In this module, you'll explore the most important and innovative social theories and the ever-changing social worlds that they respond to. You'll examine how transformations across four key areas of concern – work, culture, life, and control – have been accompanied by significant social struggles and developments in social theory and analysis. The broad range of topics you'll cover includes racial capitalism, social reproduction, precarious work, new nationalisms, class and taste, urban cultures, body projects, everyday life, intersectionality, mediated lives, prisons and policing, biopolitics and health, digital surveillance, and the climate crisis.
This module examines transformations across four key areas of concern – work, culture, life, and control. It explores a diverse range of social theories that have engaged with these themes. These include classical social theory, symbolic interactionism, post-structuralist theory, cultural theory, feminist theories, postcolonial theory, science and technology studies, ecological thought, and global social theory.
Block 1: Work
The organisation of work is one of the central structuring principles of society. This first block explores social theories that have emerged from struggles over the organisation, experience and meaning of work. What forms of work exist, and what counts as work? How does the organisation of work intersect with wider issues of power and inequality? What transformations are happening in contemporary work? The topics you'll cover include work and capitalism, feminist theories of work and social reproduction, racial capitalism, precarious work and digital platforms.
Block 2: Culture
The analysis of culture, in all its many forms, has long occupied a distinctive place in social theory. This block will explore culture as a crucial site of meaning making, identity formation, and the reproduction of power and inequalities. You'll explore how ideas of nation, class, race and gender get remade and resisted through ever-changing cultural practices and spaces. The topics you'll cover include culture and nation, class and distinction, city cultures and body cultures.
Block 3: Life
In this block, you'll explore a range of social theories that focus on our everyday and intimate lives. You'll explore how the experience of the everyday is always shaped by wider social structures and power relations. The topics you'll cover include practices of everyday life; intersectionality; biopolitics, health and illness; and digitally mediated lives.
Block 4: Control
This block explores theories of social control and social order. You’ll move from examining repressive social control, which involves force and constraint, through to forms of permissive social control, which work through freedom and circulation. You’ll explore how social control has continuously been contested by resistance, radical thought, and social movements. The topics you'll cover will include prisons and policing, abolitionist thought, digital surveillance and soft control, modernity and the climate emergency.
All of the topics in this module will be illustrated using a range of audio, video, textbook and interactive materials.
The module gives you the opportunity to discuss the key ideas and arguments in a wide range of online activities, forums and assessment tasks. You'll also be given skills and training to help you communicate your ideas in both academic and professional settings.
This is an OU level 3 module. The module will specifically enable you to develop an understanding of changing social worlds using a range of sociological theories and conceptual vocabularies. OU level 3 modules build on study skills and subject knowledge acquired from previous studies at OU levels 1 and 2. This module is intended for students who have some experience of undertaking OU levels 1 and 2 modules in related social science subjects.
If you have any doubt about the suitability of the module, please speak to an adviser.
You’ll get help and support from an assigned tutor throughout your module.
They’ll help by:
Online tutorials run throughout the module. While they’re not compulsory, we strongly encourage you to participate. Where possible, we’ll make recordings available.
Course work includes:
You'll be provided with two textbooks and have access to a module website, which includes:
The OU strives to make all aspects of study accessible to everyone, and this Accessibility Statement outlines what studying DD318 involves. You should use this information to inform your study preparations and any discussions with us about how we can meet your needs.
To find out more about what kind of support and adjustments might be available, contact us or visit our Disability support website.
Social theory: changing social worlds starts once a year – in October.
This page describes the module that will start in October 2026.
We expect it to start for the last time in October 2034.
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