SOC 331 - Topics in Organizational Analysis

Topics vary. For current offerings, review the schedule of classes. Omnipresent in “modern” settings, organizations are a potent structuring force in social, economic, and political life, and provide a wealth of possibilities for sustained inquiry in a topics course. May be repeated for credit.

Organizational Ethnographies
Organizations are central to our daily lives. They reflect and shape opportunity; create status hierarchies of gender, race, and privilege; generate and alter power relations; and are products and producers of social capital. This course utilizes ethnographic and in-depth case analysis-methods that focus on agency in context, interpersonal processes of meaning making, and social processes over time-to address interaction and influence, the generation of reward systems, (in)formal systems of power, and network dynamics in and between organizations. Across diverse cases-including financial institutions, elite medical practices, day care centers, mining companies, nonprofits, and universities-we will “study up” to consider how power, meaning, and change are constructed at the top, and examine “from-below” practices that shape opportunity and innovation, facilitate succession, shape social capital, and contest hierarchies in bureaucracies.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): SOC 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 2 times for credit if different topics.
Not offered: 2026-27
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.