Introduction to Sociology
Bachelor's-level introduction to sociological thinking: the sociological imagination, research methods, classical and contemporary theory, inequality and power, and key institutions.
Module 1 — The Sociological Imagination
Mills' distinction between personal troubles and public issues; the history of sociology as a discipline.
What is the Sociological Imagination?
Introduction to C. Wright Mills' foundational concept and its role in distinguishing sociological thinking from psychology and commonsense explanation.
Personal Troubles and Public Issues in Practice
Applying Mills's distinction to four contemporary cases — unemployment, mental health, housing and neighborhood effects, and climate change — to show how the sociological imagination operates in analysis, not only as a slogan.
The History of Sociology as a Discipline
How sociology emerged as a distinct discipline in the nineteenth century, its institutional consolidation, the shifts between classical, mid-century, and contemporary eras, and how to read the discipline's history critically without myth-making.
Module 2 — Research Methods
How sociologists produce knowledge: quantitative and qualitative methods and research ethics.
How Sociologists Know What They Know
The epistemic foundations of sociological knowledge — the relationship between theory and evidence, the difference between sociological claims and journalism or commonsense observation, and how sociologists adjudicate between competing explanations.
Quantitative Methods
Surveys, experiments, and statistical analysis in sociological research — how to produce reliable population-level claims, typical pitfalls, and the interpretation of effect sizes.
Qualitative Methods
Ethnography, interviews, and content analysis in sociological research — how to produce reliable knowledge from rich, situated accounts; what qualitative methods see that quantitative methods miss; and the criteria for rigor.
Research Ethics and the IRB Regime
The ethical framework governing contemporary sociological research — informed consent, confidentiality, risk/benefit assessment, the history of research abuses that produced the IRB regime, and the contemporary debates about where the regime fits well and where it fits poorly.
Module 3 — Classical Theory: Marx
Historical materialism, class, alienation, ideology, and Marx's legacy.
Historical Materialism and the Critique of Capitalism
Marx's historical materialism as a sociological framework — modes of production, the base/superstructure relation, the dynamics of capitalism, and the analytical tools the tradition has left to sociology regardless of political conclusions.
Class, Alienation, and Ideology
Marx's three core sociological concepts — class as relation to the means of production, alienation as the distinctive experience of wage labor under capitalism, and ideology as the social generation of consciousness — and how each has been developed in subsequent sociology.
Marx's Legacy — What Stuck, What Didn't
An honest assessment of what has been vindicated, modified, or abandoned from Marx's framework in light of subsequent sociology, economics, and history — usable by students who are politically skeptical as well as those sympathetic.
Module 4 — Classical Theory: Weber
Verstehen, the Protestant ethic, rationalization, bureaucracy, and authority.
Verstehen and the Interpretive Turn
Weber's methodological contribution to sociology — Verstehen (interpretive understanding), the ideal-type, value-freedom as an aspiration, and the interpretive tradition that grew from this foundation.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber's thesis on the elective affinity between Calvinist religious orientation and the development of modern Western capitalism — what the thesis actually claims, the evidence Weber marshalled, the contemporary empirical literature, and the long-running debates around it.
Rationalization, Bureaucracy, and Authority
Weber's three core structural concepts — rationalization as the master trend of modernity, bureaucracy as its ideal-typical organizational form, and the three types of legitimate authority (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational).
Module 5 — Classical Theory: Durkheim
Social facts, solidarity, anomie, and the birth of sociological method.
Social Facts and the Birth of Sociological Method
Durkheim's foundational methodological claim — that social facts exist sui generis, external to and coercive of individuals — and why this claim constituted sociology as a distinct discipline.
Solidarity — Mechanical and Organic
Durkheim's account in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) of how social cohesion changes from traditional societies (mechanical solidarity, based on shared similarity) to modern societies (organic solidarity, based on interdependence through specialization) — and what this framework illuminates about contemporary societies.
