Courses taught (click on course titles to download syllabi)
This class is designed to
help you gain an understanding of how complex organizations are created,
maintained, and changed.
We pay
particular attention to economic organizations, although we also make
comparisons to and discuss other organizational types (nonprofits, governmental
bureaucracies, voluntary associations, etc.).Despite the vast differences in goals and purposes,
various types of organizations use similar kinds of structures and routines to
accomplish their ends.Throughout the
class we focus our attention on a few important questions. 1) What are the
most common ways of organizing?2) Why
do we organize labor, production, and distribution in certain ways? 3) How do
organizations deal with their environment?4) What factors influence organizational change and adaptation?
Sociologists study the social
world by examining phenomena with a particular theoretical lens and using data
to assess the validity of those theories.This course teaches some of the basic skills that sociologists
use to conduct this research.We break
the course up into three basic components: 1) how to ask the right questions
and turn them into research projects, 2) how to get the data you need to answer
your questions, and 3) how to manage data and visualize them.Specifically, you will learn how to
communicate research findings through writing, through tables, and visually
through graphs and figures.
In
this course we explore the mechanisms and dynamics underlying political
action and change.I divide the
course into three main sections.First,
we talk about the nature of political power, influence, and elite
control.Second, we assess the
nature of democratic institutions and their relation to special interests and
policymaking.Third, we look at
processes of social change.In
particular, we are interested in how political outsiders - like social
movements - have the ability to make or resist change.
In this class we explore sociological and behavioral perspectives of the market.The primary objective of the class is to think about markets, not as
some naturally occurring phenomenon that imposes itself on society, but as a
kind of social construct that depends on institutions and social relations to
function effectively. First, we touch on the nature of the market.We will discuss the ideal conditions for
markets and the market’s ability to amass information and coordinate behavior
through prices.We then assess ways
in which markets can go awry and the social dynamics that contribute to these
inefficiencies.The second part of the class deals more explicitly with sociological approaches to
markets.We examine the ways that
social relations or networks serve as both the “pipes” and “prisms” of markets,
enhancing market functioning as well as sometimes impeding markets from working
according to the neoclassical ideal.We
also talk extensively about culture.Sociologists have varying views on culture’s impact on economic
behavior.According to some, culture
consists of the building blocks of markets.Or culture regulates the things and services that are seen as
appropriate for market exchange.For
others, culture provides meaning to exchange and is inseparable from any kind
of market activity.
