Global Sociology

SOCI6200: Chinese Labor Migration class presentation

2012-01-25T09:32:00.000-06:00

Spring 2012 Schedule

2012-01-13T09:43:00.002-06:00

SOCI 4260-1 globalization mwf 12-12:50 LIFE A419 (x-list SOCI 5260-8)
SOCI 6200-2 research design tues 2-4:50 PHYS 311 (x-list SOCI 5260-2)

Spring 2012 Schedule

2011-12-20T07:23:00.000-06:00

SOCI 4260-1 globalization mwf 12-12:50 LIFE A419 (x-list SOCI 5260-8)
SOCI 3200-5 intro theory mwf 1-1:50 BLB 250
SOCI 6200-2 research design tues 2-4:50 PHYS 311 (x-list SOCI 5260-2)

2011-12-19T17:06:00.001-06:00

Office Hours for Fall 2011

2011-05-05T14:20:00.004-05:00

MWF 11am-noon, Chilton 390E or by appointment: ignatow@unt.edu

Office Hours for Spring 2011

2011-01-06T07:09:00.001-06:00

Thursdays 3-4:30pm or by appointment (ignatow@unt.edu)
Chilton 390E

Office Hours for Fall Semester

2010-08-26T12:45:00.000-05:00

Mondays and Wednesday 10-11am

or by appointment

Chilton Hall 390E

940 565 3616

ignatow@unt.edu

2010-07-20T21:05:00.003-05:00

2010-07-20T21:05:00.001-05:00

material for the first exam is now available on the class blog

2010-07-16T13:20:00.002-05:00

http://sites.google.com/site/classes390e/home/sociology-of-culture-blog

Donald Duck in wartime propaganda

2010-07-12T21:36:00.000-05:00

the end of sociological positivism

2010-07-12T17:46:00.000-05:00

the end of sociological positivism:

2010-07-12T17:43:00.000-05:00

Grades for Summer I SOC4000 have been uploaded to my.unt.edu

2010-07-11T09:47:00.000-05:00

Have a great summer everyone!

2010-05-12T11:34:00.005-05:00

2010-05-12T11:34:00.001-05:00

Anthony Comstock

2010-04-28T09:34:00.002-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Comstock

Bill O'Reilly "Culture Warrior"

2010-04-16T09:19:00.003-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChU33VfX-sk&feature=PlayList&p=237E287CE01CAABC&playnext_from=PL&index=0&playnext=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lstA7j5fmio&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPjhchjoho&feature=related

Final Exams

2010-04-15T13:11:00.000-05:00

SOC 4000 Introduction to Sociological Theory 8-10am Tuesday May 11
SOC 4260 Global Society 10:30-12:30 Thursday May 13
SOC 4260 Sociology of Morality 8-10am Wednesday May 12

The official schedule is available here.

2010-03-31T22:04:00.001-05:00

2010-03-31T22:03:00.004-05:00

Thinking about graduate school in Sociology?

2010-03-31T22:03:00.002-05:00

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March 12, 2010

Neither a Trap Nor a Lie

Brian Taylor

Enlarge Photo

Brian Taylor

By James Mulholland

In "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind,'" the columnist "Thomas H. Benton" argues that graduate school in the humanities is based on "structurally ... limiting" the potential employment options of students. He is right, just as he is correct that there is a special place in hell for those professors who avoid their responsibilities in making graduate training honest and humane. Still, he is wrong when he concludes that graduate school in the humanities is a "trap" and a "lie."

I am arguing here for the life of the mind, or at least a version of it. I was inspired to write this by the recent articles on the topic written by Benton (aka William Pannapacker, a professor of English at Hope College), and the intense and passionate response they provoked among this newspaper's readers (The Chronicle, February 12). It would be difficult not to feel moved by the arguments and anecdotes that readers shared.

Like Benton, I have been one of the lucky ones. I had undergraduate professors who took an interest in me, and graduate professors who helped refine my work and prepared me for the job market. I am a junior faculty member on the tenure track at a liberal-arts college where I am happy. But before that, I was a visiting assistant professor, so there was a time when I wasn't sure what my future in academe would be. Nonetheless, I believed throughout in pursuing this profession.

As I was reading Benton's examples and the responses of his readers, I replayed the events that led me to my current teaching position. Considering the wreckage that is the hiring market in the humanities this year—and for the past three decades—why did I, why does anyone, decide to go to graduate school in the humanities? Are we all crazy?

I asked myself that because, for the first time, one of my own students has applied to graduate school in English. She could not be better suited for it: She is an agile thinker, a strong writer, a mature researcher, and, perhaps most important, a tireless worker. She dedicated herself to her senior thesis with a focus that seemed more appropriate to graduate students. She already is a graduate student; she's simply looking for a place to make it official.

But while I am a champion of her candidacy, I am ambivalent about her prospects for all the reasons that are recounted in the heartbreaking comments section of Benton's column, "The Big Lie." I insisted on giving her what has become known in academe as "the talk," telling her every horror story I know of professional misfortune and unfairness. It changed her thinking about how to apply to schools, but otherwise she remained insistent.

I wondered if she comprehended the gravity of the situation. Back when I got "the talk" from my undergraduate professors (in a market that was bad, although not as bad as it is now), I understood what they were saying, but it was extremely difficult, as a young person, to make emotional sense of their words. I couldn't feel the urgency that they were trying to impart. All I knew is that I wanted to be like my professors; I coveted their lifestyle.

A generation of young professors has grown up with the job crisis—it's normal to us, it's never been different. We're expert at imparting the anxiety that comes with graduate school to our students. I think that most graduate students now understand how dire it is, while still attempting, perhaps with incomplete information, to weigh the risks.

There are many ways to pursue intellectualism in and out of academe. I think of the life of the mind as the union of intellectual labor and professional success that, at its best, allows academics to explore ideas and still be supported financially. But I also consider the economic and social compromises that such a life might necessitate.

This is not what Benton would call sanctimony or denial. I do not intend to diminish the emotional and economic severity of the job market, of graduate-student debt, of adjunct teaching, of the "two-body" problem, or the host of other forces that conspire to destroy academic lives. Instead, I want to suggest that we should not discount the possibility that our students desire to live a life that involves academic ideals and intellectual study, despite all of the impediments.

One counterargument might be that only a happy few get to live the life of the mind. The kind of middle-class success that was assumed to come with graduate school in the humanities quite often cannot be achieved with a tenure-track salary, let alone adjunct wages.

Still, I was struck by one of Benton's examples in particular. He wrote about a couple who (I presume) replied to one of his articles, whose daughter had earned a doctorate in comparative literature and was struggling financially while their son "makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems" after six months at a for-profit trade school. I appreciated the example because it crystallizes the conflicted ideas that motivate most students who apply to graduate school. We want to be financially secure, but we also want to achieve a professional position that has a unique relationship to work.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I was employed one summer by its housing-maintenance department. My supervisors were carpenters and electricians who worked for the university. They could not understand why I would want to go to graduate school to study poetry. They outlined an alternate life in which I became an electrician, got paid to learn my trade, and, if I was lucky, owned my own business.They made a persuasive argument for a life I had never before imagined. But I didn't want to be an electrician. I wanted literature to be my work.

That's why I tell my students that if they go to graduate school they must love the work, because often that is all there is and often you are paid too little for it. But I also tell them that it does not mean they should avoid graduate school. Rather, they must go for the right reasons.

One of those reasons is the pursuit of the life of the mind. Not because we need another generation of teachers who are abused by stressful working conditions, unequal wages, little job security, and no health benefits, but because the lifestyle of academe is meaningful and rewarding in ways that are different from many other careers. Choosing to pursue that life—as irrational as it may seem, as hopeless as the prospect of achieving it might be—can still be a sound choice.

We—adjuncts, full-time professors, researchers, administrators, politicians, and parents—must retool how we talk about graduate school in the humanities. We can no longer present it as a professional school or as career training, with the assumption that more education and advanced degrees always lead to better lives, more income, increased happiness. Instead, we must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood to become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship. We must admit that the humanities, now, is that way, too.

What would it mean to see advanced degrees in the humanities as akin to pursuing fine arts, with its expectation of economic instability? How would we talk differently to prospective (and current) graduate students if we saw them as more like aspiring novelists or actors?

For me, graduate school was a compromise: a way to lead an artistic life with what appeared to be a chance for stability. That guaranteed stability has disappeared, even for someone like me who is lucky to have a tenure-track job. For those students who seek to go to graduate school, presenting the choice as an artistic career means that we must accept that persistent professional disappointment is a central part of the life.

Comparing the academic humanities to the arts also necessitates that we be honest with ourselves that the job market is not going to change and that the power of well-meaning faculty members to improve it is limited. The inequalities of employment in the humanities reflect structural shifts going on in higher education. I see little evidence that those good ideas mentioned in past years will be put into place: limiting graduate enrollments, reducing the amount of adjunct teaching, refining tenure standards, accepting the prestige of online publications. In fact, in the short run, some of those plans could be disastrous: Further reducing the numbers of contingent faculty members could toss a generation of already exploited teachers into the worst economic crisis in 70 years.

Instead, we must rethink what professionalization means in the academic humanities. What is it for artists to become "professional" in their training? What kinds of cues and advice do fine-arts programs give their students about their future careers? I don't know those answers, but I think that humanities professors need to talk more with their fine-arts colleagues about how they advise their students about what it means to become a working artist, or how to accept the risk of becoming an impoverished one.

The contradictions of this arts-based approach to graduate school are insuperable. We must operate with the understanding that graduate school is not necessarily a successful professional degree for most students. That may mean we need to recognize the emotional reasons why many students decide to attend graduate school. And yet I am aware that the current job market rewards skills such as focus, expertise, analysis, and productivity. We must somehow inculcate those professional skills while appealing to the contradictory desires that bring our students to graduate school in the first place despite its obvious dangers.

In that sense, then, graduate school in the humanities is not a trap. It's a choice. But it is incumbent on us to make sure it is not a lie. We should not romanticize it; it needs to be reformed in many of the ways that Benton and others have described. But I don't think the trouble with graduate school or the humanities job market is the promise of the life of the mind. Instead, we should modernize that life and understand the pleasures of those who still choose, often against their economic self-interest, to pursue it nonetheless.

James Mulholland is an assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts.

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Comments

1. zefelius - March 12, 2010 at 03:49 am

Nice to see a counter-point, especially one so cogent and thoughtful. Nevertheless, I'm somehow vexed by the comparison to how one might look at a humanities Ph.D. in the same light as a choosing to go to NY or Hollywood to become an artist or actor. On the one hand, it's simply and brutally true. We might as well speak the truth. On the other hand, it's precisely such an honest truth which can never perfectly disengage itself from various lies perpetuated in academe. Yes, we can now begin to set the record straight with future graduate school hopefuls, by being straightforward in all the ways you described above. But unless this is all that is at stake, we aren't yet out of the woods. I myself don't mind getting paid very little (in reference to your point apropos of economic self-interest), but as a Ph.D. from a decent top 20 school and plenty of publishing and conferences under my belt, I wish I were in a better position to provide my own students with a more attentive focus. But as an adjunct--with little job security and little pay--we need to pick up extra classes and also complete research to ensure our own livelihood. This quarter I've been working many, many 80 hour weeks (perhaps low for some adjuncts... I don't know) so that I can thoroughly read all my students' papers, provide them with essential comments, and also publish my own work. But I still feel that I'm falling short, no matter how much energy I put into my work and my classes. This is just a crappy situation not only for adjuncts, but in my view even more so for college students. Even with 80 hour weeks, I find I can't really address all the needs of my students---nor do I have the power to motivate them with realistic grades, as I could lose my job for low evaluations.

