This course will deal with the foundations of social theory, starting with the French and Scottish Enlightenments and the beginnings of a specifically sociological worldview. We will then move on to Durkheim’s organic view of society, to Marx’s dialectical materialism, finishing with Weber’s Verstehen sociology and ideal types of authority. We’ll try to understand their theories not just as historical relics, but as living sets of ideas relevant to contemporary social issues. Class attendance and participation will be strongly encouraged, as will a critical engagement with the ideas presented in the class.

The Foundations of Social Theory

In the 1990s the concept of social capital defined here as the norms and networks that enable people to act collectively enjoyed a remarkable rise to prominence across all the social science disciplines. The authors trace the evolution of social capital research as it pertains to economic development and identify four distinct approaches the research has taken : communitarian, networks, institutional, and synergy. The evidence suggests that of the four, the synergy view, with its emphasis on incorporating different levels and dimensions of social capital and its recognition of the positive and negative outcomes that social capital can generate, has the greatest empirical support and lends itself best to comprehensive and coherent policy prescriptions. The authors argue that a significant virtue of the idea of and discourse on social capital is that it helps to bridge orthodox divides among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

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Social capital: implications for development theory, research, and policy

This article aims (1) to analytically disaggregate agency into its several component elements (though these are interrelated empirically), (2) to demonstrate the ways in which these agentic dimensions interpenetrate with forms of structure, and (3) to point out the implications of such a conception of agency for empirical research. The authors conceptualize agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its “iterational” or habitual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a “projective” capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a “practical‐evaluative” capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment).

What is agency

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

Chapter 1: An Introduction to McDonaldization McDonald's as an American and a Global Icon The Long Arm of McDonaldization The Dimensions of McDonaldization Critique of McDonaldization: The Irrationality of Rationality Illustrating the Dimensions of McDonaldization: The Case of Ikea The Advantages of McDonaldization What Isn't McDonaldized? A Look Ahead Chapter 2: The Past, Present, and Future of McDonaldization: From the Iron Cage to the Fast-Food Factory and Beyond Bureaucratization: Making Life More Rational The Holocaust: Mass-Produced Death Scientific Management: Finding the One Best Way The Assembly Line: Turning Workers Into Robots Levittown: Putting Up Houses? Boom, Boom, Boom? Shopping Centers: Malling America McDonald's: Creating the "Fast-Food Factory" McDonaldization and Contemporary Social Changes Chapter 3: Efficiency and Calculability Drive-Throughs and Finger Foods Streamlining the Process Simplifying the Product Putting Customers to Work Calculability: Big Macs and Little Chips Emphasizing Quantity Rather Than Quality of Products Reducing Production and Service to Numbers Chapter 4: Predictability and Control Predictability: It Never Rains on Those Little Houses on the Hillside Creating Predictable Settings Scripting Interaction With Customers Making Employee Behavior Predictable Creating Predictable Products and Processes Minimizing Danger and Unpleasantness Control: Human and Nonhuman Robots Controlling Employees Controlling Customers Controlling the Process and the Product The Ultimate Examples of Control: Birth and Death? Chapter 5: The Irrationality of Rationality: Traffic Jams on Those "Happy Trails" Inefficiency: Long Lines at the Checkout High Cost: Better Off at Home False Friendliness: "Hi, George" Disenchantment: Where's the Magic? Health and Environmental Hazards: A Day's Calories in One Fast Food Meal Homogenization: It's No Different in Paris Dehumanization: Getting Hosed at "Trough and Brew" Chapter 6: Dealing with McDonaldization: A Practical Guide Creating "Reasonable" Alternatives: Sometimes You Really Do Have to Break the Rules Fighting Back Collectively: Saving Hearts, Minds, Taste Buds, and the Piazza Di Spagna Coping Individually: "Skunk Works," Blindfolded Children, and Fantasy Worlds Some Concluding Thoughts Chapter 7: Globalization and the Possibility of the DeMcDonaldization of Society? Globalization and McDonaldization The DeMcDonaldization of Society The Internet and DeMcDonaldization Bibliography Notes Index

The McDonaldization of Society

Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms

Greater Ethiopia combines history, anthropology, and sociology to answer two major questions. Why did Ethiopia remain independent under the onslaught of European expansionism while other African political entities were colonized? And why must Ethiopia be considered a single cultural region despite its political, religious, and linguistic diversity? Donald Levine's interdisciplinary study makes a substantial contribution both to Ethiopian interpretive history and to sociological analysis. In his new preface, Levine examines Ethiopia since the overthrow of the monarchy in the 1970s. "Ethiopian scholarship is in Professor Levine's debt...He has performed an important task with panache, urbanity, and learning."--Edward Ullendorff, Times Literary Supplement

Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society

These are two timely and valuable books on Ethiopia, an ancient land now in the throes of dynamic change and recovering from an aborted revolution. In both books the authors have addressed themselves to the forces making for change in Ethiopian societies, but whereas Levine's study places these changes within their sociological and ideological contexts, Greenfield's approach is primarily historical. Levine, who carried out field research in Ethiopia for three years, approached his study of Ethiopia through an analysis of the culture of the dominant Amhara group. He describes at length the world of the Amhara peasant; the problems of the Amhara adolescent; conflict and cooperation between the old and new elite; and the search among these people for leadership and social progress. Running like a leitmotif throughout his study, however, is the basic ambiguity of Ethiopian culture: wax and gold. The "wax" of any poem, statement, idea, or act is its obvious meaning; the "gold" is the hidden quality which, more than the wax, makes everything meaningful. Thus, social relations among the Amhara are not easy to comprehend, and actions must be carefully scrutinized if all their implications are to be understood. Levine's study is very good in so far as it deals with the stresses and strains within Ethiopian society and of the efforts being made by the people to forge allegiance to the Ethiopian nation-state. However, what is disturbing to scholars who have worked in other African societies is his attempt to use the psychoanalytic concept of "orality" to explain many aspects of Amhara behavior. This is not to deny that there may be such themes as "orality," or even "anality," in human societies, but socio-cultural processes are usually more strongly influenced by demographic, ecological, historical, and technological factors than by concern for orifices of the human body. Greenfield, like Levine, spent several years in Ethiopia, but as an administrator at the Haile Selassie I University rather than as a researcher. He, too, recognized the importance of the "wax and gold" in Ethiopian life, but eschews both this theme and "orality" in presenting his view of that country's recent political history. What he does is to outline in detail the political development of Ethiopia, indicating how the ruling family gained power, and delineate the intrigues which apparently were basic

Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture

In this work, Don Levine moves from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day in order to present an account that is at once a history of the social science enterprise and an introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought. "Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives - or "life stories" - that build upon each other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present. In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative, reconnecting centuries of voices into a dialogue among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian and American. Here, he tracks the formation of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Aristotle to W.I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary statements - confrontations and oppositions - from which social science has grown. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates how social knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science - among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park - to proceed in vastly different ways. In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene, setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.

Visions of the Sociological Tradition

The essays turn about a single theme, the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument, Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theory Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton."

Donald N. Levine

Papers

Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms

Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society

Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture

Visions of the Sociological Tradition

The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory