SYG 1000: Introductory Fall 2015 / Professor Carlson

• Class meetings TuTh 9:30 - 10:45 in HCB 210 • Instructor office hours MTWThF 8:00 - 9:15 in 609 Bellamy

Course Description: "Introductory Sociology" starts from personal observations of social interactions and settings, investigating how such interactions shape our personalities and create opportunities and constraints in our lives. A broader view of social structure explores concepts of social forces beyond the purely personal, ranging from race and gender to social class and bureaucratic organization. The course concludes with a look at social movements and other aspects of social change.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this course students will demonstrate through exams and written assignments that they can:

• identify and communicate social science explanations for how social structure shapes us as individuals, and how individuals as agents perpetuate (or change) social structure through their participation in social groups; • obtain and apply original empirical evidence both from first-person sociological observations and from analysis of secondary data sources to evaluate the validity of sociological principles and generalizations.

Certifications: The Liberal Studies for the 21st Century Program at builds an educational foundation that will enable FSU graduates to thrive both intellectually and materially and to support themselves, their families, and their communities through a broad and critical engagement with the world in which they live and work. Liberal Studies thus offers a transformative experience.

Americans with Disabilities Act: Students with disabilities needing academic accomodation should: (1) register with and provide documentation to the Student Disabilities Resource Center, and (2) bring a letter to the instructor during the first week of class, indicating the need for and type of accomodation requested. This should be done during the first week of class. All audio tracks from lecture videos and instructions for the group project are available as printed text files for persons who document a hearing disability. The University may be able to provide access, depending on available resources, to readers who can read some materials aloud for persons who document a visual disability; course materials are not available in Braille at this time. For more information about services available to FSU students with disabilities, contact the: Student Disability Resource Center, 874 Traditions Way, 108 Student Services Building, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4167 (850) 644-9566 (voice) (850) 644-8504 (TDD), email [email protected], web site http://disabilitycenter.fsu.edu.

Academic Honor Policy: The Florida State University Academic Honor Policy outlines the University's expectations for the integrity of students' academic work, the procedures for resolving alleged violations of those expectations, and the rights and responsibilities of students and faculty members throughout the process. Students are responsible for reading the Academic Honor Policy and for living up to their pledge to ". . . be honest and truthful and . . . [to] strive for personal and institutional integrity at Florida State University." (Florida State University Academic Honor Policy, found at http://dof.fsu.edu/honorpolicy.htm.) Violations of these principles, including collusion with other students to mis-use the conditional access features of the Blackboard course site, giving or taking answers to test questions, submitting the work of others as your own, or allowing your own work to be submitted as the work of others may lead to a failing grade on an assignment, to a failing grade in the entire course, or in egregious cases to formal disciplinary action by the university.

Courtesy in the Classroom:

To insure that all students have the opportunity to learn without distractions, the following activities may not take place during class sessions:

• any use of cell phones, except emergency use cleared with the instructor prior to class • (please turn all cell phones and other electronics OFF upon entering the classroom) • conversations not part of a class discussion • reading newspapers and magazines or watching hand-held TV/movie devices • entering the classroom late and/or leaving early, except for emergencies cleared with the instructor prior to class • personal attacks on another person's appearance, demeanor, or personal beliefs.

University Attendance Policy: Excused absences include documented illness, deaths in the family and other documented crises, call to active military duty or jury duty, religious holy days. These absences will be accommodated in a way that does not arbitrarily penalize students who have a valid excuse. Consideration will also be given to students whose dependent children experience serious illness. Missed scores will be coded initially to "unexcused absence" in all cases, and converted to excused absences upon presentation of a valid written excuse. For official university activities, students must make arrangements with the university unit taking them away from class to supervise proctored quizzes and other graded in-class activities in order to receive credit for such activities.

Organization and Grading: The class meets according to the regular university calendar except as announced. This course has no hard-copy textbook or other paper readings. All required readings and assignments for the course appear on line as shown in the Course Syllabus. Students should read all readings, answer study questions through independent study, and complete all assignments prior to the class sessions in which they are due. The course grade is based on the following components:

Short in-class essays based on assigned readings and class discussions count for 65% of the course grade.

• Essay questions may be given at any time during class, on any class day. • Essay questions will be taken from the list of study questions linked to each week's topic. • Each essay earns a maximum of three points, but may earn zero. • Unexcused missed essays each cost the student one previously-earned point (score -1 point). • Missed essays may be excused (see above). Excused essays will be graded "1.5" points during the semester. At the end of the semester, each excused essay will be assigned the student's average score across all unexecused essays.