In sum, to say that this can be reduced to an individual choice concerning whether or not one sufficiently desires to be an academic, on par with other precarious livelihoods in the arts, is to neglect how this contributes to the downgrading of our higher education system in the U.S. I have no problem with the risks I've taken, but until adjuncts have job security and a bit more pay (so they don't have to teach so many classes), I believe that many of our colleges will continue to suffer---thus showing how this problem is much larger than a simple pursuit of the life of mind, no matter how much I myself admire that kind of noble calling!

2. occidentalir - March 12, 2010 at 06:01 am

Excellent article. Although I've recognized the importance of "the talk", I hadn't encountered a term for it, which explicitly recognizes and names an important part of advising our students. And the comparison to the job prospects of actors and artists is apt.

One element which I have not seen mentioned enough: one's prospects can vary greatly depending on the quality of the graduate program that one gets admitted to. Granted, even having a PhD from Harvard or Berkeley is no guarantee of employment -- but one's odds are a lot better than if one's PhD is from Podunk U. So a prospective academic can receive an early and important evaluation of his or her future chances right at the beginning: if you get an admission offer with a fellowship from a Top 10 program, take that as a positive sign. If you get rejected from all of the top 20 programs and only get admitted to Podunk's program, take heed. These days only the "happy few" get tenure track jobs, and you don't want to overestimate your chances of joining the "brand of brainiacs".

3. edgr6373 - March 12, 2010 at 06:12 am

[An early career sociologist in Manchester writes] Blimey, I thought things in the UK (England) were difficult for PhD students and early career academics! Doing a PhD here, as, it seems in the US can put you deep into debt and delay family and home ownership by many years. When friends envy my interesting job and varied schedule, my reply is: "you go and do a PhD then"... Take the uncertainty, the financial burden, the solitary slogs in the library, live on pasta n' sauce, and hand back your house and car. I'm not sure what to make of the role of Adjunct, since we don't really have it here. PhD's can and do teach, but this is limited by regulations and in fact availability - there isn't that much teaching to go around, in a sense. Some of us do teaching 'off the books' accross different faculties and so on, to bump up the hours, some of us do part time work in the private sector or bits of editing work here and there. You can continue to teach part time after the PhD, but again, there are limited hours and nothing in the vacations, so it's hardly a career choice. After the PhD, it's time to get a full time job as a lecturer or researcher. But that's another story...

Anyway, I think I agree with the comment above more than the actual article. It's unfair to compare doing a Phd or being an academic to being an actor or an artist, at least in normative terms, and to do so is rather defeatist. We are culturally programmed to understand that education is a meritocratic path to, at least, 'a' job, and why not a job within that same system, if one shows enough aptitude? Are we not living in postindustrial socieities where knowledge and education have become the bread and butter of the economy and those who master it something of an elite?

Academics have had to work hard within the system most of their lives in order to get where they are... Going off to be an actor or artist is exciting and insecure and often means great sacrifices, but no one ever had to study for years and sit endless exams and write endless essays in order to do a Warhol or a Depp. I suppose if I had known that becoming an academic would be as hard as making it as an artist I'd have scrapped the studying an made tracks for New York, although the original York is nearer and has an arts scene of its own...

2010-03-27T08:39:00.003-05:00

2010-03-27T08:39:00.001-05:00

Sociology of Morality: "High-Five Nation"

2010-03-26T15:42:00.001-05:00

September 15, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

High-Five Nation

By DAVID BROOKS

On Sunday evenings, my local NPR station airs old radio programs. A few weeks ago it broadcast the episode of the show “Command Performance” that aired the day World War II ended. “Command Performance” was a variety show that went out to the troops around the world.

On V-J Day, Frank Sinatra appeared, along with Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant and many others. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The allies had, on that very day, completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. And yet there was no chest-beating. Nobody was erecting triumphal arches.

“All anybody can do is thank God it’s over,” Bing Crosby, the show’s host, said. “Today our deep down feeling is one of humility,” he added.

Burgess Meredith came out to read a passage from Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent. Pyle had been killed just a few months before, but he had written an article anticipating what a victory would mean:

“We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”

This subdued sentiment seems to have been widespread during that season of triumph. On the day the Nazi regime fell, Hal Boyle of The Associated Press reported from the front lines, “The victory over Germany finds the average American soldier curiously unexcited. There is little exuberance, little enthusiasm and almost none of the whoop-it-up spirit with which hundreds of thousands of men looked forward to this event a year ago.”

The Dallas Morning News editorialized, “President Truman calls upon us to treat the event as a solemn occasion. Its momentousness and its gravity are past human comprehension.”

When you glimpse back on those days you see a people — even the rich and famous celebrities — who were overawed by the scope of the events around them. The war produced such monumental effects, and such rivers of blood, that the individual ego seemed petty in comparison. The problems of one or two little people, as the movie line had it, didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

You also hear a cultural reaction. As The Times of London pointed out on the day of victory, fascism had stood for grandiosity, pomposity, boasting and zeal. The allied propaganda mills had also produced their fair share of polemical excess. By 1945, everybody was sick of that. There was a mass hunger for a public style that was understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare. Bing Crosby expressed it perfectly on “Command Performance,” as Gregory Peck, Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall would come to express it in public life.

And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.

But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.

Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.

If you're thinking about graduate school in Sociology, read this:

2010-03-15T20:05:00.002-05:00

http://chronicle.com/article/Neither-a-Trap-Nor-a-Lie/64535/

The Nietzsche family circus

2010-03-11T08:59:00.001-06:00

I think this is just fantastic: http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/

2010-02-25T15:41:00.003-06:00

2010-02-25T15:41:00.001-06:00

UNT Sociology Lecture Series Feb. 25

2010-02-22T14:09:00.002-06:00

“Stimulating Local Economies through Globalization”

Linh Quach

President of Q International Inc.

A discussion of work in international sourcing and manufacturing and global economic integration.

February 25, 11-12:15am, Biology 419

BIOGRAPHY
LINH T. QUACH, Founder

Linh T. Quach founded Q International, Inc. in 2003 and shortly after, left her corporate management position with American Airlines to concentrate on her company’s growth. While at American, she had the unique opportunity to facilitate the bilateral agreement between American and Vietnam Airlines which inspired her to look for further opportunities to help both countries rebuild their war-torn relationship. Realizing that this agreement was a significant catalyst to opening doors for further commercial relationships between the two countries, Ms. Quach has dedicated her career to building the bridge for both countries to benefit from each other’s needs and resources. In turn, her company’s focus is to help small businesses in the U.S. benefit from the growing commercial and manufacturing opportunities in Vietnam as well as other countries that provide low-cost and high-quality production.

Ms. Quach received both her Bachelors Degree in Economics and her Masters in International Business from Columbia University. She has also traveled extensively around the world which gives her a unique global perspective and understanding for doing business overseas. She speaks fluent Vietnamese and has had formal training in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

Ms. Quach has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a New Asian Leaderfor her contributions in promoting commerce between the United States and Vietnam. She has participated on the Forum’s Advisory Panel where she has counseled business owners and government leaders on conducting operations and building prosperous relationships with Asian nations.

Sociology of Morality: Review sheet for midterm 1 is available

2010-02-22T12:09:00.001-06:00

here

Review Sheet for Global Society Midterm I

2010-02-16T12:54:00.001-06:00

For the mid-term exam, you should be able to define and discuss the following terms.

Definitions of globalization

Nation-state sociology

Globalists

Traditionalists

Transformationalists

Interpenetration

Global infrastructure

Regionalization

Clash of Civilizations

Cold War

Triumphalists

Western liberal teleology

East versus West

“Western Civil War”

Desecularization

fundamentalism

Ethnocentrism

Blaming the victim

World System Theory (WST)

World empires

World economies

Strong states

Core countries

Periphery

Semi-periphery

Jihad

Desecularization

Racialization

Retribalization

McWorld

Homogenization

Global capitalism

International Telegraph Union

Universal Postal Union

International Meteorological Organization

Esperanto

Metric system

Transnational Capitalist Class

Culture-ideology of consumerism

Shopping malls

David Held

Samuel Huntington

Immanuel Wallerstein

Benjamin Barber

E.J. Hobsbawm

Leslie Sklair

Classes cancelled today (Feb. 11)

2010-02-11T08:13:00.002-06:00

Introduction to Sociological Theory (SOC4000) and Global Society (SOC4260) are cancelled today, because my kids' school district is closed. We'll meet as usual next Tuesday. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. All of the lecture notes for the midterm exams in both classes are posted on this blog.

--GI

Intro. Soc. Theory Lecture Notes for Midterm 1

2010-02-09T21:09:00.003-06:00

The first midterm exam will be Thursday February 18 in class. I will post a review sheet soon. Here are all the relevant lecture notes. These are no substitute for attending class and doing the assigned readings, however.

Lecture Notes

What is theory?

In the world right now there are thousands of students taking classes that are about only theory, smart people are writing books about theory. Some people spend their careers studying only theory.

So we will have to be brief here, because this is an introductory course.

Sociological theory is the 'queen of sociology,' as philosophy has been called the queen of the sciences.

Sociological theory involves the analysis, critique, and development of the ways in which we think about and discuss social reality.

The American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued, in “The Sociological Imagination,” that

the facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.

So C. Wright Mills argued that people need, or at least can benefit from, a “sociological imagination,” or a way of thinking about the world in terms of large-scale processes and historical changes.

That is Theory, but what is A Theory, and how do we know one when we see one?

One definition of a theory is: A theory is a statement of how and why specific facts are related (this is on page 22 of the textbook).

Theories are general, not specific like facts.

Theories are important because when we try to explain things, no matter who we are, we use theories, although we don't always know what theories we are using. We're usually not reflective about our theories.

Philosophy and theology are, basically, concerned only with theory. Sociologists and theologians ask, what is time, what is reality, what is truth, does God exist, etc, etc.

Theory is important in sociology too, but sociology is different from philosophy and theology because in sociology, theories are about people and societies and culture and history, not truth, time, reality, god, the devil, etc. Sociological theories are about real things that we all experience in our lives, and that we tend to think are important.

Also, sociological theories are about how things are, i.e. how societies actually work, not how society should work. Sociological theories are almost always explanatory, not normative.

e.g. Karl Marx on religion as “false consciousness”

e.g. Emile Durkheim on suicide and social integration

Classical Theoretical Perspectives

The theoretical perspectives we turn to now are a little more general than theories.

These are basic images that guide thinking and research. Here are some of the classical theories. These are considered classical because they are not new, but they are, for the most part, still talked about.

(and keep in mind that some of them might be wrong…they might be bad ideas)

Functionalism

Claude Henri de Saint-Simon… biology, Darwinism, organicism, scientific positivism in 19^th-century France à Auguste Comte, considered the founder of sociology

Functionalism is one of the oldest theoretical perspectives in sociology. It began with August Comte, the French thinker who coined the term Sociology.

The basic image here is of society as a system or organism.

e.g. a human body

The imagery comes from biology

Both societies and human bodies have different levels of organization

Whole Body
Organs, e.g. Brain, Heart, Hand
Cells
Molecules
Atoms
Nation
Groups, e.g. ethnic groups, professions, organizations

Families
Individuals

The molecules, cells, and organs of the body work together so that the body functions.

