INTRODUCTION
This course is designed to deepen graduate (M.A.) students' understanding of basic sociological theories, and of new undercurrents. The course also seeks to increase their awareness of the relevance of theory to their specific fields of interest. It emphasizes contemporary themes and macro-level dimensions of social reality. Given that students will have been exposed to a greater or lesser degree to the major sociological theories during their undergraduate years, the lecture-seminar format adopted for the course stresses close familiarity with a set of readings around carefully selected topics and themes. Experience suggests that undergraduate courses with a theory content have tended to dwell on the broad outlines of particular theories. In general, students have not been required to demonstrate detailed knowledge of specific texts, or the writings of particular authors. This is a shortcoming which this course will help to overcome.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Survey of major theorists and schools of thought in recent decades. Course includes functionalism, exchange theory, conflict theory, symbolic interaction, and phenomenology. Analysis of a sample of recent thinkers with a major impact on sociological thinking, from this list: Blumer, Bourdieu, Braverman, Collins, Foucault, Garfinkel, Geertz, Giddens, Goffman, Habermas, Marcuse, Marx, Mead, Merton, Parsons, Ritzer, Simmel and Wallerstein. The major concepts and theories to be sampled include: conflict; exchange theory; systems theory; modernity and post-modernity; G and State Coordinates; double-reflexivity; ethnomethodology; action/practice, agency-structure linkages and structuration; network theory; dependency and underdevelopment; the ecumene, world system and globalization; rational choice theory; dialectics, negations and revolution; and ethnic and cultural identity.
