Introduction to Sociology

Prof. Lee Clarke

Section 25. Class meets Tuesday & Thursday, 5-620pm, Livingston Classroom Building 102.

Here is the link for the calender of readings and lectures

Everyone must log into sakai.rutgers.edu If you have a recitation section, there will be more information on that section in Sakai.

Contact info Office hours

Welcome to my Introductory course. I put a lot of material on the website, including the syllabus and outlines of lectures. I do not print the syllabus, so you'll need to get it from here. In fact, I won't hand out anything in class, except for the tests.

You should check this page frequently for notices from me, or from your teaching assistant, if you have one

If you find any dead links please send me a note saying so. Please include the URL that's dead.

Course goals: I will introduce you to some key aspects of thinking sociologically. The course does not cover the field of sociology, for two reasons. First, it’s impossible to introduce an entire discipline in one semester. Second, to try to cover a field of study presumes that it is important for students to know the formal debates within a profession. I don’t make that presumption, so I spend most of the time understanding how some parts of society work, rather than understanding how sociology works. The excitement in sociology is not in what this or that group of scholars has to say to each other about society. The excitement is in the way they analyze how and why people think and behave as they do.

For most students, this is the only sociology course you will ever have. If you can take away some sense of the conceptual and methodological tools that we use in our craft, then I will have succeeded.

The biggest advantage to my approach is that most people find the course interesting most of the time. But, as the economists say, there are no free lunches. The biggest disadvantage is that the coherence in the course comes from the perspective and not from an outside source (such as a textbook, on which more on another page). This puts a huge burden on students to not just memorize but to think about the materials that we cover.

Ah, but thinking makes you a more interesting person. That's always a good thing.