We don't know what our cells and organs are doing, and our cells don't “know” what the rest of the body is doing (e.g. they don't know where we are walking, what we want to do today)

But our cells and organs are functional for survival

In the same way that bodies have organs and cells that are needed for the functioning of the whole body, societies have institutions that are functional.

E.g. governments

Laws

The family

Greetings

A division of labor

Professions

Why do we have these things? Because societies need them to function and survive

How does this work?

How does social change happen?

August Comte: differentiation, complexification, evolution

3 stages of society

1. theological--militaristic communities led by priests

2. metaphysical--legalistic, ruled by lawyers

3. positivist--scientific, industrial, ruled by sociologists

2. Herbert Spencer (from Darwin): Natural selection

From Charles Darwin, one of the most important scientists in history

In America, the sociologist Herbert Spencer used Darwin's evolutionary ideas to explain not only how societies worked, but how they should work.

Spencer coined the famous expression “survival of the fittest” (p. 84 of the reader)

Has anyone heard this expression before?

What does it mean?

For Spencer, Darwin's theory of evolution was perfectly applicable to human societies.

“Natural selection” ensured that the best institutions and people succeeded in societies. This is good for everyone because it is good for the whole society. Processes of natural selection, when left alone, ensured that the best forms of government would survive, the best religion would survives, the best ideas would survive, and the best people would survive and succeed.

For Spencer, and for many other thinkers (mostly in America and England) these processes are natural and inevitable, and when left alone would lead to progress for all of humanity.

Thomas Malthus provided a more pessimistic view of the human consequences of natural selection.

Malthus was a demographer and political economist who argued, from Darwin, that there were 'Laws of Population Growth': population increased at a geometric rate, while food increased at an arithmetic rate:

Starvation and conflict over scarce resources were inevitable

How would functionalism explain universities? Why are we here?

This explains, e.g., wealth and poverty. In a free capitalistic society, people who are wealthy become so because they are better than other people at something. And the whole society will improve if these people are allowed to succeed and other people are allowed to fail.

This is sometimes called Social Darwinism

Politically, it is associated with free-market ideologies: weakening central governments and lowering taxes on the wealthy

Why would social Darwinists want to lower taxes on wealthy people?

Why would they want to make governments smaller?

The Davis-Moore thesis

stratification is beneficial, good for society, 'functional'

society is complex, jobs are complex, and the best people need to be placed in the most complex and important jobs (e.g. president, operator of a nuclear power plant, heart surgeon)

therefore modern societies need to be Meritocracies

The Conflict Perspective

If functionalism were your only sociological theory, it would probably seem pretty good. It was a dominant theory in the 19^th century in America and Britain, and it is similar in many ways to neoclassical economics, which is a dominant approach to economics today--again especially in America and Britain.

Functionalism has a lot to recommend it: it provides a coherent set of explanations for societal development, it is ambitious and broad, and it links sociology to other sciences.

Functionalism has been mostly rejected by sociologists because of its innate conservatism, its post hoc style of explanation, and its inability to explain much of social life.

* * *

The next perspective, the conflict perspective totally rejects functionalism.

In the conflict perspective, societies aren't like biological organisms at all.

Instead, societies are arenas of inequality that generate conflict and change

Forms of inequality include:

Class

Race

Ethnicity

Gender

Money

Power

Prestige

The focus here is on social divisions

Privileged groups try to keep their privileges, and pass them on to their children

Non-privileged groups sometimes resist, sometimes do not resist

This perspective is, again, radically different from functionalism

Question: What would each say about university education?

The conflict perspective is associated with two famous German thinkers:

Karl Marx and Max Weber

* * *

Cultural Theory

The next classical theoretical perspective is cultural theory, although you should note that the way I'm presenting this is a bit different from what's in the book.

This is the newest of the classical theoretical perspectives, although in sociology it's at least a hundred years old.

In this perspective, societies are guided not, or not only, by functions or conflict,

But also by shared values, symbols, ideals, ideas, beliefs, religions, and rituals

Cultural theory is associated with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and also with anthropology

In cultural theory, scholars pay a lot of attention to language, symbols like flags and statues and national anthems, rituals like national holidays and religious rituals, and lots of other kinds of symbolic and ritualistic behavior.

They also pay a lot of attention to cultural difference between and within societies. This perspective is very international--probably more international than the functionalist or conflict perspectives.

So if we ask our usual question of why we have universities, cultural theory provides different types of answers. For cultural theory, education is like a religion, and we build universities because we believe in education.

Secular education is part of our value system.

Also, we build universities so that we can socialize children to have the right kinds of beliefs and attitudes.

It's important for universities to have rituals like graduation ceremonies and symbols like diplomas, in order to make the experience of graduating meaningful to the students and parents.

The Transition to Modenity: Capitalism and Urbanization

Explaining Industrial (and Postindustrial) Societies

Sociology has always concerned itself with industrial and postindustrial (or modern and postmodern) societies.

Early sociologists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others) were particularly concerned with the transition, that is the change, to industrial society. Why did this happen? How? Is it positive or negative?

These questions are not of only historical interest. Why else would questions about the transition to industrial (and postindustrial) societies be important? (A: some countries have not made the transition)

Ferdinand Toennies: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft social relations (1887)

President of the German Society for Sociology until he was ousted by the Nazis in 1933

Gemeinschaft - tight-knit communities, intimate relations of kinship, friendship, trust, reputation

Often translated as “community”

e.g. rural villages, farming communities

Tonnies argued that Gemeinschaft relations were organic, natural, healthful

Gesellschaft

modern urban relations - impersonal, based on money and prestige, and on rationality, efficiency, and instrumental value

Often translated as “”society”

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

(1893, from his doctoral dissertation)

Durkheim was especially interested in morality as a social phenomenon

He wanted to understand how people could remain socially integrated in a modern, capitalistic society

He was not romantic, as were Marx and Toennies

He was not interested in developing a critique of modern society. Rather, France had been humiliated by Germany in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, and Durkheim and many of his peers wanted to support France and to modernizeit.

Mechanical Solidarity, in which everyone knows everyone, and people are tied together through similarity

People work together (e.g. in the fields), and they share culture and “collective consciousness”

Organic Solidarity, here Durkheim reverses Toennies' use of the term organic. For Durkheim, organic solidarity is like the solidarity of the heart and the liver. They are highly specialized, and work together.

People operate in complex webs of interdependent relations.

People cultivate individual differences for the good of the whole.

People do not necessarily share culture or a “collective conscience” as in mechanical solidarity.

OS arises from the natural development of the division of labor, although this can lead to anomie and over-individualization.

Georg Simmel

Brilliant itinerant German social theorist who wrote on an extraordinary number of topics.

Like Toennies and Durkheim, he argued that there was something fundamental about the transformation from rural life to modern urban life.

He argued that society is an event, it is interaction of individuals in groups

He developed a geometry of social life, an analysis of the “web of associations” that, for Simmel, make up society. Simmel's ideas have reemerged almost 100 years later in the form of network analysis.

In modern societies, people have larger social, occupational, and associational networks. This leads to individualization, as people are more likely to develop social networks that are unique.

Simmel wrote about many topics: money, fashion, commodity fetishism, alienation--but his writings on the city are among his most influential.

Karl Marx

this is the Marx lecture, so if you don't know much about Karl Marx, here's your chance

his most famous books were The Communist Manifesto and Capital

1) theorist of the relationship between capitalism and class conflict; this was his first major concern

2) the second major concern was alienation

lived 1818-1883

Ph.D. in philosophy in Germany

became a newspaper editor and writer

unlike most philosophers at the time, he thought you needed to understand society to understand ideas

unlike most academicians, he wanted to change society, not only to understand it better

1) capitalism and class conflict

Marx wrote his articles and books during a time when the British Empire was at its strongest, when the Industrial Revolution had made Britain, a medium-sized island nation, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.

At the same time, most British citizens were part of the proletariat, the factory workers, who were terribly poor, worked in polluted factories all day (remember there were no weekends), had no homes or lived in slums, and rarely lived past 30.

At the same time, aristocrats, industrialists, and capitalists, who owned the factories, were unimaginably rich.

They lived lives of luxury in mansions with hundreds of servants.

Marx saw society, not only British society but all societies, as based on conflict between social classes.

He saw societies as made up of a base and a superstructure.

The base is economic; it is the mode of production of goods and services.

The superstructure is nearly everything else: the government, religion, culture, the family, and ideas

Social change occurs from the base, from the mode of production of goods and services. Whoever controls the mode of production controls the society, including the government, religion, culture, the family, etc.

So for example, British capitalists were able to control virtually all of British society because they were able to control Britain's economic base. If they did not like a person or an idea, they could buy that person, or have that person put in jail or eliminated, because they were in control of the government. They could buy politicians…They could pretty much buy or control whatever they wanted.

Marx thought that this was true of horticultural and pastoral societies, agricultural societies (e.g. slavery in ancient Egypt; the European feudal system), and now of industrial societies. He thought this was true of every form of society that came after hunter and gatherer societies. Hunter and gatherer societies were communist because they shared their wealth and did not have social classes or class conflict.

So economic classes struggle over control of the means of production. But in industrial societies, the proletariat is much, much larger than the capitalist class. And they are terribly poor, and they generally know that the capitalists are amazingly rich.

If the workers got together and attacked the capitalists and took control over their factories, they could gain control over society.

So why don't they revolt?

Marx had trouble with this question, and his answer was what he called false consciousness.

False consciousness is a kind of confusion about how society works. For example, poor workers blamed themselves for their poverty, when they should blame the rich capitalists. Because there's really very little

they can do to improve their lives.

Capitalists create false consciousness in the proletariat because they control the schools, the church, the press, and the whole “superstructure” of society. They control these things because they control the means of production. They control pretty much everything.

For the proletariat to revolt, false consciousness would have to be transformed into class consciousness. Workers would become aware that they were in the same economic class, and would organize themselves to challenge the capitalists.

How would the proletariat switch over from false consciousness to class consciousness? A revolutionary elite group of intellectuals would help them.

Also, capitalism would collapse due to its internal contradictions. Capitalists do everything possible (like what??) to increase profits, and would be driven to reduce wages so much, to pay workers so little, that the workers would be forced to start a revolution.

2) Alienation

This is an important idea for Marx. It comes from some of his earliest writings, which were much more psychological than his later writings.

He was concerned, as many people were, with the change from farming and craftwork to factory work

ciftcilik, zanaat à industrial work, factory work

Consequences of factory work

de-skilling of work

routinization

boredom

workers see themselves as a commodity, as something capitalists can buy and sell

workers see themselves as machines, not as full human beings

Alienation (separation, or distancing) from the products of work

factory workers do not see the products of their work. they get no satisfaction from their efforts

Alienation from their friends and families

workers are not allowed to socialize with friends

they work so long that they have little time left for their families

Workers cannot grow or evolve as human beings. Work should allow people to evolve and improve themselves. Instead, workers can only learn and grow as human beings during their leisure time.

This can only get worse, as capitalists try to make bigger profits.

Revolution

The only way for workers to escape from alienation is to revolt, to start a revolution against capitalism.

Workers would take over the factories from the capitalists, and would replace capitalism with socialism

Socialism would be a humane, equal economic system that preserves social ties. Workers would take care of each other, and everyone would work for the good of the society.

Marx thought this revolution would occur in England first, because England was the most advanced industrial country.

