SOCY 66 Markets and Management
What is money? How do people find jobs? Are markets competitive or cooperative? This course examines these and other questions about how economic behavior is organized, operates and changes historically. It recognizes that economic activity is socially organized and guided by political, cultural and normative as well as economic principles. It explores how economic activity takes many forms, including groups of small competitive firms, large and powerful corporations, and diffuse networks of companies tied together through inter-firm alliances, business associations and other sorts of cooperative and competitive relations with each other, unions, government agencies and universities. It examines the organization and operation of different kinds of markets, different theories of how economic activity is organized, and the social factors that contribute to economic success or failure. It also investigates how managers, unions, policy makers and governments are coping with recent economic challenges, such as those posed by technological change and the globalization of economic activity. Because this is a course in economic sociology-not economics-no background in economics is required.
Instructor
Harrington