of the Simulacra,” Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 1-14, 19-23, 26-32.

11. The Critique of Corporatism [2 hours]

Saul’s critique of corporatist society and call for us to wake up from our unconscious social state.

Reading: q John Ralston Saul, "The Great Leap Backwards," The Unconscious Civilization. Concord: Anansi, 1995, 1-9, 15-19, 26-37.

Reports

Write a short (typed/word processed) report using one of the sociological theories we’ve studied in the course to analyse a contemporary social, political, economic or cultural issue. It must be about 2 pages long, 11-12 point font, or 650-750 words, or I will deduct marks for it being too short or too long (probably 2% per extra line). It’s worth 22% of your grade. Due April 7. Late penalty = 5% per day. If you go over two pages by more than 4 or 5 lines, hand in your report on a floppy disk so I can check the word count (your bibliography and title page don’t count!).

Structure: Write it like an opinion article or editorial for a newspaper. Get to the point as quickly as you can, and state your own point of view in the first few sentences (read an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, or National Post to see how they’re written). Do NOT use long quotes from the courseware texts or other secondary sources – 80 to 90% of the report should be your own words. You must still footnote or in some way reference quotes and ideas that aren’t yours, though you can include a separate third page with references and endnotes on it that doesn’t count against your 750-word limit.

The point of the report is to get to you (a) quickly summarize the sociological theory you’re applying, and (b) apply that theory in a critical way to the social problem you’ve chosen to write on (though not especially in that order). You can do both at the same time if you like, introducing theoretical ideas as you discuss your topic. Here are some suggestions for possible topics:

· Do a functionalist analysis of police enforcement or of the university.

· Is the Liberal Party part of the Canadian power elite?

· Is modern popular music, including music videos, part of a cultural industry that seeks to stupefy the masses?

· How does consumerism act as a new form of social control? (use Marcuse)

· Is Lasch right that advertising helps to turn us into bored and anxious narcissists?

· Discuss whether Lasch’s analysis of the “sex war” still applies to modern society.

· Use symbolic interactionism to analyse which social objects give student life meaning.

· Use Goffman’s dramaturgical theory to analyse a specific social location e.g. a bar, an apartment building you live in, an office you’ve worked in, or a shopping mall.

· Analyse a specific social role – e.g. a lawyer, teacher, doctor, police officer, bank teller, or clerk in a shop – as a performance, discussing staging, masks, performance disruptions and/or defensive practises along Goffmanesque lines.

· Use Becker to discuss how a specific group of “outsiders” has been labelled as such.

· Use the Birmingham School (Hall, Hebdige, etc.) to determine whether a specific youth group is indeed a true “subculture.” What are its class origins?

· Apply feminist theory to one of the following: images of women in the media, romance and marriage, sexual harassment, affirmative action.

· Apply postmodernist theory to some aspect of our modern media-driven culture: is modern society significantly different from society before TV, computers and other forms of media?

· Do we live in a desert of the real, as Baudrillard says?

· Is Saul right that we live in a corporatist society? Focus on a specific issue.

Since your article has to be fairly short, in all the above cases you can narrow your topic down even further. See my notes at http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/good_papers_soc.htm for some additional hints on how to write your report. Remember, get to the point quickly, and edit… edit… edit! And don’t hide your position on the issue at hand – state it clearly. You’ll be graded on (a) your ability to express yourself clearly, (b) your ability to come to grips with the social theory you’ve chosen to apply, and (c) your creativity in actually applying that theory to the issue you’ve chosen to write on.

Policies (please read these over)

Quizzes: There will be 5 quizzes, of which only 4 will count. The main purpose of the extra quiz is to cover ALL reasons for missing a class, including a brief illness, travel, work in other courses, sleeping in, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. IF you do write all 5 quizzes, I’ll count your top 4 marks. Each quiz will consist of a mixture of up to ten multi-choice and/or short answer questions – I’ll probably poll the class throughout the term to see which format the majority prefers. There are no rewrites for any reason: don’t intentionally miss a quiz early on the assumption you can make it up later. In the exceptional case of someone who is sick (with a doctor’s note as proof) for a month or more, I may offer them an alternative assignment – probably a short paper, but not a quiz – to make up one or two quizzes. But only in exceptional cases!

Class Attendance: All announcements having to do with work in the course will be given during class. You’ll be tested in part on the lecture materials and class discussions, along with the readings. It’s up to you to make sure you keep up to date on such things by attending class: don’t expect any notes posted to the web to cover missed classes. Please keep the background chatter down during lectures and group presentations out of respect for both me and for those of your classmates who wish to listen to the lecture or participate in class discussions.

Participation Bonus: At the end of the term I’ll give out a bonus of 1-3% to the six or seven students who most regularly attend class and participate in class discussions on top of their total final grade. Naturally, I’ll have to know who you are to give you this bonus! If you miss more than two or three classes, you’re off the bonus list.

E-Mails: I would like to conduct as much of class business as possible in person to avoid misunderstandings and the ever-worsening problem of e-mail congestion. Please don’t email me complex questions about the content of the course - it’s far more effective for both of us if you come to speak to me in person about this sort of thing. Also, I reserve the right to not reply to e-mail questions or complaints concerning grades - once again, present these in person! If you missed the midterm, you must make your case to me in person, unless you’re deathly ill.

The same standards of civility apply to electronic communication as apply to personal conversations or letters. If I receive a rude or impolite e-mail I will ignore it and delete all future e-mails from the offender unread. In short, don’t rely on e-mail for any communication you think is important - e-mails are often a poor replacement for direct verbal communication and can lead to serious misunderstandings and bad feelings!