Eventually it would happen everywhere else. For Marx, it was inevitable.

Was he right?

Did socialist revolutions occur?

Where?

What happened in England?

Thorstein Veblen on the leisure class (p. 25)

Son of Norwegian immigrants to the U.S.

Contributes to the development of “institutional economics,” a less individualistic, rationalistic approach to the economy

Influenced by Functionalism, Social Darwinism and evolutionary thought generally

Emphasizes instincts for emulation, predation, curiosity, parental behavior

Most famous for ideas of “conspicuous consumption”

“conspicuous leisure”

“conspicuous waste”

Max Weber

Much influenced by Wilhelm Dilthey--argued (against Marx and others) that human history is fundamentally different from the material world--the subject of the natural sciences

Human history is shaped by contingency, spirit, consciousness, culture

Sociologists should try to interpret history to capture the way it is experienced subjectively by other people in other times and societies

Strict causal arguments are not appropriate for the study of human history, culture, society

What Weber thought about Marx:

capitalists versus proletariat idea was too simple

really Three dimensions of inequality

Class -- $

Status - social prestige, social honor expressed through “styles of life” (stande)

Power - ability to make people do things despite resistance

The rationalization of society

What does rationalization mean? Life becomes more rational, subject to means-ends reasoning.

Weber lived in the 19^th and early 20^th century, mostly in Germany, but he took a long trip to America too.

He knew almost everything you could know about history, but in both countries, he felt strongly that a great shift was taking place in society.

This was not just a change in technology, not only industrialization.

The shift was from tradition to rationality.

What does this mean? Are people who follow traditional ways of life irrational?

Tradition: sentiments and beliefs passed from generation to generation

Rationality: Disciplined calculation of the best means to accomplish specific ends

So these are different ways of thinking and living.

The rationalization of society affects more than just technology or industry. It changes the whole way people think, what they believe, and the ways they live their lives.

Rationalization does not happen to individuals one at a time, so much as it happens to whole societies, or whole segments of societies, at a time.

It happens in Northern and Western Europe and North America first.

e.g. England, Holland, Germany, America

But Weber is similar to Marx, because Weber is also concerned with the social and psychological alienation that is associated with capitalism and industry.

In a famous line, Weber likens modern organizations to an “iron cage” tightening around individuals. People are left with little freedom to be creative or unique or to enjoy life or be social.

What is an organization?

social group

specific goals

division of labor

formalization

Modern organizations, from the government to Microsoft or MacDonalds or IBM, are supposed to be the ultimate examples of rationalization, of means-ends reasoning.

So many people think these organizations are good and rational. They make people work hard. Even Marx thought that capitalist organizations uproot people from the “idiocy of village life”

For Weber, capitalist organizations have “purely technical superiority” over all other organizations because of their

“precision, speed, unambiguity, continuity, discretion, unity, reduction of costs…”

Max Weber on Modern Organizations

Weber was concerned that Germany was lagging behind Britain--a question of comparative development--and wanted to understand why, and then to improve Germany's position

3 Types of Legitimate Authority

(these are “ideal types”)

(and these are true for all time)

(authority is the ability to make people do things despite resistance)

1. Charismatic Authority

authority from personality, charisma: e.g. religious leaders, popular politicians, kings

any problems with this kind of authority?

succession, irrationality, incompetence

2. Traditional authority

authority from sacred traditions and leaders

e.g. a man is elected president because his father was president

e.g. a man is anointed king because his father was king

any problems with this?

lack of charisma, irrationality, incompetence

3. Rational-Legal authority

Authority based on specialized learning

rule by experts

technical ability

exams

career ladders

meritocracy

any problems with this?

lack of charisma, rigid hierarchy and inequality

For Weber, modern organizations, and especially capitalist organizations (corporations), must move from charismatic and traditional forms of authority to rational-legal authority. Rational-legal authority is more efficient, faster, better; and in capitalism, the older forms cannot compete.

Pierre Bourdieu on forms of capital

Maitre penseur, recently died

Our last major conflict theorist

Rejects Marxist approaches, hopes to be rid of them once and for all

Did early research on Kabyle tribe in Algeria during the revolution against French rule.

Used quantitative techniques, highly professional as a sociologist.

Politically active: spoke out often against 'neo-liberalism'

Ideas of:

“Social space” and “power field”

Forms of Capital and their Transformation

Habitus: bio-cognitive imprint of the social environment

Economic capital

Social capital

Cultural Capital

Transformation (conversion) of these

Position in social field/space is relative

Predicts tastes, likes and dislikes: e.g. size and position of TV in house

Habitus: why working-class men don't like keyboard work, stockbrokers

Pierre Bourdieu, Snobs, and Omnivores

Distinction (excerpt)

Pierre Bourdieu is perhaps the most influential sociologist alive today. Like Foucault before him, in France he is widely regarded as a “master thinker,” although he is unlike Foucault in that he is a tried-and-true sociologist, who uses numerical data and advanced statistics in his research.

For the purposes of this course, we'll cover some of his work on Structure, Habitus, and Social Space, and then we'll move on to Michele Lamont's revision and extension of his ideas.

Social Space and Social Classes.

Bourdieu's Opponents:

(1) A break with Marxists: (I.e. 'objective' reality). Bourdieu is interested in RELATIONSHIPS, on more levels than just the economic, and argues that how people

interpret and make sense of their relations matters (this is the subjective element).

He also has s definite focus on POWER STRUGGLES.

Social Space: A geographic/mathematical metaphor for how people are arranged in society. Bourdieu defines social space as:

"a (multi-dimensional) space constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties active in the social

universe under consideration, that is, able to confer force or power on their possessor in that universe." (p.229).

The points to keep in mind with this def:

(1) Social space has multiple dimensions (ex economic, educational, cultural, etc.: n dimensions) These dimensions can usually be categorized as a form of

Capital.

(2) "...constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution..." This mean that how

much and what kind of the particular capital one has is the basis for sorting along the dimensions.

(3) "...by the set of properties active in the social universe under consideration, that is, able to confer

force or power on their possessor in that universe." The quantity or quality (i.e. point 2) of a given good only matters to the extent that the good in question

is 'active' in the social world of interest. This part of the definition implies an element of contextual specificity. Two groups' relative position depend on the

particular 'field' that is active. If we're dealing in the economic field, then the relative position of $$ matters, if we're dealing with the educational, then

that's what matters. [note, that this discussion is about one dimension at a time, Bourdieu does not think that way - this is for illustration only, the point is that in

some struggles, the relative value of a given dimension will change.].

Power follows from the ability to mobilize capital.

The social space is a field of forces -- the system of relations, alliances, and power struggles. His vision of social space is NOT one that is (necessarily)

static, but instead constantly infused with power struggles. Thus we see the world as a system of 'objective power relations.'

Is this paranoid? Overdramatic??

This allows us to see the social world in two ways, as the positions themselves thusly: (take culture and econ as examples)

Hi Culture

| A

Poor ---------------------------- Rich

| B

c |

Low Culture

In this picture, the three groups are arrayed on these two dimensions (thus C is poor and holds mainly 'low culture' values, A is rich with 'high culture' , etc).

Because these positions are at the same time relations, because domination follows from the ability to utilize this capital, we could instead view this picture

as:

A -> B-----> C

\ _____/

Where A dominates (a little) B, and both B and A dominate C. What Bourdieu wants to claim is that these systems of relations are in constant contest -- not ONLY

in who gets to be WHERE, but what having a certain quantity/distribution of a good GIVES you, ie what it MEANS.

The dimensions are the elements that give power (education, money, social contacts, etc) in general, these elements form types of CAPITAL. The four

general types of capital for Bourdieu are:

1.Economic Capital: How much money one has.

2.Cultural Capital: The systems of value and meaning a person can draw on, what counts as 'good' for a group. (the main distinction is between

high and low culture for Bourdieu, thus the difference between a person who listens to Garth brooks and goes to the bowling alley every weekend versus a

person who reads Shakespeare, drinks fine wine, and goes to the museum all the time).

3.Social Capital: The set of relations one can draw on: who you know that MATTERS.

4.Symbolic Capital. : the extent to which one has the power to institute, to NAME, to define who is who. Symbolic power rests on RECOGNITION, i.e., give or take, legitimacy (Weber).

Bourdieu argues that each of these types of capital is transformable (to some extent), i.e. able to be converted and reconverted, one to the other. Thus if you have enough money you might get to know a new

set of important people, etc.

The two dimensions along which each type of capital are arrayed is Volume and composition. Thus the AMOUNT of money one has, and the TYPE of

money matter (i.e. cash vs stocks vs gold vs land).

Classes on Paper:

On the basis of the distribution of the various forms of capital, we can find groups of people who have 'similar' distributions. These are 'classes' in the

logical sense -- people who occupy the same cell in a cross-tabulation. BUT, we can't necessarily assume that these classes are self-recognized. This is the

long standing differentiation between classes in-themselves vs. classes for themselves.

What exists is a space of relations, out of which may or may not emerge a class per se.

We can compare this to Marx's theories of class, in which he assumes that groups form from similarity, but it does not explain how the groups form. Instead, through a theoretical 'slight of hand', the

essential questions are spirited away:

We don't ask about the political work needed to organize and created a self-recognized, mobilized class

Don't explain how the formal 'classes' of social scientists are related to the actual, living classes in society.

Classes and class fragments develop “habituses”--roughly but not quite subcultures

The Perception of the social world and political struggle.

One must account for how actors see the world to make sense of how they act. That is, we ned to look to the social construction of identity.

One's perspective in the world is due to two things:

1) 'Objective': People see the world differently because they occupy a different space in the world.

2) 'subjective': The tools brought to bear, the language used, are all the products of previous struggles, and influence the meaning of the very dimensions

that people array themselves along.

Thus, not only are people seeing the world from different spaces, but the very view of that space, the relevant value of any given quantity/quality

distribution is different depending on a group's past history of struggle.

While Bourdieu argues that people TEND to accept the position they find themselves in, there is social change, and it comes from struggles for power related

to (1) and (2).

in an earlier essay, Bourdieu writes

“Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories which make it possible, are the stake par excellence of the political struggle, a struggle

which is inseparably theoretical and practical, over the power of preserving or transforming the social world by preserving or transforming the categories of

perception of that world.”

These are social categories: racial, social class, economic categories, that change over time

So being able to define the dimensions of status, to identify the subject of political debate and shape the way issues are seen to be related are all symbolic actions,

and they are the means through which politics are carried out. Thus, being able to control these means gives one control of political outcomes. The power of

naming is crucial.

Examples:

? Political rhetoric about abortion: proponents use 'right-to-choose' language, opponents use 'rights-to-life' language.

? Use of the word 'Liberal' in presidential campaigns

Symbolic Capital: Any capital when it is perceived by an agent as self-recognized power to name, to make distinctions.

It follows that objective power relations reproduce themselves in symbolic power.

The power to create titles

Citizenship is bestowed by the government,

The definition of 'adult' or 'graduate'

“It is the most visible agents, from the point of view of the prevailing categories of perception, who are the best placed to change the vision by changing the

categories of perceptions. But they are also, with a few exceptions, the least inclined to do so.”

Why? Because they benefit from the current arrangement. That those in power control the means to power creates a cycle, whereby they reenforce the power

that they have. Bourdieu refers to this as the “circle of symbolic reproduction”.

Symbolic power rests on legitimate recognition your brother-in-law can't declare you a graduate of the university. The title 'graduate' can only be made by

those with legitimate control of symbolic power.

