Sociological Theory
Fall 2006
Study Guide for Final Exam

The final exam in this course will be held on Monday, December 18th at 9:00 a.m. Please arrive on time and bring a #2 pencil and a good eraser. The exam will consist of multiple-choice questions. Remember that if some emergency forces you to miss the exam, it is your responsibility to reach me either via email or by phone at my office (225-6013) no later than the day of the exam to arrange for an incomplete or a make-up exam. Otherwise I will have to give you a zero for the final.

From Earlier Parts of the Course

You should be familiar with some of the recurrent theoretical issues that run through the whole course, most notably the debate over positivism. You should remember who gave sociology its name and its original positivist vision, what that vision was, and why it remains controversial.

You should retain a basic familiarity with what Kuhn means by paradigm, normal science, anomaly, and scientific revolution, and how those terms apply to what we have studied in this course.

While the exam will not have questions on the details of the thought of the "Big Three," (Marx, Durkheim, Weber), you should retain a general familiarity with their thought so that you can respond to questions linking later theorists to their ideas. You should be able to recognize when subsequent theorists are making reference to them.

You should be familiar with the basics of data analysis assumed by the two MicroCase exercises we did (analysis of cross-tabulations and scatterplots). Be prepared to interpret tables in terms of such things as: independent vs. dependent variable; unit of analysis; operationalization; statistical significance; whether data support a hypothesis drawn from a broader theory.

New Material

Micro vs. macro sociological theories: the differences between them. Be able to recognize them.
"The discovery of the invisible world"--what do Collins and Makowsky mean by this?
Georg Simmel: who he was and what his basic sociological approach was.
Charles Horton Cooley: looking glass self. Society as consisting of the mental images we have of it. Why this is an "idealist" view.
George Herbert Mead: the social origin of the self. His role in the emergence of symbolic interactionism. His implicit critique of positivism.
Symbolic interactionism: basic tenets. Blumer's role in popularizing Mead's ideas and creating a symbolic interactionist paradigm.
The concept of "definition of the situation." Symbolic interactionism's strategy of theory building.
Erving Goffman as a "radical empiricist"--what that means. Labeling theory and total institutions. His dramaturgical model; the role of performed ritual in constructing and upholding social reality.
Ethnomethodology: its basic approach. Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodological experiments.
Sazman Ch. 3: what the issue of "agency" is about

W.E.B. DuBois: what university he graduated from (as its first African American Ph.D and what famous European sociologist he then studied with. The significance of The Philadelphia Negro. His prediction about the central focus of the 20th century. His exploration of race and class. DuBois' sociological and political career as portrayed in video excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices

Durkheim and functionalism in anthropology.
Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism. Basic tenets of Parsons' thought. Social system, functional prerequisites, cybernetic hierarchy, pattern variables, equilibrium, structural differentiation. The translation wars.

Robert Merton: how he turned functionalism into a tool of analysis rather than a "grand theory".

function and dysfunction
manifest vs. latent functions
functional alternatives
functional for whom?

"Hitler's shadow"--its significance for sociological theory in the second half of the 20th century

Robert Michels: iron law of oligarchy--what it sought to explain
C. Wright Mills. His critique of both "grand theory" and "abstracted empiricism." Sociology as a form of imagination. Biography and history; personal troubles and public issues. Mills as a "public intellectual."

Michel Foucault: his take on culture and power. The concept of discourse. His "Nietzschean" view of modern civilization. His analysis of the panopticon as the paradigm of modern civilization in Panopticism (be familiar with this piece). The relevance of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Two famous visitors: who liked it and who did not.
Pierre Bourdieu: his theory of cultural capital and social reproduction. How cultural capital is distinguished from social capital.
Foucault and Bourdieu as promoting a new way of thinking about culture and power.

Basic themes in postmodernism. Its view of culture. The "cultural turn." What "epistemological relativism" means.
The connection between feminism, postmodernism, and critical advocacy, as discussed by Salzman in Ch. 7.
The problem of representation and the challenge to ethnographic authority, Reflexivity in postmodern anthropology.
Be familiar with the main criticisms of postmodern anthropology, as summarized by Salzman. Understand the meaning of the Marshall Sahlins quote on p. 137.

Immanuel Wallerstein: world systems theory. World empires vs. world economies. Core, semiperiphery, periphery in the world economy. His relation to Marx, according to Collins and Makowsky.
Globalization theories: David Held's argument about three schools of thought (be familiar with the broad outlines of each).

Stephen Cole: his answer to why sociology doesn't make progress like the natural sciences.
Core and frontier; why sociological research at the frontier does not tend to enter the core, according to Cole.
The mutability of sociology's object of study
The role of noncognitive elements
His overall argument

Steven Seidman: how he thinks sociological theory should change. Understand his basic argument.

 

December 7, 2006