Contemporary Sociological Theory and Cultural Transformations

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Contemporary Sociological Theory and Cultural
Transformations

• Review

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To review the contents of the courseTo identify
key theoretical issuesTo trace connections and
linkages between key contributors and their
ideas
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Foundations
Key Concepts Methods Issues
Marx Labour, Class, dialectical logic Historical analysis, Economics
Weber Rationality, Bureaucracy, Action Verstehen, Ideal types, Cause and Meaning
Durkheim Social Facts, structures, functions Positivism, Structural analysis, Causal a
Tonnies, Simmel, etc Social order, everyday life,
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Neo Marxism

• Consumer culture and mass society
• Frankfurt School, old and new
• Gramsci and hegemony

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Goffman and symbolic interactionism

• Presenting the self
• Action and reflexivity
• 'taken for granted' rules and meanings
• Order in everyday life
• Labels and power

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Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies

• Culture and culture?
• Culture is ordinary?
• 'Resistance through rituals'
• The nature of representation

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Foucault

• Social order and power
• Institutions and Biopower
• Asylums, Prisons, Hospitals
• Archeology of knowledge?

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Bourdieu

• Cultural Capital
• Distinctions
• Habitus
• Fields
• Practice

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Class today

• Consumerism
• Postindustrialism
• Globalization
• Empire/Multitude
• But- Social Inequality?
• Wealth distribution
• Tourists and Vagabonds?

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Race ethnicity post colonialism

• Race and the Global village?
• Ethnicity and Postindustrialism
• Racism?
• Religion
• Empire or Imperialism?

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Feminism and Masculine Hegemony

• Bodies and Gender
• Biopower
• Performativity

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McDonaldization Disneyfication

• Weberian concepts extended
• Technical rationality rules- ok?
• Symbolic order dominated by consumer fantasies
• Growing significance and power of commercial
  interests
• extension of capitalist 'cost-benefit' and
  ideologies into leisure lifestyles

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Risk and reflexive modernisation

• Risk Society and unintended consequences
• The dangers of progress
• disenchantment with modernity?
• Reflexivity and late modernity

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Empire and Multitude

• Empire or Imperialism?
• The end of class?
• Revolutionary potential?
• Global flows and social change?
• The multitude as an agent of change?

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Globalisation

• The triumph of market capitalism?
• Dangers?
• Cultural Imperialism?
• Loss of national autonomy?
• Rise of trans national corporations
• Cultural homogeneity?

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Embodiment

• Biopower, bodies and postindustrialism?
• Reflexive modernity and cultural capital
• Performances and Performativity?
• Signs, structures and symbolic order

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Postmodernism

• The decline of metanarratives
• Social order and its mythologies
• The end of deference
• Disenchantment?
• Back to the future PM Nostalgia?

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Hyperreality

• Baudrillard and consumption
• Signs and sign value
• The end of class?
• The end of sociology?

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