Symbolic order and the power of naming.

Symbolic power can be arrayed along a dimension of intensity/legitimacy:

Insult Official Naming

I-----------------------------------------------I

Low power High Power

We can think about the proliferation of titles in current work and occupations. This rise (sanitary engineer, executive assistant, vice president, e.g.) follows FROM the

desire of groups to NAME THEMSELVES, and thus make their own distinction. The move in contemporary society to provide all with a new name, is a struggle for legitimate power. Racial epithets are the imposition of place by a ruling class on a

ruled class, and when the POWER associated with those epithets can be reversed, then the group has gained the symbolic upper hand.

e.g. minority groups referring to themselves in terms of racial “slurs”--not just the N word--Chinese, Jews, immigrants in America (greenhorns, FOBs)

Bourdieu points out that rewards separate a title from a task. Thus, a part-time person doing the same work as a full time person will likely be paid less (even by the

hour) than the person who officially occupies the position. Or, for example, a nurse and a doctor often do exactly the same things, but the doctor will make

more.

Because symbolic power is a useful power, something that can be used to gain resources in multiple dimensions, it is clearly the subject of controversy.

Groups fight over the right to control the naming process.

“Every field is the site of a more or less openly declared struggle for the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field.” (p.242)

Alliances in the Political Field

Those who occupy similar, but distinct social spaces (or who are in similar, but distinct patterns of social relations) tend to form alliances (though, again,

not necessarily).

How do people at the bottom of a symbolic power system gain capital to change the present point of view?

Bourdieu says it happens through alliances with those who have the ability to control symbols. For example, the intellectuals will 'embezzle' symbolic power for

the workers. These alliances occur where there is a similarity in their position in the structure, across dimensions of the structure. Thus, workers are the

dominated group in the production/economic realm, while intellectuals are the dominated group in the cultural realm. The one helps the other because of the

similarity of their situation. For Bourdieu, this was Marx's error: to look only within the economic realm for the emergence of classes.

Critiques of Bourdieu (general)

too agonistic, too focused on struggle and competition

isn't Bourdieu himself an example of why he is wrong?

too Parisian, too French, and perhaps too old

Global Society: Lecture Notes for Midterm 1, Feb. 23

2010-02-09T20:54:00.003-06:00

The mid-term exam will be Feb. 23 in class. The format will be short-answer, just like Quiz 1.

Introduction

The word “globalization” was first popularized in the business press in the 1980s

Originally it referred only to economic processes

It has come to mean much more: cultural globalization, state decline, Americanization, cultural imperialism, immigration, regional political integration (EU), global political integration (UN)

Globalization theories are, I think, gradually transforming “nation-state sociology” and other social sciences

Sociology developed with the development of the modern nation-state; its stated purpose was to provide knowledge useful for solving social problems, mainly urban problems: crime, racial and ethnic conflict, poverty, disease

Yet today, it seems that sociology and the other social sciences are in some ways lagging behind the actual world

e.g. immigration, the internet and satellite television, and global trade are evolving more quickly than are theories that can explain these changes

One purpose of this seminar, as I see it, is to put you “ahead of the curve” at this early stage of your life and career.

What is “globalization”? Here is a preliminary list:

1. increasing volume and speed of global trade and financial interactions (“financial flows”)

2. increasing global interconnectedness of personal communications – long-distance phone calls and email

3. media globalization – satellite television and the internet

4. increasing migration and changes to citizenship

e.g. Mexican laborers in the U.S., Turkish “guest workers” in the EU

dual citizenship

5. easier international travel, cheaper flights, more people with passports

6. weakening of states, decline of state sovereignty, privatization of state functions

7. strengthening of transnational corporations

8. evolution of global networks of non-governmental organizations

Some of the above are not entirely new, but much of it is relatively new, occurring mostly after the 1970s

Everything in this course will be about global and transnational processes. We will study nations mainly as examples of global processes

So to start the course, we should have a sense of how the world works. What are the fundamental processes at work in the world today? (what a question!)

DAVID HELD, INTRODUCTION TO “A GLOBALIZING WORLD?” (OPTIONAL)

Held is a well-know British political scientist

The world in the Middle Ages, before industrialization: most people live in isolated villages connected to market towns

villages near each other often couldn’t understand each others’ spoken language

gradually agriculture, technology, trade, cities, military campaigns tie the world more closely together

from the late 16^th century onward: the nation-state, then democracy

today we see the decline of states under conditions of globalization

3 main theoretical positions in the study of globalization

1) globalism: globalization is weakening states

positive and negative versions

2) traditionalists: globalization is nothing new

3) transformationalists: no simple unidirectional change, but globalization is transforming societies, cultures, and the nation-state system

The nation-state has been taken for granted as the basis of political authority for 300 years

N-Ss have power and sovereignty over a specific geographical area defined by its borders

Globalization forces are forces that ignore borders, or bring them into question, such as multinational corporations, global trade, communications technology, diseases, global environmental problems, terrorism, and organized crime

Held defines globalization this way:

1. growing global interconnectedness

2. exercise of power at a global scale

3. interactions between global and local processes

4. multi-dimensionality: economic, political, cultural

5. can be seen positively or pessimistically

Held uses the following metaphors to help describe globalization processes:

1. “stretched social relations” across national borders

2. “regionalization” of groups of nations

3. “intensification of flows” of capital, people, and information

4. “interpenetration” of different cultures and societies in daily life

5. “global infrastructure” of the global economy (e.g. stock markets and banks), travel, an communications, and “global cities” like New York and Tokyo

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

This book has become a classic of our time, though a very controversial one. What is SH’s argument? How does he see the world?

He is a Harvard political scientist, and he wrote this book as the Cold War ended in the early 1990s.

His intended audience was mainly scholars who were trained during the CW, and especially triumphalist scholars who saw the end of the Soviet Union as one big step in a global expansion of democracy, liberal capitalism, human rights, and equality (for women, for different races and religions)

SH disagrees with this kind of optimistic, Western, liberal teleology. He sees it as naïve, dangerous, and historically inaccurate. This liberal triumphalist view ignores deep cultural differences between East and West.

The West is one “civilization,” and what happens within it does not necessarily translate to non-Western societies: e.g. the rejection of communism, embrace of human rights and freedoms for women.

For SH, wars within Europe, and the Cold War, were “Western civil wars”

After colonialism, non-Western countries will enter history as active players rather than as passive, dominated colonies.

For SH, the world is made up of 7 or 8 “civilizations”: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African

But what about globalization? Isn’t the world becoming more integrated? For SH, globalization weakens nations and national identities, and religion provides compensation. He refers to these trends as desecularization and of course fundamentalism.

For SH, the West ends basically where it did in 1500:

West: Finland, Baltics, Catholic Belarus and Ukraine, Transylvania, Croatia and Slovenia, the former Hapsburg Empire

East: Russia, Orthodox Belarus and Ukraine, the rest of Romania, the former Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia

West: democratic, rich, stable, peaceful, equal, universalist ambitions and ideas, dominant and superior

East: weak, inferior, authoritarian, divided, unstable and violent, unequal, poor, particularist, and only successful in so far as they copy Western political, economic, and military models (Japan and Turkey), though it is much harder to adopt Western culture

The West was and is economically, politically, and militarily dominant: colonialism, the Gulf War, Afghanistan war, Iraq war, the IMF and World Bank, the United Nations

Now and in the future the West will have to deal with modernized societies with non-modern values, with fundamentalisms and other reactionary and anti-modern movements

Criticisms? SH’s arguments are uncomfortable for many people. They criticize him for being too simplistic in drawing lines between East and West. They see him as ethnocentric. They argue that he blames the victims of colonialism and general Western dominance.

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN, “THE CAPITALIST WORLD SYSTEM”

Like Huntington, IW is responding to liberal Western modernizers

Unlike SH, IW’s focus is economic, not at all cultural

For IW, the world is now, and has been for 500 years, an economically interdependent system

Historically, the world has been run by world economies and world empires

World Economies: Napoleonic France, the British Empire

World Empires: China, Egypt, Rome

Today we have the “modern world economy” which emerged in 16^th-century Europe. This is capitalism, and it does not evolve into a world empire, though it is sometimes described as an American empire

Northwest Europe became the center or “core” of the modern world economy because it was able to diversify its agricultural production through technological innovations, and to develop cities and eventually strong states that allowed for stable economic transactions.

Mediterranean and Eastern Europe were in the “semi-periphery”. The colonies and the rest of the world were in the “periphery”, exporting cheap raw materials and importing expensive goods and services.

These inequalities are reinforced and perpetuated by “unequal exchange” between core and periphery. The core almost always wins.

Both poor and rich nations are almost locked into their positions in the world economy. The basic structure of the world economic system is stable and static.

Criticisms of IW? IW pays almost no attention to culture – values, beliefs, religion, traditions.

Is his view of the world too static? What about countries like South Korea that have changed their positions?

BENJAMIN BARBER, “JIHAD VERSUS MCWORLD”

BB is a political scientist at Rutgers University in the US. This chapter was from his 1995 best-seller.

Like Huntington and Wallerstein, he has an argument about the basic structure of the world after the Cold War.

He starts by referring to the popular press. On most days, the front pages of major newspapers will have articles about Muslim violence (Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, Bali, Madrid, London, Holland). In the same newspaper, the business section will discuss, every day, new forms of global economic integration and cooperation and high technology: multinational companies buying one another and merging, new tools for communications, business, and entertainment.

The contrast here is striking, although we tend to get used to it.

Like SH and IW, BB, along with most globalization theorists, criticizes Western modernizers and secular liberals. For BB, large-scale globalization processes produce both division and integration:

1. “Jihad” – division, retribalization, desecularization, racialization (e.g. former Yugoslavia)

2. “McWorld” – homogenization, global capitalism, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, MTV

Jihad and McWorld are in some ways technically interdependent, though they define themselves partly by contrast with the other.

Both Jihad and McWorld weaken states, and both are undemocratic

The two trends go together in any case

Criticisms? Simplistic? Too focused on headlines? Are fundamentalist movements nearly as important as global capitalism?

Martin Albrow, “Travelling Beyond Local Cultures”

Like a large number of globalization scholars, Albrow is interested in the “penetration” of globalization processes into everyday life, specifically into the daily lives of quite ordinary people (not cosmopolitan elites, not immigrants).

For Albrow, this kind of study can recast many of the theories and ideas of “nation-state sociology”

Some important ideas in Albrow’s analysis:

1. globalism – thoughts about the state of the world penetrating the daily lives of ordinary people

2. globality – images, information, and commodities from around the world are available in people’s local lives. global events impince on people’s lives.

3. time-space compression – an idea developed most famously by David Harvey – “direct” social relations can occur over any distance across the world

4. disembedding – people can move across national borders while maintaining their lifestyles and routines (food, furniture, television)

Empirical Study: Wandsworth (inner London)

Wandsworth is a fairly conservative neighborhood

What kind of “local culture” is there in the Wandsworth neighborhood?

Older sociology suggests that in the absence of a strong local culture, i.e. local community and traditions, there will be “anomie” or social disorganization (Marx, Weber, Tonnies…)

E. J. Hobsbawm “The World Unified”

Until the 18^th and 19^th centuries, regions of the world are mostly independent.

E.g. China has almost no interaction with Europe.

Almost no one in Europe knew what was happening in Japan.

Even in 1848, the best European maps have large white spaces for much of Africa, Central Asia, South and parts of North America, Australia.

