SOC 423: Social Stratification
University of Idaho

Welcome, you will find course information below and through the links above and at bottom of page.

Professor: John Mihelich, Ph.D.
Office: Phinney 401
Office Phone: 885-5046
Office Hours: W 2:00-4:00 p.m. & TTh 8:30-10:30 a.m.
Or by appointment
Email: jmihelic@uidaho.edu

                                                  Course Mentor:

"In America, [George] Foreman sees a terrific system because he made it out of the gutter. He believes that if he could do it, anyone can. Foreman does not draw from Martin Luther King’s conclusion: that a system that produces gutters needs to be restructured.” Dave Zirin, in What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States, p. 100. Chicago: Haymarket Books (2005).

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course examines the central question of “who gets what and why?” in the contemporary world.  In answering this question, the course focuses on the social arrangements of social stratification and inequality and their effects on society and individual lives.  It critically examines the historical, theoretical, and empirical foundations, manifestations, and maintenance of social class difference, power and conflict.  The course primarily examines the United States, but, because the U.S. is not isolated from world affairs, including global economic affairs, it will necessarily also tend to more global concerns.  While cultivating a critical understanding of the nature of social stratification and inequalities, the course will explore alternatives and possibilities for a more equitable and humane society with both individual and structural levels of analysis.

REQUIRED TEXTS AND READINGS:

The New Class Society (NCS)

Perrucci, Robert and Earl Wysong (1999). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (NS)

Newman, Katherine S. (2000). New York: Vintage Books.

Selected readings

SOME QUOTES:

"That anyone should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work, to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods, seems to [the pre-capitalist human] explicable only as the product of a perverse instinct”
             --Max Weber 1996[1930]. The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism.   Pp. 71-72.

“What remain—always to be reflected on—is the existential questions which confront all cultures in the demand for meanings”
              --Daniel Bell, 1977. The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion.  British Journal of Sociology 28(4): 441.

“The more one’s self-concept and one’s life plan are dependent upon one’s critical and knowledge-yielding powers, the freer one is from nature and the culture and the more one is the author of one’s own life”
               --E.M. Adams, 2002.  The Meaning of Life. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 51: 78. 

“It is not your part to finish the task; yet neither are you free to desist from it” 
               --Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Avoth, cited in Daniel Bell, 1977,  The Return of the Sacred?
               The Argument on the Future of Religion.  British Journal of Sociology 28(4): 448.

"The fascination of sociology lies in the fact that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives. This also constitutes a transformation of consciousness. It can be said that the first wisdom of sociology is this--things are not what they seem…Social reality turns out to have many layers of meaning. The discovery of each new layer changes the perception of the whole. [Sociology invites] the sudden illumination of new and unsuspected facets of human existence in society. This is the excitement and…the humanistic justification of sociology. People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the rules and maxims of…the 'taken-for-granted,' should stay away from sociology"
                 --Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 21, 23-24.