We’re talking sports again on the podcast! This time, building community through minor league baseball. Where major league sports focus on winning and making money, minor league teams play a greater role in bringing together different aspects of the local community for a fun, affordable day at the park. For the second in our series on sociological …

BMW, Louis Vuitton, Vineyard Vines – what makes these products so expensive, and why do people pay so much for them? Part of it may be their quality, but more importantly there is a certain cache to the labels themselves. They say that the owner has enough money she can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on luxury items. This is conspicuous con…

Sociology is interesting, but how do you make a career out of it? One way, of course, is to get a PhD and become a professor, but that doesn’t suit everyone. There are a lot of careers out there that tackle sociological issues like building community, reducing inequality, and creating infrastructure that allows us to all live together in peace. In …

Classical theorist Emile Durkheim (my personal favorite!) came up with the concept of collective effervescence to describe the way we feed of each others’ emotions when in a group. But how exactly does that happen in practice? And how does one great experience carry through to bind us together in a lasting way? In this episode, I explain Randall Co…

The long football season (okay, not as long as baseball) is coming to a close with the Super Bowl. The best players of America’s game square off in a grand show of strength, athleticism, hyper-masculinity, and commercialism. In this episode I’ll tackle these features and more as I apply some of the theories we’ve covered to better understand the bi…

Why does following social norms so often feel natural? And how is it that so many different people stay in line even without authoritarian controls? In this episode we’re going micro with George Herbert Mead’s concept of the self. I look at how we internalize the ideas, norms, and values of society so that who we are is inseparable from our social …

Are snails slimy critters or a gourmet food item? The answer depends on where you live, a factor which shapes your perception of reality. In this episode I tackle the social construction of reality, which is what we consider real or true has more of a social than scientific basis. I apply the concept to food, diamonds, gender, and race, asking list…

Between GPS-enabled smartphones, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and the NSA’s monitoring of phone and internet traffic, we are constantly being watched. In many ways, this can make for a safer society, but it also raises grave questions of what give up in individual creative expression in the name of such security. In this episode guest Ian Conlo…

How do you make decisions in your life? Do you write an exhaustive pro/con list and ask friends to weigh in, or do you go with your gut? In this episode guest Ian Conlon and I discuss Weber’s concept of rationalization. Starting with simple decisions like choosing a cereal, Weber proposed that the world is increasingly ruled by rational, objective …

Does all that chatter on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook serve a useful purpose? I certainly hope so, since I’m on all of them (well, except Pinterest)! In another first for the podcast, this week I interview Dr. Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and my mentor, about Habermas’s idea of the public sphere. D…