There was not really “one world”

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries long-distance trade begins to increase very rapidly.

transportation and communications technology – telegraph, steam engine, train

e.g. in 1872 it was possible to travel around the world in 80 days

in 1848 it would have taken at least 11 months

in the 1800s international cooperation in technology and government began

International Telegraph Union (1865)

Universal Postal Union (1875)

International Meteorological Organization (1878)

all of these survive today

attempts to create a global language

Esperanto in the 1880s

the technological and economic unification of the world that began in the 17 and 1800s left out large portions of the world, e.g. Latin America, Africa, most of Asia

Leslie Sklair “Sociology of the Global System”

A broad argument that provides an alternative to both Huntington and Wallerstein.

The key to understanding globalization is not Westernization and the rise of non-Western and reactionary movements, as in Huntington; nor is it a slowly evolving Western-centered world economic system, as in Wallerstein.

Rather, the new force we need to understand is a social class, the Transnational Capitalist Class

This is not Western only, it is a global class of people, partially a product of brain drain from poorer regions.

What members of the TCC share is a culture-ideology of consumerism

Capitalism is no longer inter-national but global

The culture-ideology of consumerism supports global capitalism, and the TCC are the main agents for spreading this culture-ideology

To expand successfully, global capitalism needs to expand the markets for its consumer goods, and therefore to create demand for consumer products

e.g. today even quite poor people in poor regions know about the differences between consumer products (products that they cannot possibly afford)

The TCC does not own the means of production (factories etc.)

They are pulled from all nations into jobs as executives, in media, as owners, as capitalist-inspired politicians and high-level bureaucrats

They see their job as convincing their countrymen of the merits of capitalism, free markets and consumerism

Shopping centers (malls) are the temples of the culture-ideology of consumerism

The TCC almost completely controls the world’s resources (“national” resources)

Without consumerism, i.e. without media (television, radio, newspapers, internet ads) this system could not survive

The TCC is transforming cities

Jan Nederveen Pieterse “Globalization as Hybridization”

Sklair’s argument on the Transnational Capitalist Class takes us away from Western-oriented perspectives toward more global theories of globalization. We will encounter this tension throughout the course, between center-peripherymodels of globalization and models of globalization as transnational “flows” of ideas, capital, and people.

In the last ten years or so, the trend has been away from center-periphery theories, although this trend is uneven.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse is well known for arguing against center-periphery models.

He views globalization as a very complex multi-dimensional process, fluid, indeterminate, and not unidirectional.

It is better, he argues, to think of globalization not in terms of standardization (homogenization) but in terms of hybridization.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse “Globalization as Hybridization”

Pieterse is our first writer to argue against theories of globalization-as-standardization, uniformity, homogeneity, mcdonaldization, coca-colonization, neo-colonialism…

We should think about globalization(s), in the plural, and in terms of multidimensional processes, some of which tend toward standardization, others toward differentiation and hybridity

Does globalization = Western modernity? Or Western capitalism?

No, there are theoretical problems with this approach. Globalization does not exactly equal Westernization.

This approach is not historically sound. Globalization implies an intensification of global interactions that already existed. Globalization is more like a stage of history.

For the nation-state, globalization erodes state sovereignty over national economies. And yet it encourages “absentee patriotism” among diasporic communities – Jews, Palestinians, Irish, Sikhs, Kurds…

“Glocalization” of local ethnic groups referring to universal human rights standards.

Supranational regionalism – e.g. the EU, ASEAN (Ohmae)

Sub-national regionalism – e.g. Northern Ireland, Quebec

This is all hybridization, not standardization

e.g. “hybrid sites” and neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods, border cities, global cities, Free Enterprise Zones

“structural hybridization” due to globalization increases the range of “organizational options” available to people

Sociology will have to change to accommodate the new realities of a globalizing world

Neoliberalism / Economic Globalization

1. “Economic Liberalism”

This is not an economics course, but we can discuss the basic principles of what is sometimes known as “Anglo-Saxon” or “Anglo-American” or “laissez-faire” capitalism, and its transformation.

Adam Smith: the “invisible hand” of the market provides goods and services for all of us.

Free trade is good because, since individuals are rational and self-interested, and tend to negotiate and trade and bargain, and because whenever people trade or buy goods or services both parties must gain (most of the time), governments should allow free trade. Governments should not interfere in the market.

Economic liberalism thus gave priority to economic freedom over economic equality

Liberal capitalism was the official economic system, and the economic backbone, of the British Empire, and it was the dominant global system until the early 20^th century and the rise of communism and socialism, and crises of capitalism including the 1929 stock market crash.

The result of these crises and threats, in advanced capitalist democracies, was that the state sought to smooth out the volatility of markets, and sought to make capitalism serve social purposes – equality and welfare.

The result was not communism, but rather the “welfare state” in which states taxed citizens, and taxed the wealthiest citizens more than others, in order to provide health insurance, unemployment insurance, retirement benefits, and other benefits to vulnerable citizens.

The welfare state was the dominant economic-social model in the world from about 1945-1975(ish). This period also saw the growth of labor unions, which were generally not communist/socialist, but that demanded guarantees of social security and benefits from states.

In the 1970s the welfare state and unions faced their own crises and also sustained intellectual/ideological criticism from “neo-liberal” economists and other writers.

The welfare state was, and is, threatened by global economic competitition, by economic globalization and the incorporation of countries like China into the global economy. States that tax businesses and citizens for social reasons lose because businesses and citizens can more easily move. E.g. Germany and France today.

Thus economic globalization / neo-liberalism directly threatens the welfare state, and in so doing it threatens the welfare of millions of people in advanced democracies. For these and other reasons, we should not be surprised to find anti-globalization social movements, and anti-globalization and anti-immigration sentiments among voters in advanced democracies. And yet economic globalization / neoliberalism continues to advance, and welfare states continue to shrink. Why? Peter Martin and Martin Wolf argue that there is a strong moral case for economic globalization. Their arguments are classical arguments of free-traders and economic globalizers, and most business executives would strongly agree with them. Their arguments are rooted in neoclassical economics and in observations of the world, particularly since the 1990s.

Peter Martin “The Moral Case for Globalization”

This article was originally published in the Financial Times, a highbrow business newspaper. For Martin, economic globalization is morally good. In fact it is great, because it has integrated previously marginalized, poor people into the world economy and provided them with higher standards of living.

Economic globalization is better and more powerful than bureaucratic elites and their “North-South dialogues”. Economic globalization is real, powerful, and beneficial because it will transfer power from developed countries to developing ones.

Leftist critics of globalization (the anti-globalization movement) are in fact conservative, they want to retain the status quo.

Economic globalization refers to the lowering of trade barriers and the liberalization of economic policies and labor laws.

Economic globalization creates losers, but it creates more winners than losers.

Economic globalization creates jobs. Millions of jobs. Maybe not great jobs, but a job in a factory is better than no job at all.

Globalization can be stopped, but this requires a more powerful state that can repress individual rights and freedoms. This is undemocratic.

Economic globalization / liberalization is associated with democracy. Where we have free trade, we will generally have democracy and more freedoms.

This is a “mainstream” view of globalization. For evidence it relies on the economic development of southeast Asia – Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam

Martin Wolf “Why this Hatred of the Market?”

Technology has made the lives of millions of people much better. It is easier to travel, to communicate.

Governments are forced to open their economies to the world economy, although this leads to a loss of power and control. Why do they do this? Because choosing economic isolation leads to disasters, e.g. East Germany, North Korea, and Maoist China (poor, isolated, militaristic) versus West Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan (rich, successful, not militaristic).

Still, some people resist economic globalization. Why?

Hatred of markets

Fear of foreigners

Concern about wages and jobs

These fears are unfounded, “mythical”

What is not mythical is the economic prosperity of … east Asia

Other criticisms of economic globalization

Neoliberalism / economic globalization weakens unions and the welfare state, both of which are institutions that gave millions of citizens opportunities to attain a middle-class standard of living, and to live and grow old free of the fear of poverty or destitution. These institutions created an important “safety net” for citizens of advanced democracies, and now it seems that this safety net is weakening.

There are other criticisms of economic globalization that are less focused on the wealthy democratic societies.

Economic globalization increases inequality in the world
Economic globalization increases poverty in the world. Or at least, it does not decrease it.
Economic globalization creates a “race to the bottom” in terms of workers’ rights, wages, environmental standards, and child labor.

States and regions and even towns compete to attract mobile businesses

Econ glob’n is un- or anti-democratic (Barber)

Transnational corporations are immune from voters
Econ glob’n strips power away from democratic institutions

Econ glob’n is racist and/or sexist

EG generally privileges white male executives (e.g. exec salaries)
EG generally punishes people of color and women
Advocates of EG are mostly white men
Critics of EG are often people of color, people from poorer countries, women

Econ glob’n is basically a new form of colonialism and exploitation
Econ glob’n destroys traditional cultures that have develop ed over millenia

John Dewey: "The Quest for Certainty"

2010-02-08T14:02:00.002-06:00

For sociology of morality students whose reader doesn't include the Dewey reading, you can link to it here. Try to ignore my margin notes please.

Sociology of Morality: Groups have been assigned

2010-01-30T12:46:00.002-06:00

You have all been assigned to groups on our wetpaint wiki page. If you want to change groups, find someone who is willing to trade, but let me know what you're doing. Don't hesitate to start posting your ideas about the assignment. Your grade for this assignment is partly based on participation, after all.

SOC 4000: Intro Theory: If you want to email your group...

2010-01-30T09:06:00.002-06:00

If you'd like to email the members of your group, you can try to figure out who's who from this list: http://ignatow.wetpaint.com/page/Introduction+to+Sociological+Theory

Otherwise, you have to hope they'll look at the group's wiki page. But don't wait! You can brainstorm and contribute to your page right away.

SOC. 4260 Global Society: groups have been assigned

2010-01-28T15:09:00.002-06:00

You can all find your groups on the Wiki site (http://ignatow.wetpaint.com/) by searching your last name in the search box on the top right of the main page. Get to work as soon as you are ready. The only things that are graded are 1) each group's paper, and 2) the amount each group member contributes to the paper (this is mainly to prevent free-riding).

Intro. Sociological Theory group assignments

2010-01-28T14:34:00.004-06:00

To find your group, just log in to the Wiki site ignatow.wetpaint.com and search your last name in the search box on the top right of the page.

Here is your assignment:

Group Writing Assignment

Use your group's page to write a 4-page paper, with a reference page of 4 or more non-Internet-only references, that answers the following question.

Karl Marx is dead, but are his ideas? Discuss the relevance or irrelevance of some of Marx's most important ideas, with reference to current events in the United States or elsewhere.

A hard copy of the 4-pages (plus a reference page) assignment is due in class February 4.

SOC 4000: The revised syllabus with page numbers for both editions of the book is now available

2010-01-23T12:45:00.002-06:00

It's here:

http://sites.google.com/site/classes390e/home/soctheory

You can get to it through the courses link, as usual.

Sociology 4000

2010-01-23T09:24:00.002-06:00

As many of you have noticed, the page numbers on the on-line syllabus refer to a previous edition of the theory reader. I'll fix it on Monday, but generally, it's enough if your reading just keeps up with the lectures. I won't give quizzes or exams on anything I haven't discussed in class.

Also, I'll add dates to the readings on the syllabus.

Why do college students get such long winter vacations?

