Lehrende: Dr. Georg Lorenz
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar
Orga-Einheit: 06-Soziologie
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Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Offizielle Kursbeschreibung: The seminar discusses one of sociology's core issues—the social embeddedness of human action. We start by reading classical literature (e.g., Simmel, Coleman, Granovetter, and Blau) and discussing how sociologists understand and model human behavior. This understanding spans between the poles of "economic action" and "social action". Building on economic models of human behavior, we elaborate on how peoples' behavior depends on the behavior of others, is affected by the behavior of others, and influences others' behavior. In the next step, we discuss social network analysis as a means of better understanding the interdependence of human action. In terms of social network theory, we discuss basic concepts such as social norm enforcement, homophily, segregation, and centrality. In a final step, we study "analytical sociology" to understand how the embeddedness of social action creates societal phenomena such as social inequality. Here, we also discuss the law of unintended consequences: the intentions and anticipations of the individual actors (and organizations as well as governments) are often unrelated to the social phenomena that emerge on the societal level (e.g., Merton's "basic values": The Protestant ethic of hard work and asceticism might have paradoxically led to its own decline through the accumulation of wealth and possessions).
