Advanced Sociological Theory: Modelling Social Interaction

This is an intermediate undergraduate course on theory formation and model building in sociology.  Rather than discussing the classical theoretical approaches in sociology, it focuses on developing new sociological theory on the one hand, and understanding and evaluating the common logic of existing sociological theory on the other. We adopt an analytical perspective, emphasizing explicit assumptions on individual behavior, clarification of causal social mechanisms, and attention to the interaction between macro- and microlevel processes. This is often best done by building more or less formalized models. We discuss the overarching logic of analytical sociology, and introduce a number of seminal sociological models as examples of the analytical approach. In doing so, we also introduce a toolkit of techniques to derive hypotheses from such models, including game theory and agent-based modeling. Students start building a repertoire of important sociological models, and learn how to use these as building blocks for developing new theoretical arguments, as well as for reconstructing and criticizing existing theories.

The course proceeds from examples of sociological analyses, covering topics related to some of the main themes of sociology as a discipline: problems of order and cooperation, problems of social inequality, and problems of social change.