A Field Study assigned in Part One of the course counts for 10% of the course grade.

• Each part of the field study is assigned, submitted and scored through the BLACKBOARD "Assignment" feature. DO NOT submit work any other way. Work submitted through the "Drop Box" or as regular email attachments will be IGNORED. • Follow all instructions in the BLACKBOARD "Assignment" feature for each part of the Field Study, and submit each part of the assignment by the due dates noted on the course schedule below. Each assignment loses one point of possible value per day or fraction of a day that it is late. Students will have ample time to complete the assignment before the deadline, so ordinarily no excused absences will excuse a failure to turn in an assignment on time.

A Computer Study assigned in Part Two of the course counts for 15% of the course grade.

• Each part of the computer study is assigned, submitted and scored through the BLACKBOARD "Assignment" feature. Work submitted in any other manner such as regular email attachments cannot be scored in Blackboard and will be IGNORED. • Follow all instructions in the "Assignment" feature for the Computer Study, and submit each part of the assignment by the due dates noted on the syllabus below. Each assignment loses one point of possible value per day or fraction of a day that it is late. Students will have ample time to complete the assignment before the deadline, so ordinarily no excused absences will excuse a failure to turn in an assignment on time.

A cumulative Final Examination counts for 10% of the course grade.

• The final examination will take place in our classroom from 7:30 to 9:30 AM, Monday, December 7th. No exceptions can be made. • The final examination will be composed of multiple-choice items to be completed during the regularly scheduled final exam period. • Students should NOT schedule departures from campus prior to the final exam period; the exam may not be taken early.

Points appear in the BLACKBOARD "Grade Book" feature as they are earned. Students may estimate their grades at any time during the semester by consulting this record. The grade distribution for the course will be: A = miss less than 1/8 of all possible points; B = miss less than 1/4 of all possible points; C = miss less than 3/8 of all possible points; D = miss less than 1/2 of all possible points; F = miss half or more of all possible points.

COURSE SCHEDULE

READING LIST INSTRUCTIONS: A few of the assigned readings listed below appear with titles as direct links (in color). For these readings, you may click on the highlighted title to see the assigned reading on your screen. However, most of the readings are available through a web archive called JSTOR, to which FSU has an expensive annual subscription. Your visits to the JSTOR site to read course assignments will help to demonstrate the importance of this valuable resource (already paid for with your tuition dollars) to the university. To find each reading in JSTOR, go to the FSU web site (www.fsu.edu) and choose "libraries" from the Key Links item near the middle of the page. On the Libraries main page, choose "Find a Database" from the left- side menu and type JSTOR into the field on the right. When you click "Go" you should see an entry highlighted in yellow for JSTOR. (You may have to log into the FSU site with your FSU username and password at some point.) Clicking this highlighted entry should take you to the JSTOR "advanced search" page. Type in the name of the author (first name and then last name, no punctuation) in the first blank field, select "author" from the pull-down box to the right of this field, click on "articles" in the "NARROW" section below, and type the date of the publication in both the "From" and "To" boxes to the right of the "articles" option. Then click on the SEARCH button to find all articles by that author from that year. The assigned reading should be one of the displayed options. Click on "Article PDF" below the correct citation to open the article as an Adobe Acrobat PDF document. (If you do not have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software on your computer, you can download it from the Adobe web site without charge.) Rather than try to read this document directly from the web, it often is much faster to download and save this document on your computer, on a removable flash drive, or in some other location. Then you can return to the document and read it conveniently at any time, and also review it later for the final exam.

Part One - PERSONAL SOCIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION

Week 1 - First-person research

• [FIELD STUDY PART ONE ASSIGNED]--See "FS1" under Blackboard Assignment Feature • Richard LaPiere. 1934. Attitudes versus actions. Social Forces 13(2):230-237. • Roger Homan. 1980. The ethics of covert methods. British Journal of Sociology 31(1):46-59. • Martin Bulmer. 1980. Comment on 'The ethics of covert methods'. British Journal of Sociology 31(1):59-65.

Week 2 - Social relations

• . 1932. The primary group: essence and accident. American Journal of Sociology 38(1):41-50. • Mark Granovetter. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78(6):1360-80. • [FIELD STUDY PART ONE DUE]--Submit using "FS1" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature by the end of Week 2.

Week 3 - Socialization

• [FIELD STUDY PART TWO ASSIGNED]--See "FS2" under Blackboard Assignment Feature • Don Stewart & Thomas Hoult. 1959. A social-psychological theory of the authoritarian personality. American Journal of Sociology 65(3):274-279. • Audrey Shalinsky. 1980. Learning sexual identity: parents and children in northern Afghanistan. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 11(4):254-265.

