Department of Sociology | University of Maryland

Coordinator: Kurt Finsterbusch | (301) 405-6397 | kurt@socy.umd.edu

The study of development at the University of Maryland benefits from the many resources of the Washington metropolitan area. We have a diverse, international student group and easy access to centers of development research and planning such as the World Bank. The program studies development at the world system, cultural, national, institutional, organizational, and community levels. It includes theoretical, historical, and practical approaches.

Faculty Interests

The principal faculty active in the area are Sonalde Desai, Kurt Finsterbusch, Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, Bart Landry, and Reeve Vanneman.

Desai has investigated family structure and children’s status in both developing and developed societies. She is also now working on a project on gender inequality and poverty in India. Finsterbusch studies the effectiveness of development projects using evaluations from the World Bank and the Agency for International Development. He also has studied the role of organization building in development. Korzeniewicz has written on how commodity chains are linked to inequality and democratic movements across the world economy. He is currently studying changes in women’s labor force participation in Latin America. Landry is studying the impact of the global economy on changes in the labor force, especially on women’s labor force participation. Vanneman is investigating stratification changes in India during the last forty years, focusing on gender inequality, landlessness, and the progress of the former untouchables.

Recent student research has studied technological dependence in Brazil, the sugar industry in Brazil, women’s labor force participation in China, migration in Cote d’Ivoire, educational expansion in Europe, declining sex ratios in India, poverty in female headed households in Peru, social movements in Peru, gender differences in industrial employment in South Korea, gender differences in medical care usage in Tanzania, and polygyny in Zambia. Students have also used cross-national data in studies of urban primacy, military expenditures, managerial employment, and women’s labor force participation.

Academic Program

Students are required to take three of the following courses:

SOCY 631 Comparative Sociology
SOCY 636 Population and Development
SOCY 651 Gender and Development
SOCY 671 Sociology of Development
SOCY 699X States, Politics and Social Change
SOCY 699X Theories of Globalization

The two most basic courses for the specialty exams are Comparative Sociology and Sociology of Development, so these are recommended but not required. Comparative Sociology takes a macro-level focus on development and reviews the major Marxist, modernization, and world systems approaches to the field. Sociology of Development focuses more on institutional, organizational and community level studies of development. Population and Development, taught jointly with the Demography program, reviews the relationships of development with family structure, fertility, migration, and mortality. Gender and Development taught jointly with the Gender, Work, and Family program analyzes the interaction between gender and development with a focus on feminist theories.

Graduate Student Research Opportunities and Employment

Several faculty have built databases that can be used for graduate student research. Finsterbusch has comparative data on the organization and success of AID development projects; and Deasi and Vanneman has been building a large historical database of district-level data on India. In addition, cross-national data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations are readily available and frequently used in the department.

Graduates with a development specialization are employed in both academic and applied settings. The Washington area offers an especially wide range of applied opportunities for work in development research and consulting.