2009-12-31T09:46:00.000-06:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2239392/

2009-08-13T11:25:00.001-05:00

2009-08-13T11:24:00.002-05:00

2009-08-13T11:24:00.001-05:00

Soc. Culture Final Exam Review Sheet

2009-08-05T13:17:00.001-05:00

Sociology 4260 Cultural Theory (Summer II 2008)

Prof. Gabe Ignatow

Review Sheet for Final Exam (Wednesday August 12 at 11am in class)

You should be able to define and discuss all of the following terms:

Cultural capital

Social capital

Economic capital

Power field

Social space

Symbolic violence

habitus

Kabyle

Symbolic boundaries

Boundary work

Moral boundaries

Cultural boundaries

Socioeconomic boundaries

Cultural specialists

For-profit workers

Musical dislikes

Cultural omnivores

High-status exclusiveness

Educated tolerance

Symbolic racism

Patterned tolerance

Multicultural capital

“tolerance line”

Production of culture

Culture industries

Gatekeepers

Soc. Culture Final Exam Lecture Notes 3

2009-08-05T13:12:00.000-05:00

Durkheim and the Neo-Durkheimians

Emile Durkheim and the Neo-Durkheimians (Cultural Sociology)
Philip Smith, 9-13, 74-96

Politics
Lynn Hunt, The Sacred and the French Revolution
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Discourse of American Civil Society (in reader)

Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

One of sociology’s founding fathers, the “big three,” the other two being Karl Marx and Max Weber. He developed the core of a cultural approach to sociology almost a century before the “cultural turn” in the social sciences.

French academic, unlike Marx he was a professional academic, and as such was deeply engaged in the academic debates of his time. He did as much as anyone to establish sociology as a discipline in France in the 19^th century.

Four most famous books:

The Division of Labor in Society, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Key ideas in Durkheimian sociology, key contributions:

1. The study of “social facts”: a social fact is a real phenomenon that is collective in nature and irreducible to individuals’ actions. e.g. language…no such thing as a “private language”

2. Rigorous scientific methods of study: statistical analysis of survey data, data collected by French bureaucracies

3. Cultural analysis: symbols, categories, rituals, the sacred and the profane

The Elementary Forms, part of which is assigned for this course, was his last great work, and it came very late in his career, and it is where he most fully spells out his ideas about cultural processes. The book is complex, in part because in it Durkheim tries to do two things.

1) understand religion, i.e. provide a sociology of religion (lots of people are still working on this)

2) show how the modern world is still fundamentally “religious.” This is his religious sociology (fewer people see things this way, although I tend to)

1) Durkheim’s sociology of religion

Why do all human societies have religions in the first place? What are the social effects of particular religions? The economic effects? How do power, politics, and money interact with religion? From a purely economic or ecological perspective, religion and particulaly elaborate religious rituals can seem wasteful. From a Marxist perspective, religion is the “opiate of the people.” It disguises power and subtly enslaves people. But this doesn’t really answer the question of why religious beliefs come about.

Here are some answers as of the late nineteenth century:

1) Naturism: religion helps to explain natural phenomena, which are often threatening

Naturism addresses itself to the phenomena of nature, including great “cosmic forces” such winds, stars, rivers, the sky, etc., or else plants, animals, rocks etc.

2) Animism: Religion explains natural phenomena in terms of spirits, souls, divinities, demons, which are animated and conscious and inhabit natural entities. This is a kind of anthropomorphism.

Durkheim finds lots of problems with these two explanations, not the least of which is that they are both deeply condescending, and assume religion to be a matter of illusions and hallucinations totally unrelated to rationality and science.

Durkheim’s answer, based on his reading of the anthropological and sociological literature on Australian Aboriginal and Native American tribes:

First, he defines religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

This definition includes two elements: the idea of the sacred, and the idea that religion is inherently collective. By nature, i.e. because of the way individual humans are wired to interact with the world, human beings distinguish between the sacred and the profane. We’ll get back to this point later in the course. Second, religion is social. God, or the gods, are in fact society, and belief in God or the gods basically serves the interests of society as a whole.

This isn’t a course in the sociology of religion, however, so what’s most interesting to us here is that Durkheim’s sociology of religion provides the foundation for his religious sociology, you could say his cultural sociology, of the secular world.

2) Durkheim’s religious sociology

Unique for a sociologist, he emphasizes

a. the independent causal importance of symbolic classification

b. the importance of the symbolic division between the sacred and the profane

c. the social significance of ritual behavior

d. interrelations between symbolic classifications, rituals, and the creation of social solidarities

The Elementary Forms is a difficult book, in part because it is exploratory, and in part because Durkheim covers so much ground. His primary empirical case is the Australian Aborigines, whose social organization is, basically, the following:

Tribes (groups of clans)

Phratries

Matrimonial Classes

Clans

The clans each have totems—symbols based on animals and plants, and occasionally meteorological or celestial entities—and relations between totems mirrors social relations between clans as they are incorporated into phratries. In this way, aboriginal society shapes the use of symbols.

Totems are names, but they’re more like coats-of-arms to the clans. But it is more than a collective label in which individuals take pride. It also has great religious significance. It is a “sacred thing.” It keeps the profane at a distance, because of its essential properties: it heals wounds, sickness, it can makes men’s beards grow, it has power over the totemic species, it gives individuals force, courage, and perseverance, and depresses and weakens their enemies (p. 142). It surrounds ordinary objects and happenings with a kind of “religious halo.” Importantly, the idea, the symbol that is the totem has more power than the animal or plant on which it is based.

Totems have not only religious but cognitive significance as well. They shape the way Aborigines and Native Americans categorize the world around them, their own bodies and minds, and even the whole universe (i.e. their religious cosmology). Durkheim gives lots of examples, but the important thing to note is that Aboriginal and Native American categories of thought are very different from modern Western notions, which are typically based on modern science.

Society furnishes these categories to the individuals who comprise it, and in turn, by thinking in terms of the same categories and communicating with the same symbols, society is strengthened. Social solidarity is strengthened.

Finally, and this point is particularly important for us, modern societies and modern science do not reject totemism, the division of the world into sacred and profane, etc. Basically, science and rationality rely on the same universal cultural and religious notions that animate Aboriginal religion. Modern social organization is more individualistic and less tribal and clannish, and scientific rationality is sharper and clearer than aboriginal thought processes and categories, but the elementary forms of thought and group culture that underly both are the same. If we can apprehend these processes at work in the modern world, we can begin to understand the scope and the limits of our rationality.

Durkheim’s scholarly influence

Durkheimian thought permeated the French intellectual scene, and it has influenced research in various disciplines. The influence of Durkheim’s work, and particularly of the Elementary Forms, has been both direct and indirect.

Linguistics: most prominent is Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of the field of “semiotics” (the study of signs) who saw language as a social fact irreducible to anything else that emerged from the conscience collective of a society.

Literary theory: Roland Barthes’s studies in social and literary semiotics. Barthes and his colleagues have explicated the systems of symbolic classifications that regulate a wide array of secular institutions and social processes, including fashion, food production, and civil conflict.

Anthropology: Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, in which he studied societies in terms of their symbolic classifications, which are often patterned as binary oppositions. The opposition between the sacred and the profane is a cardinal one. Geertz’s interpretive studies of expressive cultural practices, such as Balinese cockfighting and American political campaigns, are also broadly Durkheimian, as they emphasize the “religious” and cultural bases of cultural phenomena. Mary Douglas’s research on purity and pollution taboos, which we’ll cover in this course, is directly Durkheimian too.

History: Michel Foucault, who often pointed out the religious and in a sense arbitrary basis of “rational” Western attitudes and practices, from sexual attitudes to such as mass incarceration.

Social Psychology: European “social representations theory” builds directly from Durkheim’s idea of “collective representations.”

Sociology: Amazingly, sociologists have been the slowest to pick up on Durkheim’s ideas. There are a number of reasons for this, but they aren’t too interesting, so we won’t get into them here. Robert Bellah has written on secular nations’ “civil religions,” basically the rituals and symbols modern democracies use. Otherwise, Durkheimian research in sociology, especially American sociology, is fairly new, only really picking up in the late 1980s. We’ll cover some of this work later in the course.

Durkheimian and Politics

Lynn Hunt, The Sacred and the French Revolution

briefly on the modern sociological debate on the F.R.

Why did the F.R. happen? Why do revolutions happen in general? Lots of sociological scholarship on revolutions.

Structural Analysis of the F.R.: Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol

peasant grievances

agricultural production and distribution

taxation

government susceptibility to revolution

centralization of bureaucratic government organizations

government policy consistency

William H. Sewell, Lynn Hunt

symbols and meanings

sovereignty of the crown versus of “the people” (shifting meanings and associations)

ideology

public rituals

symbols of the king versus symbols of the new order (the liberty tree, liberty in female form, the revolutionary calendar…)

Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Discourse of American Civil Society (in reader)

Jeffrey Alexander is a “Durkheimian” (or neo-“Durkheimian”) scholar, and in his chapter he applies and revises Durkheimian ideas in order to better understand the public response to the Watergate break-in. But there’s a long intellectual history of studies of this kind, specifically of studies of mass politics, propaganda, and the media. As far back as the 1920s, an awareness was developing that the extension of the vote and the enlarged purchasing power of the “masses” entailed expanded opportunities for both demagogues and well-meaning propagandists to further their respective causes using various symbols, fictions, myths, and utopian appeals. These opportunities have only expanded further with developments in communications technology, most notably the universalization of television.

Nowadays we take advertising, marketing studies, consumer research, political polling, image consultants, “spin doctors” and the like more or less for granted. But beginning in the 1920s social critics and social scientists began to study these processes carefully, and to rethink fundamental democratic ideals in light of new realities.

The first great writer in this tradition was Walter Lippmann, who was perhaps the most famous journalist and commentator of his day. Two of his books are relevant here: Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

In Public Opinion he developed what amounts to a social constructionist view of public opinion. It is an ideal of our democratic system, of course, that government represents the “will of the people,” that is the interests, opinions, beliefs, and values of the people. If the people’s will is disregarded, the result is tyranny and ultimately violence. What could be more basic to the American way of life? Yet by the 1920s, this ideal seemed increasingly unrealistic and naïve. Lippmann felt this as strongly as anyone, and set out to explore the fabrication of public opinion. Taking a page from Freud and other psychologists, he saw human beings as guided by “the pictures in their heads,” not necessarily by external realities. The pictures in our heads are “fictions,” which is not to say that they’re untrue, just that they’re subjective. And these fictions are socially constituted, i.e. they are part of culture. Human beings are not directly exposed to reality, but instead adjust themselves to their environments through collective culture, through “simpler models,” because the real environment is too big, too complex, and too fleeting for us to apprehend it directly. Human beings thus live in “pseudo-environments.”

In Public Opinion, and especially in The Phantom Public, Lippmann drew out the implications of this view of human nature for modern political life. “The Public” is not made up of rational individuals judging an objective reality based on their values and interests. Instead, “the public” doesn’t exist, but is for the most part created and manipulated by powerful cultural actors.

Further, for practical purposes, public opinion as such is typically “uninformed, irrelevant, and meddlesome.” Therefore, educated insiders, i.e. experts, should make society’s important political decisions, and public opinion should follow. Public opinion can and should be manipulated in order to further the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Educated experts, who will naturally have society’s best interests in mind, should make decisions and manipulate public opinion for the good of the society.

This was certainly a new democratic ideal, one that remains provocative and for many, disturbing.