Week 4 - Deviance

• Lewis Coser. 1962. Some functions of deviant behavior and normative flexibility. American Journal of Sociology 68(2):172-81. • Jeffrey Segrave & Douglas Hastad. 1985. Evaluating three models of delinquency causation For males and females. Sociological Focus 18(1): 1-17. • [FIELD STUDY PART TWO DUE]--Submit using "FS2" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature by the end of Week 4.

Week 5 - Social control

• Stanley Milgram. 1963. Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67(4): 371-8. • John Lofland & Rodney Stark. 1965. Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective. American Sociological Review 30(6): 862-875.

Part Two - A BROADER VIEW OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Week 6 - Culture

• [COMPUTER STUDY PART ONE ASSIGNED]--See "CS1" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature • Ruth Benedict. 1934. The Pueblos of New Mexico. excerpted from Ch. 4 in her Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. • Elijah Anderson. 1994. The code of the streets. Atlantic Monthly 273(3):81-94.

Week 7 - Race & ethnicity

• Robin Andreasen. 2000. Race: biological reality or social construct? Philosophy of Science 67: S653-S666. • Elizabeth Vaquera and Grace Kao. 2006. The implications of choosing "no race" on the salience of Hispanic identity. Sociological Quarterly 47(3): 375-96. • [COMPUTER STUDY PART ONE DUE]--Submit using "CS1" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature by the end of Week 7.

Week 8 - Gender & family

• [COMPUTER STUDY PART TWO ASSIGNED]--See "CS2" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature • Janet & Larry Hunt. 1982. The dualities of careers and families. Social Problems 29(5):499-510. • Nancy Folbre. 1997. The future of the elephant-bird. Population & Development Review 23(3):647-54.

Week 9 - Age & generations

• Diane Macunovich, Richard Easterlin, Christine Schaeffer & Eileen Crimmins. 1995. Echoes of the baby boom and bust: recent and prospective changes in living alone among elderly widows in the United States. Demography 32(1):17-28. • Elwood Carlson. 2009. 20th-Century U.S. Generations. Population Bulletin 64(1): 1-17. • [COMPUTER STUDY PART TWO DUE]--Submit using "CS2" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature by the end of Week 9.

Week 10 - Inequality

• [COMPUTER STUDY PART THREE ASSIGNED]--See "CS3" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature • Daniel Feenberg & James Poterba. 2000. The income and tax share of very high-income households, 1960-1995. American Economic Review 90(2):264-270. • Edward Wolff. 1998. Recent trends in the size distribution of household wealth. Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(3):131-150. • Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2000. Globalization and inequality: a Norwegian report. Population and Development Review 26:(4):843-848. •

Week 11 - Stratification & social class • & Wilbert Moore. 1944. Some principles of stratification. American Sociological Review 10(2):242-249. • Melvin Tumin. 1953. Some principles of stratification: a critical analysis. American Sociological Review 18(4):387-394. • Robert Erikson & John Goldthorpe. 2002. Intergenerational inequality: a sociological perspective. Journal of Economic Perspectives 16(3):31-44. • [COMPUTER STUDY PART THREE DUE]--Submit using "CS3" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature by the end of Week 11.

Week 12 - Rationalization & bureaucracy

• George Ritzer & David Walczak. 1988. Rationalization and the deprofessionalization of physicians. Social Forces 67:(1)1-22. • David Hartley. 1995. The 'McDonaldization' of higher education: food for thought? Oxford Review of Education 21:(4)409-423. • [COMPUTER STUDY DUE]--Submit through "CS" under BLACKBOARD Assignment Feature

Part Three - SOURCES OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Week 13 - NOTE: THIS WEEK HAS BEEN DELETED FROM THE SCHEDULE AS ANNOUNCED! Please go on to Week 14 for November 17th & 19th.

Week 14 - Social movements

• Bert Klandermans. 1984. Mobilization and participation: social-psychological expansisons of resource mobilization theory. American Sociological Review 49(5):583- 600. • Jill Quadagno. 1992. Social movements and state transformation: labor unions and racial conflict in the war on poverty. American Sociological Review 57(5):616-34.

Week 15 - Social science as a social process

• . 2004. Public sociologies: contradictions, dilemmas, and possibilities. Social Forces 82(4):1603-18. • Francois Nielsen. 2004. The vacant "we": remarks on public sociology. Social Forces 82(4):1619-27.

Final Examination - 7:30 - 9:30 AM, Monday December 7th (No exceptions)

This site maintained by Professor Carlson.