Power, Organizations, and Culture

This seminar addresses a number of topics in macrosociology. Our goal is less to provide a thorough overview of the topics—i.e., power, culture, and organization—than to engage a select group of late 20th/early 21st century debates and scholars asking: What are they trying to explain? Why does it matter? Are their arguments convincing? Why or why not? Students will be evaluated on the basis of task-specific memos designed to build practical skills (e.g., diagram an argument, develop a typology, decide whether a correlation is causal or spurious, provide a peer review of an article, conduct an interview, etc.).