Sociology

Hello, I’m Nicole Sweeney and I have a question for you: Have you ever wondered how the world works? I’m not talking about atoms and molecules, or wave functions and chemical reactions; I mean the world of people. For example, have you ever wondered who goes to college and why? What is it that makes […]

So, when I was young, I thought that my freedom and my independence were the two most important things in my life. And in fact, I thought that happiness could only come from me directing my own destiny, in a way that was independent and free from the influences of other people. And then I

Do you think you’re middle class? If you’re American, there’s a pretty good chance that you do. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2015, 87% of those surveyed identified themselves as middle class. That’s a pretty big middle. But your intuition about what the middle class is, like who it includes,

What do you, as you’re watching me right now, have in common with a toddler who’s being read a bedtime story? I’ll give you a clue. It’s also something you have in common with the kids in The Breakfast Club. As well as with a soldier going through boot camp. Give up? You’re all being

What puts the science in the social science? The things you probably think of as science, like biology, or physics, or chemistry can seem a world apart from sociology and the concepts we’ve introduced so far. But sociology is a type of science; it’s just not one that uses beakers or microscopes. Rather than investigating

Historically speaking, we can trace functionalism back to the late 19th century in particular to the French Theorist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and the concept then emerged later in the early 20th Century as a major theoretical lens that dominated some aspects of the social sciences all the way up to the 1960s.The thing is, a

00:00:07 At the core of Emile Durkheim's sociological theory is the idea of social cohesion. As a functionalist sociologist, Durkheim is concerned about social cohesion or social solidarity. According to Durkheim, social cohesion comes from core institutionalized values that are held in common. Thus anomie, that is, the lack of norms of behavior, feelings of alienation, and social

00:00:02 Max Weber’s Sociological Theory, key concepts. At the center of Max Weber’s sociological theory is the concept of authority or leadership. And in Max Weber’s Sociological theory, authority or leadership is based on forms of legitimacy. Hence, for Weber authority and legitimation illustrate the ways in which different forms of society cohere and the

Interviewer 00:00:07 Welcome to you all today. I am Paul Peppis, Director of the Oregon Humanities Center. My guest today is Juliet Schor, an economist and Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Professor Schor’s research interests include consumer society and consumer culture, working hours and lifestyles, environmental degradation, the sharing economy, and alternative sustainable economies

Host 00:00:08 Thank you all for being here today. And moreover, I want to thank you for giving me some authority relative to you for the next 18 minutes or so. And by that, I mean, just the way we are positioned here, gives me control relative to you. I stand, you’re sitting, I can