300068 Modern Sociological Theories (V) (WiSe 2018/2019)

Modern Sociological Theories

In this seminar we will more or less cover and brows the last one hundred years of sociological thought. You will be offered at least some of the essentials of most of the big shots in our discipline and will hopefully be more picky afterwards and look at some of these folks or to be more precise on their works in more depth later on. We will start with Weber´s notion of social action and Durkheim´s ideas about social facts, shortly touch on Simmel´s and Mauss´ observations on social exchange, go one with Mead´s analysis of gestural communication and symbolic interaction, put up with a lot more detail and sophistication by going through some of Goffman´s rethinking of social interaction; will than move forward and take a bird´s eye view by tackling the main theoretical approaches to explain processes of social differentiation and stratification as outlined by Parsons, Bourdieu, and Luhmann, of course, we will not bypass questions of globalization and world society´s imposing of (mostly pseudo) universalist cultural scripts, perhaps also take a short glimpse at some of the more technical advances in the areas of game theory and network-analysis (which I consider my hobby horse, though I won´t ask you to hop on), and maybe even eventually dip into the new field of econophysics, but definitely end with a session an Lacaninan psychoanalysis to better understand todays strange cultural imperative to enjoy, which almost everyone seems to have internalized and from which many seem to suffer. An intended side-effect of teaching this seminar is that you should also get a more specific feeling for the different kinds and ways of theorizing in sociology. Some of it is very sober and focused, in other areas professors are more inclined to grand ways of theorizing and enjoy dealing in abstractions, again, some research is quite technical, so that you can easily see its limitations, give it a laugh or perhaps try to do better by adding something, and still other present themselves as magicians or prophets and seem to go for the bizarre, though even this still might give you a vague hunch about what makes us move, love, hate, fight or avoid each other, though, as Simmel already pointed out and explained sociologically, modern life requires us to be mostly blasé, at least in public.