One other social thinker I’ll briefly mention here is the political scientist Harold Lasswell, who published a famous book in 1927 analyzing the effectiveness of the various propaganda campaigns waged during World War I. His theoretical approach is similar to Lippmann’s, by the way.

An alternative view of these matters comes from the sociologist Robert Bellah, who is even more Durkheimian than Lippmann or Lasswell. Bellah is well known for his concept of “civil religion,” a concept he illustrates in an American context through studies of Presidential inaugural addresses and other addresses to the nation. The American civil religion is not the fabrication of any one interest group or group of experts. It goes deeper than that, and comprises myths and symbols that guide our national identity and sense of purpose. In America, the civil religion is influenced by Christianity, specifically by the Old Testament, but it is not actually Christian. Here are its fundamental ideas, as Bellah lays them out:

America was, and is, like the people of Israel, Europe was like Egypt

America escaped Europe as the Israelites escaped Egypt

also, Americans continue to escape oppression and tyranny as the Israelites escaped Egypt

God has a special mission for America

America must stand for liberty and freedom

America must be a light to other nations, and must promote these universal values

This civil religion is the source of much of our national identity, and Bellah cites as evidence for this the fact that these ideas recur again and again in American political documents, including such diverse sources as abolitionist pamphlets, civil rights speeches, and many Presidential speeches. For Bellah, this indicates that the civil religion is interwoven with the fabric of American politics.

“Binary Codes” in modern political discourse, which we imagine to be rational

Discourses have “internal symbolic logics” that can be perceived from outside. This is what cultural analysis should do.

like Sacred/Profane but with local variations

in the American case:

Actors

Democratic Code

active, autonomous, rational, reasonable, calm, controlled, realistic, sane

Counter-democratic code

passive, dependent, irrational, hysterical, excitable, passionate, unrealistic, mad

Social relationships

D: Open, trusting, critical, truthful, straightforward, citizen

C-d: Secret, suspicious, deferential, deceitful, calculating, enemy

Institutions

D: Rule regulate, law, equality, inclusive, impersonal, contractual, groups, office

C-d: Arbitrary, power, hierarchy, exclusive, personal, ascriptive, factions, personality

Alexander and Smith: revises and, more accurately, adds to Durkheimian analysis the following ideas:

“Generalization”

Values (general and elemental aspects of a culture)

Norms (regulatory conventions, customs, and laws)

Goals (mundane play of power, interest)

Social factors involved in crisis and ritual renewal

consensus about deviance/pollution of event

consensus about relevance of event

institutional social controls, including possibly the use of force

mobilization and struggle of autonomous elites and publics**

processes of symbolic representation, ritual and purification

** “incompleteness” of rituals

Organization of symbols by myths

So even modern, secular, democratic politics are discursive and cultural, and in a sense irrational

Cultures of Technology

Technology is a big target for cultural theory, because in modern societies, and in much modern social theory, technology’s relationship to culture and society is a deterministic one. Technology is, in Alexander’s phrase, a “dead hand” pushing social and cultural change.

Technological developmentsà society, social change

e.g. gun powder, steel production colonial conquest

windmill food production

automobile residence patterns

commercial jet airliner travel, business, residence

personal computer work patterns

internet communication patterns, privacy

Technological developmentsà culture

e.g. automobile “car culture”—decorate our cars, value our cars as more than mere transportation, etc.

mass production, industry modern art, modern design

streamlined airplanes art deco design

television cultural degradation, massification

cable television cultural fragmentation

industrial machinery social science theories (e.g. Freudianism, systems theory)

email written and spoken language

Yet social scientists are beginning to recognize that the converse is true as well, and have been paying increasing attention to the ways social organization encourages or impede technological innovation.

societyà technological innovation

Economic approaches—e.g. Robert Merton, Neil Smelser and others have argued that high labor costs encouraged the industrial revolution (they also argued for the importance of Methodist values)

Network theorists—point to the role of interpersonal and interorganizational ties in fostering technological advances (e.g. Powell 1999)

The “cultural turn” in the social sciences has thus far yielded fewer insights on technological innovation. (However, there is a large literature that is critical of the incursion of technology into cultural life, although theoretically, this literature shares the presuppositions of research that celebrates the effects of technology in the modern world, i.e. that technology is the causal agent in cultural change: e.g. Neil Postman 1993; Talbott 1995; Charlene Spretnak 1997; Shelly Turkle 1997; Slouka 1995; Ullman 1997).

Cultural historians have made more progress, and in recent years have begun to rewrite the role of technology in Western culture. Beginning in the late 1960s and ’70s, historians began to reconsider the relationship between technology and religious culture in the West since the Middle Ages.

White, for example, traces contemporary moral approval of technology to a Christian ascetic tradition that, contrary to Weber’s famous argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, preceded the Calvinists and instead goes back throught the monks to Jewish roots.

The Christian embrace of technology, i.e. the equating of technological progress and spiritual virtue, can be traced back through monastic iconography to the ninth century. Since that time, the “medieval affirmation that technological advance is morally benign” has been essentially unanimous, and remains an axiom of the modern West.

Recently, even more ambitious and far-reaching efforts have been made to illuminate the powerful, persistent influence of religion in fostering technological innovation. Noble (1997), echoing White, has carefully documented what he argues is a millennium-old trend in western culture, wherein particular strands of Christian religious faith have inspired and grounded the development of the “useful arts.” From Benedictine monks’ innovations in machine design, metal-casting, glass-making and tinning, to Freemasonry, space exploration, and computer technology, in the West, millenarian and eschatological religious understandings have long inspired technological achievement.

Noble argues that the Western tradition of religiously inspired technological experimentation has been shrouded by a century and a half of “secularist polemic and ideology” (p. 4). Yet the modernist intellectual tradition running from Marx to Habermas (outlined in Alexander 1992: 299-305) fails to explain popular religious construals of a range of 20th-century technological phenomena, from the atom bomb to artificial intelligence, the possibility of human cloning, and the promise of computer technology (cf. Noble 1997: 115-142).

Alexander on the “Sacred and Profane Information Machine”

Alexander takes on both Weber’s rationalization thesis and Marx’s commodification thesis, and for that matter he is not enthusiastic about any broad, deterministic theory of social change. E.g. McDonalization, rationalization, commodification, modernization, globalization, and so on. Nor is he a fan of rational-choice models of individual behavior, nor Realpolitik models of collective behavior. Why? Because he is a cultural theorist, and wants to show how culture and meaning and nonrational processes are a part of all social processes.

For Alexander, cultures are like languages, loosely structured by binary codes (sacred/profane, good/evil)

Social scientists ought to be able to read cultures like texts, that is to understand, in an empathetic way, cultures as systems of meaning for social groups.

As Durkheim and Weber tried to understand Australian aborigines, Native Americans, and Calvinists, so we should try to understand contemporary, modern cultures.

Alexander critiques neo-Marxists and critical theorists (we will read some of this work later) for being anticultural, for assuming that technology and economics drive social and cultural change, just as Marx argued that control of the means of production (the base) drives changes in the superstructure (schools, religions, values, culture, ideas, politics).

Alexander argues that it is impossible for a society to be dominated by technological rationality, as Weber, Marx and others have long predicted, because the “mental structures” of humankind are, in crucial respects, unchanging. Human rationality never exists in a pure form, but is always tied into irrational systems of psychological defense, systems that are both primordial and cultural.

In a sense, Alexander wants to do for the personal computer, for modern technology, what Freud did for the mind and Weber did for capitalism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: reveal its cultural and irrational dimensions in a rational way.

The personal computer and the internet have had profound effects on modern society. As such, and as Durkheim would have expected, the rhetoric and legitimating myths of the computer age are rife with religious themes. Alexander examined religiously based popular conceptions of technology in the United States—generally a religious, Christian country, but one that has been at the forefront of most modern technology—between the end of the second world war and 1975 (roughly the dawn of the age of the personal computer), and unearthed a Durkheimian pattern. In popular magazines (Time and Newsweek) and lay technology magazines (Popular Science), innovations in computer technology were introduced to the public wrapped up in a “transcendental and mythical discourse...filled with wish-fulfilling rhetoric of salvation and damnation” (p. 308). Alexander finds apocalyptic themes, themes of salvation, and even themes of the computer as the antichrist, the devil. Time and again, the marvels of computer technology were treated as sacred, existing at a remove from the profane world, and computer specialists as lay priests, intermediaries between technological divinity and the laity. Time, for example, wrote in 1965 of the “new breed of specialists [which] has grown up to tend the machines,” who “ have formed themselves into a solemn priesthood of the computer, purposely separated from ordinary laymen [and] speak[ing] an esoteric language that some suspect is just their way of mystifying outsiders” (Time, April 1965; qtd in Alexander 1992: 310). Completing their analogy three years later, Time wrote: “When we want to consult the deity, we go to the computer because it’s the closest thing to God to come along” (Time, March 1968).

“Idea Hamsters” on the “Bleeding Edge”: Profane Metaphors in High Technology Jargon

This was my first published article, and in a sense what I ended up doing was extending Alexander’s argument, which has roots in both Freud and Weber.

1) I argue that sacredness is not a consensual part of modern/postmodern culture the way it perhaps once was, and that the profane is worth thinking about more.

2) I argue that we can use theories of metaphor, and develop methods of analyzing metaphors, that can teach us a lot about culture. We can borrow ideas and methods from linguistics and cognitive psychology.

http://www.cinepad.com/mslex.htm

http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/categories/jargonWatch/

So it turns out that Silicon Valley people use a lot of jargon, and a lot of profane jargon, that is jargon with symbolism of bodies, animal, and death (all profane things).

This profane jargon has increased over time, and there is more of it in Silicon Valley than in other industries.

This jargon is structured in a binary way, that is in terms of a binary code, of

sacred/profane = technological progress/backwardness

For theorists of technological rationalization, Silicon Valley should be the most rational, most rationalized place in the world, as it is the source of so much of our everyday technology. But Silicon Valley has its own culture of technology, and it is a culture that is in many ways consistent with a centuries-old cultural code characterizing especially communities of innovation, in which technology is seen as sacred, and resistance to technological progress as profane.

Soc. Culture Final Exam Lecture Notes 2

2009-08-05T13:10:00.002-05:00

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieuàsymbolic boundaries, quantitative techniques for sociology of culture (compare with cultural anthro)

Working-class background, studied the Kabyle in Algeria while a soldier

Became more politically active later in his career: anti-globalization, anti-Americanization to some degree

Rejected Marxism, but also post-positivism

Main ideas:

Forms of capital (social, economic, cultural)

Social Space or Field

Habitus: bodily and cognitive imprint of social position

Why workers don’t like to eat fish (removing bones too dainty) or work on keyboards

Categories of refined/unrefined versus masculine/feminine

Symbolic Violence, Symbolic Domination

Distinction (excerpt)

For the purposes of this course, we’ll cover some of his work on Structure, Habitus, and Social Space, and then we’ll move on to Michele Lamont’s revision and extension of his ideas.

Social Space and Social Classes.

Bourdieu's Opponents:

(1) A break with Marxists: (I.e. 'objective' reality). Bourdieu is interested in RELATIONSHIPS, on more levels than just the economic, and argues that how people

interpret and make sense of their relations matters (this is the subjective element).

(2) A break with "intellectualism": The theoretical class (i.e. the one we as scientists define) is not necessarily the class that exists in-the-world.

(3) A break with Economics: There are more dimensions to the social world that just economics.

(4) A break with “Objectivism” in favor of a symbolic understanding of social structure.