Major: Social politics (Bachelor Degree)
Choose just one of the extracts below on which to write an interpretative and explanatory account consisting of 1000 words (excluding bibliography)
That reference seems to be in the reading list. 
Plz read the requirements carefully. 
PPT courseware and reading list are provided. 

In this assessment you are asked to undertake a ‘close reading’ of a social theoretical text. The purpose of the assessment is to enhance your skills of comprehension, reading and interpretation. Reading classical sociology can be challenging. It may be written in unfamiliar language that reflects prevailing norms and values of the time of writing, which often requires critical reflection. It may also refer to complex concepts and principles. By the end of this assessment, you will have become aware of the importance of close and repeated rereading of material that, at first, may seem difficult and remote. In this exercise you will be asked to reflect upon an extract and, in 1000 words, demonstrate that you have understood the significance of the extract.

Use the following points to guide you as you read and analyse your chosen extract:

• What do you think the text is meant to achieve?
• In your own words define and explain the concepts that are being used
• To what extent does the argument of the extract remain relevant to today’s society, or to current sociology, social psychology or criminology? What possible applications of the text can you imagine? Can you think of some contemporary cultural examples or uses of the concepts?

Use the following framework to structure your assessment:

Aim to spend around 25% of your assessment (250 words) on each of these four points:

• Outline the central argument put forward by the author
• Identify and summarise the key concepts which underlie this argument
• Assess the continuing relevance of the argument or themes
• Identify a contemporary cultural example which invokes this argument or themes

Also bear in mind:

• You may include references to other work but the total word length is 1000 words. References should be collected as a bibliography at the end of your essay, but the bibliography is not included in the word count.
• If making references to other work, make sure you use the Harvard system of referencing (see your undergraduate handbook).
• For this assessment, we would rather you not use lengthy quotes.

Feedback and marking:

You will receive written feedback and your mark in the first week of the Spring Term.

1st year feedback workshop:

This session is designed to give general feedback to all 1st year students on the Term 1 assessment. Module convenors will give an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of assessments on their modules. The session will take place in Term 2. You will be able to discuss your feedback and mark with your academic supervisor in your first meeting of the Spring Term.

Highlighted Quotes

Mary Wollstonecraft

‘Confined…in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch. It is true they are provided with food and raiment, for which they neither toil nor spin; but health, liberty, and virtue are given in exchange. But where, amongst mankind, has been found sufficient strength of mind to enable a being to resign these adventitious prerogatives  - one who, rising with the calm dignity of reason above opinion, dared to be proud of the privileges inherent in man? And it is vain to expect it whilst hereditary power chokes the affections, and nips reason in the bud.’ (From The Vindication of the Rights of Women Ch 4)

Adam Smith

‘It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.’ (from The Wealth of Nations, chapter 1)

Karl Marx

‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’ (Marx, K. (1990 [1867]) Capital, Vol.1, London: Penguin Classics p. 165)

Emile Durkheim

‘Of all the sociologists, to our knowledge, [Comte] is the first to have recognized in the division of labour something other than purely an economic phenomenon. He saw in it “the most essential condition of social life”, provided that one conceives it “in all of its rational extent; that is to say, that one applies it to the totality of all our diverse operations of whatever kind, instead of attributing it, as is ordinarily done, to simple material usages”. […] If this hypothesis were proved, the division of labour would play a role much more important than that which we ordinarily attribute to it. It would serve not only to raise societies to luxury, desirable perhaps, but superfluous; it would be a condition of their existence. Through it, or at least particularly through it, their cohesion would be assured […] if such is really the function of the division of labour, it must have a moral character, for the need of order, harmony and social solidarity is generally considered moral.’ (Durkheim, E. (1964 [1893]) The Division of Labour in Society, G. Simpson (trans.), The Free Press: London, pp. 55-56).

Harriet Martineau

‘The grand secret of wise inquiry into Morals and Manners is to begin with the study of things, using the discourse of persons as a commentary upon them. Though the facts sought by travellers [sociological analysts] relate to Persons, they may most readily be learned from Things. The eloquence of Institutions and Records, in which the action of the nation is embodied and perpetuated, is more comprehensive and more faithful than that of any variety of individual voices…The Institutions of a nation,—political, religious, or social,—put evidence into the observer's hands as to its capabilities and wants which the study of individuals could not yield in the course of a lifetime (Part II, introduction ‘what to observe’)…The traveller everywhere finds woman treated as the inferior party in a compact in which both parties have an equal interest…The degree of the degradation of woman is as good a test as the moralist can adopt for ascertaining the state of domestic morals in any country.’ (From, How to Observe Morals and Manners, Part II Introduction (‘what to observe’) and Part II, chapter 3)

Max Weber

‘Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily see the limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life so well adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups of men. This origin is what really needs explanation. Concerning the doctrine of the more naïve historical materialism, that such ideas originate as a reflection or superstructure of economic situations, we shall speak more in detail below. At this point it will suffice for our purpose to call attention to the fact that without doubt, in the country of Benjamin Franklin’s birth (Massachusetts), the spirit of capitalism (in the sense we have attached to it) was present before the capitalistic order.’ (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Taylor & Francis, 2001, p. 20)

Charles Cooley

‘Thus the imaginary companionship which a child of three or four years so naively creates and expresses, is something elementary and almost omnipresent in the thought of a normal person. In fact, thought and personal intercourse may be regarded as merely aspects of the same thing: we call it personal intercourse when the suggestions that keep it going are received through faces or other symbols present to the senses; reflection when the personal suggestions come through memory and are more elaborately worked over in thought. But both are mental, both

are personal. Personal images, as they are connected with nearly all our higher thought in its inception, remain inseparable from it in memory. The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse. We have no higher life that is really apart from other people.’ (Human Nature and the Social Order, p. 61)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

‘…the consuming female, debarred from any free production, unable to estimate the labour involved in the making of what she so lightly destroys, and her consumption limited mainly to those things which minister to physical pleasure, creates a market for sensuous decoration and personal ornament, for all that is luxurious and enervating, and for a false and capricious variety in such supplies, which operates as a mostly deadly check to true history and true art. As the priestess of the temple of consumption, as the limitless demander of things to use up, her economic influence is reactionary and injurious. Much, very much, of the current useless production in which our economic energies run waste – man’s strength poured out like water on the sand – depends on the creation and careful maintenance of this false market, this sink into which human labour vanishes with no return.’ (from Women and Economics chapter VI)