Sociological Theory Level 2

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The aim of this module is to introduce students to sociological theory by examining some of the key ideas of classical thinkers and how these have been extended into the writings of modern sociological theorists. The course will also examine the ways in which sociological theory can help us to understand aspects of everyday life. The first section of the coure deals with the role of 'classical' theory where we will outline the work of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. The second section examines how some of the core ideas of these classical thinkers were developed further in the work of functionalism, symbolic interactionism, Neo-Marxism, feminist theory and network theory. The final section deals with the sociology of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. The lectures will also discuss the theme of an individual and society dualism or to use sociological jargon, an agency and structure dichotomy, which runs throughout the sociological tradition. We will elaborate upon the meaning of these concepts- and others such as micro and macro- as we proceed during the course. For the time being it would be useful to think of the concepts of individual and society (or agency and structure) as representing a contrast between sociologies that foreground the free individual, action, and creative people (agency) as opposed to sociologies that focus on the socially constraining forces of society, or a social system that shape and determine what we do. On the one hand, it is us as agents that freely create our society. On the other it is society or the social system that determines or shapes us as individuals. Such a dualism is at the heart of our everyday existential experience but it is also evident in how sociologists think.