Sociology

140 Prospect, 432.3323
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Ivan Szelenyi

Director of Graduate Studies
Jeffrey Alexander (Williams Hall 102, 436.4354, jeffrey.alexander@yale.edu)

Professors
Jeffrey Alexander, Scott Boorman, Deborah Davis, Paul Gilroy, Roger Gould, Karl Ulrich Mayer (Visiting [F]), Ivan Szelenyi, Stanton Wheeler, Lawrence Wu (Visiting [Sp])

Associate Professors
Dalton Conley (Visiting [F]), Joshua Gamson, Joseph Soares

Assistant Professors
Jennifer Bair, Hannah Brueckner, Lawrence King, Sharon Kinsella, Christopher Rhomberg, Andrew Schrank

Lecturers
Derrick Gilbert, Eric Kostello, Vron Ware

Fields of Study
Fields include Social Policy, Comparative Sociology/Macrosociology, Culture, Historical Sociology, Mathematical Sociology, Methodology (Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches), Networks, Political Sociology, Race/Ethnic/Minority Relations, Social Change, Social Movements, Social Organization/Formal/Complex, Social Stratification, Urban Sociology.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Qualification for admission to candidacy for the Ph.D. will take place during the student's first three years of study at Yale. A student who has not been admitted to candidacy will not be permitted to register for the seventh term of study. Any exception to this regulation must be approved in advance by the appropriate dean. As a result of the qualification procedure, a student shall be either (1) admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. or (2) explicitly terminated. To qualify for candidacy the student must complete fourteen term courses, demonstrate competence in sociological theory, statistics, research methods, and comprehensive examination in two substantive fields, and complete a dissertation prospectus exam. No more than one term of independent study will be accepted for credit toward the fourteen-course requirement. Admission to candidacy implies that the student's position in the department is secure, subject only to continued satisfactory progress toward completion of remaining departmental and university requirements. Competence in sociological theory, statistics, and research methods may be demonstrated by passing two term courses in each area. Students are also required to pass written and oral comprehensive examinations in two selected fields and have a dissertation prospectus approved. After admission to candidacy, the student is permitted to proceed with the dissertation. The dissertation represents a test of the candidate's ability to select and execute a major research project of professional quality. It should show the student's mastery of the field of specialization and it must demonstrably contribute to the body of sociological knowledge.

Teaching is an important part of the professional preparation of graduate students in Sociology. The department expects students to teach, usually in the third and fourth years of study.

Combined Ph.D. Degree in Sociology and African American Studies
The Department of Sociology offers, in conjunction with the program in African American Studies, a combined Ph.D. degree in Sociology and African American Studies.

Students accepted to the joint Ph.D. program must meet all of the requirements of the Ph.D. in Sociology with the exception that, excluding the courses required to demonstrate competence in sociological theory, statistics, research methods, and comprehensive examination in two substantive fields, joint-degree students may substitute African American Studies courses for six of the fourteen term courses required to qualify for the Ph.D. in Sociology. For further details see African American Studies.

Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate School requirements.

M.A. (en route to the Ph.D.). Eight term courses are required for the M.A. degree. Two of these courses must include statistics and theory. A grade of High Pass or Honors must be achieved in five of the eight required courses. A student may petition for the M.A. degree in the term following the one in which he/she completes the course requirements.

Program materials are available at www.yale.edu/socdept/.

Courses
SOCY 501a, Foundations of Sociological Theory. Joseph Soares. Tuesday 4-6
An intensive reading seminar on the textual groundwork of the sociological tradition. An examination of the philosophical commitments, conceptual resources, and empirical arguments of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Gerry Simmel, and W. E. B. DuBois.

SOCY 506bu, Survey Methods. Hannah Brueckner. Tuesday 2.30-4.20
We explore both theory and practice of survey design, including conceptualization, measurement issues, sample design, questionnaire construction, interviewing, data analysis, publication of results, limitations and ethical aspects of survey research. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth/) serves as an example for addressing difficult design problems in social research throughout the course. Students are also welcome to contribute survey design or analysis problems from their own work.

SOCY 522bu, The Sociology of Development. Andrew Schrank. Thursday 1.30-3.20
The seminar asks how and why states, firms, and popular organizations in the developing world use their natural and human resource endowments to generate different social, political, and economic outcomes.

[SOCY 524b, Sociology of Culture.]

