This course is designed to help introduce you to the sociological study of institutions.  Many scholars contend that the most interesting questions in sociology today revolve around how institutions emerge, function, and influence individuals and other institutions.  In addition to being of significant interest in and of themselves, developing a solid understanding of institutional dynamics should enrich your understanding of a wide variety of social phenomena.

The course is explicitly organized around three dominant schools of institutional thought:  institutions as incentive systems (originally dominant in economics); institutions as cultures (originally dominant in organizational studies); and historical institutionalism (originally dominant in political science).  While each of these schools continues to have adherents, boundaries between them are blurring.  One goal of the course is for you to become familiar with these the major tenets of these schools of thought, and to understand their theoretical and empirical limitations. 

The course is implicitly organized around a small set of key theoretical questions:  what do we mean by institutions, where do they come from, what keeps them going, and how do they spread, change, and collapse?  As we proceed, we will consider major theoretical models that have been used to account for these features of institutions.  A second goal of the course is for you to be able to consider how each of the schools of thought addresses these "life-course of institutions" questions.

In spite of these two organizing principles, institutions are used in research investigating an extraordinarily broad range of substantive questions.  This poses a challenge for a general course on institutional analysis, since few students (or even advanced scholars) have the substantive expertise necessary to make full sense of arguments and evidence from so many sub-fields.  While one strategy would be to concentrate all the readings around a particular question, instead I have tried to select readings that give you a sense of the breadth of institutional analysis without delving too deeply into any particular problem.  However, I encourage you to begin to develop the substantive expertise necessary to advance your own research agenda, and I hope that the readings in this course will give you some theoretical and analytic tools to work with.

Finally, I also hope that this course will provide a context for ambitious empirical work that uses some type of evidence to explore interesting questions involving institutions or institutional effects. We'll talk about both data and methods throughout, with an emphasis on how to actually do research on institutions.  My hope is that the course will be a setting in which you are able to make substantial progress on developing an existing idea, with an eye toward writing a publishable paper.

Monday 3:30-5:20

Winter 2008

Condon 311

Office hours: Thursdays 3:00-5:00