Human Relations
Human Relations
Soc 100
Delaware County Community College, fall 2007Instructor: Joseph P. Ferry, M. A.
ferry@tenebrae.org
Syllabus
Course Description:
This course is designed as an introduction to the basic principles of sociology with emphasis on human relationships in community and industrial settings. We will examine the increasing importance of living and working in large scale societal groups – factories, urban housing, and corporate offices. We will contrast these settings to smaller scale formations – family, neighborhood, friendship circles; and we will look at the kinds of relationships, roles, obligations, reciprocities that are common within personal relationships, and compare these to the requirements of successful organizational, workplace and exchange relationships.
Course Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course students should be able to:
• Explain the importance, structure, history of human relationships in large scale society and occupational spheres. Recognize the difference between reciprocal personal relationships and relationships based on exchange.
• Recognize roles and interact effectively in structured social settings – customer, traveler, employee, patient, student, supervisor, applicant, voter, sales prospect and seller.
• Describe the significance of self-awareness in building good human relationships.
• Distinguish between the formal and informal structures of an organization as they relate to appropriate human relations.
• Develop capacity to recognize and interpret diverse ‘languages’ – vocal, but also body language and meaningful movement – kinesics and proxemics.
• Describe successful employee on-the-job behavior, especially during the first few probationary months.
• Describe how the impact of human relations in the leadership and motivational areas can affect productivity. Distinguish charismatic and institutional leadership.
• Apply the sociological perspective to human relations, and industrial and societal roles.
• Distinguish the different obligations, motivations, and consequences of friendship and familial relationships, and contrast those with the motivations, obligations and consequences of formal, professional and organizational relationships.
• Recognize signs of cultural difference and personal style in communications.
Required Text and Online readings:
Effective Human Relations, 9th Edition
Personal and Organizational Applications
by Reece and Brandt, Publisher is Houghton Mifflin
Student WORK
1. Readings Each week there will be readings in the text that will cover subject areas that will be the focus areas of class discussion. Each week there will be readings of the social philosophers and social scientists that made seminal contributions to our understanding of those topics under discussion.2. Class Discussions - Students will need to prepare for class discussions by having studied assigned readings prior to class, and then contribute to developing our understanding of the human relationships and conduct that we are studying.
3. Class Presentations: Student will present their research as a work-in-progress: classmates will offer ideas, assistance, sources, leads and constructive critiques.
4. Social research projects and papers: Each student will be required to present two reports during the term; the first will be a work-in-progress, and a final, completed, scholarly paper. The final paper will have the same subject as the work in progress and will be the completion of it.
5. A mid-term exam and a final exam: Demonstrate an acquaintance with variety of human relations/-ships explored in class and with the major analyses of those problems. Exams will be graded according to knowledge of the ideas and thoughts in our assigned readings and class discussions, logical thinking, clear writing expression, persuasiveness of argument, and evidence of reading and study.
Evaluating student's work and Grading