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.

Organizations: Cooperatives and Nonprofits
Organizations are central to our daily lives. They reflect and shape opportunity; create or contest status hierarchies of gender, race, and privilege; generate and alter power relations; and are products and producers of social capital. This course examines in depth two kinds of organizations-cooperatives and nonprofits. Despite the emphasis in our capitalist society on corporate hierarchies, individual profit seeking, and the market, we rely to a striking extent on cooperatives, nonprofits, and kindred forms to organize our efforts and get work done. This course will explore these organizing strategies, critically addressing 1) their history, evolution, and prospects; 2) their important role in public policy and everyday economic life; and 3) their service as platforms for broader projects, including contesting corporate capitalism, promoting workplace democracy, fostering community and economic development, overcoming dependency, empowering poor or marginalized groups, and achieving social justice.

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.
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.