TheBoxInspector

I would also add UCLA to your list. They have people like Stefans Timmerman, Jack Katz, CK Lee, and a lot of people who do cultural sociology.

You could also consider Brown. They are strong in political economy, although their focus does tend toward development...they have people like Mark Blyth, Patrick Heller, Nitsan Chorev, and I believe Peter Evans has a part-time position at the Watson Institute. People there also tend to be a bit sympathetic Marx (or more modified approaches of those who came after him), although I don't know if you could call them Marxists.

As others have mentioned, this does depend on what you're trying to do research on and what about "postmodernism" you are studying. The term has come to mean everything from a logic of capitalism to a collapse of meta-narratives to critical theory to cultural relativism and so on. I think you probably need to do your own digging and look for the people who are relevant to the topics you're interested in. So for media, you could look up someone like Deleuze on cinema and then relate it to your own interests. Or if you're talking about identity, you could try to show how someone in the postmodernist tradition (or someone who studies it, like David Harvey or Frederic Jameson) is important for understanding the construction of religious identity or how it's changed. I would start with one or two thinkers who say something interesting or relevant, and then leverage that to justify taking a class that would place this person's ideas into context. And then choose wisely what you're going to take. A lot of postmodernism requires learning about the terms they use, and at least from the classes I've taken, they often reduce their ideas to cliches without showing how they are relevant or without addressing the questions that led to them. It doesn't mean that they don't have some good ideas, but it is a stigmatized branch of thought for a reason...it does mean that you have more work to do in order to justify its explanatory relevance.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt come to mind for me, although I think they are more Spinozist and Deleuzian than they are postmodernist. I think postmodernism is used in gender/queer theory as well (not my forte), and you could also probably check out Alan Sokal's work (of the infamous "Sokal Hoax") and see whom he criticizes. In all honesty though, I've never really understood the hype about postmodernism...it seems like the basic idea of the "end of metanarratives" (in the sense of the work of Lyotard and Baudrillard) had an impact on some understandings of gender or culture, but much of what I've read seems to suggest that the movement is just another form of modernism. The term "postmodernism" itself also seems to me to be used to refer to almost anything against the ideals that the Enlightenment stood for...so other lines of thought like post-structuralism or critical theory tend to get lumped together with it, when they have some very real and important differences--Deleuze and Foucault and Derrida, for example, explicitly reject the "postmodernist" label. I think some thinkers tend to be dismissed too quickly as a result of this; either that, or the explanatory force of their ideas are reduced to cliches that don't have as much impact as they could.

I'm not sure about how much I would be able to tell you about quantitative stuff, but for economic sociology you might be interested in the following: An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets by Donald Mackenzie--constructivism. Getting a Job by Mark Granovetter (including the appendix on "Economic Action and Social Structure")--the problem of embeddedness. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition by Ron Burt--network analysis. The Architecture of Markets by Neil Fligstein--field theory.

Stanford.

I think you'll be fine...if you already got into those programs you're definitely doing something right, and we do have five (probably closer to seven or eight) years to get better at it. To me, in most educational contexts (not just grad school) time is a huge variable in development, and if you're in a good program and have the desire/energy to do so, you'll have a lot of opportunities to develop both intellectually and professionally. I mean, it's probably a good thing that you have these kinds of doubts at this point...at least you're sincere in thinking about how to do a good job! My own strategy for coping with this is to just do a lot of reading between now and the fall, so that when I get to my program I'll have some ideas and I'll know where my own interests stand in terms of the rest of the field. I think pursuing research is really just a matter of developing a certain cognitive framework, like Andy Abbott talks about in that book Methods of Discovery. But really I think you'll be fine...like everyone else mentioned, we're all pretty adaptable and malleable at this point anyway...

Haha well, if it's any consolation to you I was planning to wear sneakers to all of my visits...

So...this might be a silly question, but what are you all planning to wear to visit days? Would a polo shirt and dress slacks be appropriate, or would business casual be better?

The funding was definitely impressive; I imagine that living in Palo Alto will not be cheap, though, so in terms of relative income it might be similar to other programs. Are you all planning to attend the visit in March?

What kinds of things do you do to get a general feel for a particular sociology department's personality? I've been looking at the kinds of professors and research and the fields of interest offered at each school, but even with that information it is sometimes difficult to identify whether a department is more theory-driven, whether it stresses more quantitative methods, etc. Does anyone have any insights into this process? Right now, I'm looking at places like Berkeley, NYU, Indiana, Stanford, and UPenn.

I got waitlisted at UC Berkeley and rejected from the other 6 that I applied to...man, this process is pretty tough. I'm hopeful (the director was really warm and personable) but at this point I think it's just a luck of the draw. Is anyone else in the same situation (getting rejected from everywhere)? What are you planning to do next year, or what might be something worth doing at this point?