SOCY 525a, Issues in Cultural Sociology. Jeffrey Alexander. Wednesday 3-5
After a review of a broad range of contemporary perspectives, the seminar examines in depth, and in its variations, the "strong program" in cultural sociology. We look at theoretical ideas about hermeneutics and interpretation, semiotics and structuralism, social drama and ritual, performance studies, and social approaches to symbolic process. The course also considers empirical studies that apply cultural methods to such issues as politics, violence, civil society, and collective trauma. Readings include works by: Dilthey, Ricoeur, Geertz, Durkheim, Shils, Turner, Saussure, Sahlins, White, Brooks, Wagner-Pacifici, Eyerman, Gibson, Sewell, Alexander, Jacobs, and Smith.

[SOCY 526a, Recent Trends in Social Stratification Processes.]

SOCY 528au, Reading Race and Gender. Vron Ware. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
An exploration of feminist writing that demonstrates how race and gender are constituent of each other. Comparative examples from the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Themes include: theories of race and gender formation; gender and white supremacism; sex and race; and class, ethnicity, and domestic service. Also AMST 680au.

[SOCY 529b, Legislation.]

SOCY 534a, Writing Sociology. Joshua Gamson. Thursday 2-4
This course combines readings and intensive workshop sessions, with the goal of developing practical social science writing skills, and more broadly of considering issues of representation, authority, creativity, and audience in sociology, and examining the social, political, and professional context of sociological writing and publishing. Students enter the course with a draft of an article, typically but not necessarily an analysis of empirical data, that they intend to develop for publication; these drafts serve as the basis for workshop sessions.

SOCY 541b, New Theories of Civil Society. Jeffrey Alexander. Wednesday 3-5
Civil society has recently emerged as a primary topic in political and social theory. The aim of this seminar is to see whether, and how, a more specifically sociological theory of civil society might be developed vis-à-vis the normative theorizing that dominates contemporary debates. After briefly reviewing historical approaches, this seminar surveys the range of contemporary debates, from neo-Tocquevillian (Putnam) to radical-democratic (Keane), to discourse ethics (Habermas, Cohen/Arato), to more cultural and institutional approaches (Alexander). We then consider these approaches, and civil society in general, in relation to issues of race, religion, gender and sexuality, and globalization.

SOCY 545a, Reading Max Weber. Ivan Szelenyi. Monday 1-3
A close textual analysis of some of Weber's work, with particular emphasis on Economy and Society. Also PLSC 607a.

SOCY 550a, The Future of Work. Karl Ulrich Mayer. Thursday 10-12
This graduate seminar examines the ongoing changes in employment and occupational structures as well as conditions of work as a consequence of information technology, global economic competition, increasing gender equality, and changing work values. Special emphasis is placed on labor markets and career mobility as well as cross-national comparative studies.

SOCY 555b, Poverty in the United States. Lawrence Wu. Monday 4-6
Nature, causes, and consequences of poverty in the United States. Topics include: poverty dynamics; distribution across social and demographic characteristics; role of labor markets, family structure, human and social capital; quantitative and qualitative studies; history of antipoverty measures and proposals in the U.S. and other industrialized countries.

SOCY 557a, Current Debates in Political Sociology. Christopher Rhomberg. Tuesday 2.30-4.20
Examination of current topics in the sociology of the state and politics. Initial survey of development of the field since the 1960s; primary focus then turns to recent debates, including the racial and gendered character of politics, restructuring of the welfare state, relations between state and civil society and/or social movements, and other topics.

SOCY 560a,b, Comparative Research Workshop. Hannah Brueckner. Monday 5-7
This weekly interdisciplinary seminar is devoted to discussions of work-in-progress (forthcoming articles, M.A. thesis drafts, dissertation proposals, dissertation chapter drafts) by distinguished visiting scholars, Yale graduate students, and faculty from various social science disciplines. Papers are distributed a week ahead of time and are also posted at the Web site of the Center for Comparative Research. Students who take the course for a letter grade have to present a paper the semester they are enrolled for credit. Also PLSC 734a,b.

SOCY 561bu, Topics in Contemporary Chinese Society. Deborah Davis. Tuesday 9.30-11.20
Development of research skills through study of one topic in contemporary Chinese society. In 2002, focus is on change in Chinese family life in the twentieth century. Particular attention to the consequences of the one-child campaign, the revival of ancestor veneration, and the re-emergence of family businesses, on the nature of family life in the People's Republic of China. Comparison with family life in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Knowledge of modern Chinese is desirable but not necessary. Prerequisite: at least one course focused on China after 1911.

[SOCY 577a, Topics in Multivariate Data Analysis.]

SOCY 580au, Introduction to Statistics in Sociology. Joseph Chang, Eric Kostello. Tues/Thurs 1-2.15
An introduction to probability and statistics, with emphasis on applications to sociology. Also STAT 503au.

