Interactionism

Social Interaction Theories

Presentation Templates

Here are two different presentation templates.  Either one is acceptable for your final presentation (due on the last day of class).

My_Paper_Title

How to do the short presentation

Mills, Sociological Imagination

THE PROMISE

Culture

Cuture  click the hyperlink for the slideset.

More slidesets:

Societies and Culture

Sanctions

Values

Folkways, mores and laws revised

Since our culture consists of everything we know and everything we have in common with others it is really a way of summarizing the totality of knowledge that we share with others. It has three main characteristics:
it is shared, it is not necesarily limited by time or space, and it consists of material as well as non-material elements.

We can look at culture on a micro or a macro level. Microcultures are smaller, of course, they might be as small as the shared “world” of a group of friends; in which case they’d be called an idioculture. Small cultures could be small in comparison to a larger group, in which case we’d call them sub-cultures; they would be smaller than the macro-culture or “mother culture” in which they reside, but like the idiocultures they’d have more in common with the larger culture then differences from it.

A culture can have many sub-cultures.

Although the video describes three divisions in culture, we typically combine these into just two:

• Material culture
• Nonmaterial culture

Protected: A Final Exam

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Protected: A Take Home Exam

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A book for those who liked the lecture on organization and institutions

Take a look at  “Social Networks and Organizations”.  You can read the first few pages online at Amazon.com.

Michel Foucault

For those of you who want a challenge here is a website dedicated to Michel Foucault, a structuralist/poststructuralist sociologist.  If you are so inclined… ENJOY!

Drugs and the fate of girls

This article from Newsweek gives us a sense of the far reaching effects of the criminalization of drugs. 

The Tyranny of Nodes

All scientists struggle with the challenge of describing the material and non-material worlds in mathemathical terms. The wonder of it is that so much has already been put into equations and that these equations do a reliable job of representing reality. 

Social scientists have longed for a way to produce these wonderful mathematical tools for their own disciplines.  One theory and method that has proved to be a fairly hopeful path is Social Network Theory.  There are problems here as with all theory, and for most of us the math is mindboggling so we rely on the programs that do the work for us (a problem in itself).  Still this is a fascinating subject even if the fine details leave us clueless. 

Once in a while a researcher writes something that is relatively easy to understand about the work they are involved in. This social networking blog is such a case, especially if you read all the way through the discussion so that you can see how Dr. Martin Luther King used the concept of nodes (inherent in social networking theory) without even realizing it in his beautiful “Let Freedom Ring” speech.

Before you go to the blog see if you can find the nodes in this excerpt.  Don’t worry if you can’t.  This is not a test.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that.
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi,
from every mountainside, let freedom ring !