Anomie, Suicide, and the Pathologies of Modern Society
Durkheim's 1897 Suicide as the founding exemplar of quantitative sociology, his concept of anomie as a distinctive pathology of modern life, and how these tools illuminate contemporary phenomena from deaths of despair to precarious work.
Module 6 — Contemporary Theory
Structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and post-1970s developments (Bourdieu, Foucault).
Structural Functionalism and Its Critics
The dominant post-war sociological paradigm — Parsons's systems theory, Merton's middle-range functionalism, the analytical tools it provided, and the substantial critiques that displaced it from dominance in the 1960s and 1970s.
Conflict Theory After Marx
How the Marxian focus on conflict, power, and structural antagonism was developed in twentieth-century sociology — through the Frankfurt School, C. Wright Mills, Dahrendorf, Collins, and contemporary conflict-theoretic traditions — often without direct Marxian political commitments.
Symbolic Interactionism and Microsociology
The interpretive-micro tradition — Mead, Blumer, Goffman, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis — that studies social life through close attention to face-to-face interaction and the production of meaning in situ.
Bourdieu, Foucault, and Post-1970s Developments
The two most-cited theorists of the post-1970 period and the broader transformation of sociological theory since — the turn toward practice, power-knowledge, cultural sociology, and the rise of theoretical pluralism.
Module 7 — Culture and Socialization
Culture as meaning-making, socialization across the life course, mass and digital media.
Culture as Meaning-Making
How sociology conceives culture — not as high art but as the shared systems of meaning through which people interpret and act in the world — and how contemporary cultural sociology studies its production, circulation, and effects.
Socialization Across the Life Course
How people become the social actors they are — primary socialization in childhood, ongoing resocialization through schools, peer groups, workplaces, and media, and the shift from container models of the self to life-course perspectives that place biography within historical time.
Mass Media, Digital Media, and Culture Production
The sociology of media — from Frankfurt School critiques of the culture industry through cultivation and agenda-setting research and the production-of-culture tradition to contemporary work on platforms, algorithms, and the attention economy. The analytical question throughout: does media reflect culture, or produce it?
Module 8 — Social Structure and Institutions
Groups, networks, organizations, and how institutions shape lives.
Groups, Networks, Organizations
The meso level of sociological analysis — the forms through which people coordinate, cooperate, compete, and structure action between individual agency and whole-society institutions. Groups, networks, and organizations as three interrelated but distinguishable forms, with the mechanisms that link micro and macro.
How Institutions Shape Lives
Institutions as the patterned, rule-governed organization of social activity around core domains — family, education, economy, polity, religion, law — and the empirical claim that where institutions are strong, weak, or cross-cutting, lives unfold differently.
Module 9 — Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
Construction of crime, theories of deviance, and mass incarceration.
What Counts as Deviance? (The Social Construction of Crime)
Sociology's distinctive framing of deviance — not as a fixed property of acts but as a socially produced category that varies across societies and historical periods — and how the construction of crime is itself a site of power.
Theories of Deviance
The principal sociological explanations for rule-breaking — strain, learning, control, labeling, and critical theories — and how they complement rather than exclude one another.
Punishment, Policing, and Mass Incarceration
The sociological analysis of contemporary systems of punishment — the US incarceration boom, racial disparities, policing as institution, and comparative perspectives on criminal justice.
Module 10 — Stratification and Inequality
Class, income, wealth, mobility, reproduction of inequality, and global inequality.
Class, Income, and Wealth
How sociology conceives and measures economic stratification — the distinct concepts of class, income, and wealth, their distributions, and their consequences.
Social Mobility and the Reproduction of Inequality
How sociology measures intergenerational mobility, the mechanisms that reproduce class position across generations, and what the evidence shows about the American Dream and its European counterparts.
Global Inequality
Inequality across countries and as a global phenomenon — between-country vs. within-country variance, the Great Convergence and its limits, and the world-systems and dependency traditions that set up comparative analysis.
Module 11 — Race and Ethnicity
Race as social construction, Atlantic slave trade and legacies, colonialism, and contemporary structural racism.