[SOCY 581b, Multivariate Methods for the Social Sciences.]

SOCY 597a,b, Special Topics in Sociology. Faculty.
Students enroll in Special Topics if they wish to retake a course for credit when there is a new instructor and a substantially different syllabus from the first time they took the course. Only with the permission of the DGS.

SOCY 598a, 599b, Independent Study.
By arrangement with faculty.

SOCY 607a, Seminar on Field Methods. Deborah Davis. Friday 9.30-11.20
An introduction to the challenges and problems of doing fieldwork through a series of supervised field experiences as well as close reading of old and new classics (e.g., Whyte, Gans, Becker, Lauman, Bourdieu, Luker, Halle, Hochschild, Gamson, and Anderson). The course begins by discussing questions of ethics, privacy, and consent and then focuses on analytic and practical problems of observations, note taking, interviewing, transcription and coding, focus groups, photographic data, and life histories.

[SOCY 607b, Participant Observation Research.]

SOCY 611bu, Historical Approaches in Sociology. Christopher Rhomberg. Monday 2.30-4.20
This seminar focuses on general methodological and theoretical problems of doing research in historical sociology. We examine such topics as the uses of theory; research design; archival investigation; types of evidence; narrative genres; and strategies of historical argument drawing on several exemplary published works of sociology and in the students' own practice of historical research.

SOCY 615bu, Black Communities in the Twentieth Century. Derrick Gilbert. Tuesday 2.30-4.20
A review of historical and contemporary issues confronting black communities in twentieth-century America. Using ethnographic case studies of black communities, the course explores social, economic, political, and cultural history of the black experience. Also AFAM 715bu.

SOCY 625a, Analysis of Social Structure. Scott Boorman. Monday 10-12
Develops and integrates a variety of the most promising contemporary approaches to the study of social structure and social organization.

SOCY 627a, Sociology of the Welfare State. Hannah Brueckner. Friday 2.30-5.20
The class aims at building a framework for comparisons across time and space for the way in which welfare states structure social relations, and social relations structure the welfare state. Topics include: history of the American welfare state, welfare state regimes in comparative perspective, gender and the welfare state, the state and the life course, family structure and poverty, and gender regimes and welfare state transitions. For each of six thematic sessions, a leading scholar in the field is invited as a guest lecturer.The remainder of the class sessions are devoted to discussing the literature in preparation for the guest lectures.

SOCY 627b, Gender and Society. Jennifer Bair. Friday 2.30-5.20
The class aims at laying a foundation in the sociology of gender. Topics include: the social construction of genera; the economics of gender; the (re-)production of gender inequality in education, work, and the family; gender and development; race and gender. For each of six thematic sessions, a leading scholar in the field is invited as a guest lecturer. The remainder of the class sessions are devoted to discussing the literature in preparation for the guest lectures.

SOCY 637b, The Transition to Democracy and Capitalism in Eastern Europe. Lawrence King. Thursday 2-4
Survey of the sociological accounts of Eastern Europe's "double transition" to capitalism and democracy. Focus on the competing accounts of the collapse of Communist systems, and the resulting political and economic systems that have emerged over the past six to eight years.

[SOCY 643b, Comparative Political Economy.]

[SOCY 644a, Contemporary Racial and Ethnic Formation.]

SOCY 647b, Social Processes. Scott Boorman. Monday 10-12
Focus is on identifying and exploring robust alternatives/complements to the rational choice models that have come to dominate so much of the analysis of social (including organizational) processes in recent years. Specifically, emphasis is placed on a range of mathematical models and related analytic approaches originating outside the rational choice literature-in fields such as social network analysis, evolutionary biology, organization theory, and the law. Possible starting points include: the Boorman-Levitt network matching model (see, e.g., Scott A. Boorman and Paul R. Levitt, "The network matching principle: A model of efficient resource allocation by informal social networks in nonprofit and other non-market social structures," Economics Letters, 1982, 10, 1-7) and its applications to nonprofits and complex statutes; weak ties model of job information transmission and other information transfer in elite social networks; "garbage can" models of the internal problem-solving dynamics of complex organizations.

[SOCY 650b, Modernity and Its Others: Self, Subject, and Cultural Differences.]

[SOCY 651a, Roots and Routes: Identity and Travel in African American Political Culture.]

SOCY 652au, Race, Class, and Public Policy. Dalton Conley. Tuesday 2.30-4.20
An investigation into the state of black-white inequality since the 1960s. Topics include theories of race, the role of societal institutions in perpetuating or ameliorating racial inequality, the race-class debate, and the issues of affirmative action and social policy. Also AFAM 682au.

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