Week 12. Work and economic life.

Concepts of work and occupation. The division of labour. Primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. Industrial division of labour: Taylorism and Fordism. Work on the assembly line. The limitations of Fordism and Taylorism. Fordism and after: Post-Fordism and flexible production. Automation. Low-trust systems, high-trust systems and group production. Industrial democracy. Corporations and corporate power: types of corporate capitalism. Trade unions and industrial conflict. The development of unions. Recent developments. Unemployment, women’s work and industrial economy. Secondary labor market. The informal economy. Primary labor market.

Reading materials:

Giddens, Anthony. Sociology. Second edition. Polity: 2001. Chapter #15, P.490-526.

Week 13. The Development of Sociological theory.

Early origins: August Compte (1789-1875), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Karl Marx (1818-1886), Max Weber (1864-1920). Later developments: functionalism, structuralism, symbolic interactionalism. Marxism. Main theoretical dilemmas in sociology: 1. human action and social structure; 2. Whether societies should be pictured as harmonious and orderly or marked by persistent conflict; 3. Analysis of modern social development; 4) gender and sociological analysis.

Reading materials:

Giddens, Anthony. Sociology. Second edition. Polity: 2001. Chapter #22, P. 705-731.