Race as Social Construction with Material Effects
How sociology treats race — not as a biological fact but as a social construction with profound material consequences — and why 'social construction' and 'real effects' are compatible, not opposed.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Legacies
The trans-Atlantic slave trade as historical fact — numbers, mechanisms, named systems — its economic significance for early-modern European development, and its continuing legacies in contemporary racial inequality.
Colonialism and the Making of the Modern World
Colonial empire as a specific historical formation — its scale, mechanisms, specific atrocities, and its role in producing contemporary global structures including the racial order, the world economy, and nation-state boundaries.
Contemporary Racial Inequality and Structural Racism
The empirical record of contemporary racial inequality across domains (wealth, health, criminal justice, education, labor) and the concept of structural racism as a sociological framework for explaining it.
Module 12 — Gender and Sexuality
Gender as category, sexism and coverture, heteronormativity and change, intersectionality.
Gender as a Sociological Category
How sociology conceives gender — as a social organization of sexual difference, done in interaction and institutionalized in structure — and why this distinguishes sociological from biological or psychological approaches.
Sexism, Coverture, and the Gender Order
The historical record of women's subordination in Western legal and social systems, the emergence of contemporary gender equality, and the persisting structural arrangements the sociology of gender studies.
Sexuality, Heteronormativity, and Social Change
Sexuality as a social and historical category — Foucault's move, the emergence of contemporary sexual categories, heteronormativity as a structural arrangement, and the recent legal and cultural changes around LGBTQ+ rights.
Intersectionality
Crenshaw's analytical framework for thinking about overlapping systems of oppression, its empirical uses in sociology, and the ongoing debates about how best to deploy it.
Module 13 — Family and Kinship
Families across time and culture, contemporary transformations, care work and the second shift.
Families Across Time and Culture
The historical and cross-cultural variability of family forms — challenging the 'traditional family' as universal — and the sociological lens for understanding kinship.
The Contemporary Family in Transformation
The current shape of family life in advanced democracies — late and partial partnering, single-parent households, same-sex families, chosen families — and the sociological analysis of these changes.
Care Work, the Second Shift, and Gendered Labor
The unequal distribution of unpaid domestic and care work, its consequences for gender inequality, and the political economy of care.
Module 14 — Major Institutions in Detail
Education, religion, the economy and work, and politics/power/the state.
Education: Reproduction and Mobility
Education as the central contemporary institution for both social mobility and inequality reproduction — how schools act, what the empirical record shows, and the policy debates around educational opportunity.
Religion: Durkheim, Weber, and Contemporary Research
The sociology of religion — from Durkheim's account of religion as social solidarity and Weber's analysis of religious rationalization, through secularization debates, to contemporary research on religious persistence and transformation.
The Economy and Work
Economic sociology's view of markets as socially constructed, the transformation of work from industrial to post-industrial forms, and the sociological analysis of labor, unions, platforms, and precarity.
Politics, Power, and the State
The sociological analysis of political power, the state, and democracy — state capacity, political sociology of voting and participation, the power elite question, and the contemporary contest over democratic institutions.
Module 15 — Social Change and Globalization
How societies change, globalization, movements and collective action, sociology for the 21st century.
How Societies Change
The sociology of social change — mechanisms, patterns, and the theoretical debates about how large-scale transformation happens across economic, demographic, technological, and political registers.
Globalization — Economic, Cultural, Political
The processes labeled globalization — their empirical content across domains, the debates about their scale and novelty, and the sociological analysis of a world increasingly connected yet still organized by nation-states.
Movements and Collective Action
Social movements as the organized form of collective challenge to existing arrangements — the resource mobilization, political-process, and framing traditions, and contemporary movement sociology.
Sociology for the 21st Century
The state of sociology today — its contested relations to policy and politics, the debates about public sociology, the methodological frontiers (computational, comparative, historical), and what the discipline offers a world confronting climate change, inequality, democratic backsliding, and technological transformation.