Social course?

I hope I'm right in saying that a course in social theory is very much like sociology. Social theories include those like Marxism, Feminism and Functionalism, and social phenomena are things that take place in society for example, moral panics and folk devils. Different social theories will interpret moral panics differently, some believing they are caused in certain ways/have certain uses. Marxists would see the bourgeois owned media as creating moral panics in order to maintain control over the proletariat e.g in Stuart Hall’s book ‘Policing the Crisis’ (1980) he looked at the moral panic of increased muggings by black youths. Hall found that rather than there being an increased number of muggings, the term 'mugging' was not actually a criminal offense so there were no real statistics. He concluded that the media and the bourgeoisie create moral panics in order to perpetuate fear and maintain control over the whole of society. Wheras, functionalists would say that the media don't create moral panics because it is free from control, so where a moral panic exists it is real.

Hopefully that makes some sort of sense. I'm sure it would be a pretty interesting degree.