Sociological Imagination

11 Key excerpts on "Sociological Imagination"

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  The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education

  • Cheryl E. Matias(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Sociological Imagination, then, serves as a theory and, haphazardly, also a method for situating the daily lives of individuals in a larger social context. Aligning with Mills (1959), individual reality is not in and of itself informed by just that one individual, especially when the period of time and other individuals within the circumstance influence the ways one person views reality. Needless to say, reality is co-constructed between the individual and those around them and cannot be detached from other lived experiences (Crowley, 2019). As such, the Sociological Imagination is a theory that expands our understanding of an individual as part and parcel of a larger collective. When applied as a method, the Sociological Imagination realizes the story captured by one participant in empirical research may not be adequate enough to best capture the reality of a more holistic lived experience.

  Playing a fundamental role in sociology, the Sociological Imagination is often-times one of the first ideas discussed alongside social theory (Garoutte, 2018). For sociologists, social theory centers on understanding four major components: socio-cultural contexts within which institutions/human behavior exists; the connection between those contexts and institutions/human behavior; the social worlds created by these contexts; and the experiences of individuals or groups within these contexts (Anderson, 2010). However, the Sociological Imagination takes these objectives one step further by acknowledging the role of the individual in these investigations and necessitates a critical examination of the roles individuals played within the socio-cultural contexts that then affect the researcher (Garoutte, 2018). Through this, the Sociological Imagination equips researchers to reveal and critique structures in society that may help to reproduce and maintain inequities (Doob, 2019; Hurst, Fitz Gibbon, & Nurse, 2020; Kozol, 1991). Going back to the Highlander example, this is illustrated through the philosophy that was adopted as part of the training for collective action:

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  Sociology

  The Basics

  • Ken Plummer(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 QUESTIONS

  CULTIVATING Sociological ImaginationS

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003158318-5

  I start with a quote from C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. It has been influential in shaping the three most recent generations of sociologists. He says:

  The Sociological Imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise.

  C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

  In this chapter, I expand and develop Mills’s ideas as we go in search of the Holy Grail: the elements of a Sociological Imagination. We have just seen a wide variety of imageries and histories of past sociological traditions; as well as the critical emergence of new ones. With all this in mind, the question now becomes whether we can find common themes – maybe a persistent imagination, a way of thinking and a set of problems perhaps, that will hold it together? What ‘frames of mind’ need to be developed and what critical questions posed? C. Wright Mills’s influential book The Sociological Imagination has inspired several generations of sociologists, and I use his broad idea to frame this chapter, widening it ultimately to raise twelve critical challenges (see also pp. 179–81 and 243–45).

  This discussion will lead us to core features of how sociology is studied and taught – generally through three concerns: methodology, theory and empiricism. Methodologists give their intellectual energies to rendering the tools, technologies and statistics of social research ever more sophisticated: ‘good measurement, modelling and sophisticated research design’ – that’s what is needed, they say. Theorists are often devoted to the beautiful intricacies of human thought and elegant thinking – of making our thinking as precise, logical and clear as possible: to establish the general and abstract principles of social thought. And empiricists

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  The Sociological Quest

  An Introduction to the Study of Social Life

  • Haydn Aarons, Evan Willis(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 The Sociological Imagination DOI: 10.4324/9781003316329-4 The basic concepts outlined earlier are important to all Sociologists: the distinction between sociological and social problems, between macro and micro Sociology, between private troubles and public issues, between continuity and change, and the importance of reflexivity. How most Sociologists work with these basic sociological ideas is to pursue the answers to a number of key questions. These questions are: What’s happening? Why? What are the consequences? How do you know? How could it be otherwise? The early Sociologists, amongst them Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, began to explore these concepts and questions and apply them to the societies in which they lived. Sociologists continue this project to this day, moulding and adapting these basic concepts and questions to their own version of Sociology and to their ever-changing worlds. As we have seen, one sociologist whose version of these questions has been particularly influential is C. Wright Mills. Writing in 1959, he gathered together these questions and concepts and labelled the perspective that uses them to view the world, ‘the Sociological Imagination’. Our interpretation of this perspective is that the quest for sociological understanding of the world involves invoking the Sociological Imagination as a form of consciousness for understanding social processes. Here, and in the following chapters, this notion is developed in some detail by arguing for a number of sensibilities or components to the Sociological Imagination. Sensibility, in this instance, means a keen appreciation of, or consciousness about, aspects of explanation. Our starting point is with the work of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1983 : 16), who interprets the Sociological Imagination as ‘several related forms of sensibility indispensable to sociological analysis’

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  Human Rights Policing

  Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century

  • Peter Marina, Pedro Marina(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  You learned from the previous chapters all about the meaning of human rights, human rights policing social interactions, and the power of human agency as it relates to achieving human rights policing, among other things. Now we invite you to the fruits of thinking in powerful new ways about the world. We invite you to an imagination that will help you better understand the world and the communities you serve. We invite you to a way of thinking that will improve the institution of law enforcement and advance the goals of a human rights policing as we push into the 21st century.

  We now invite you to the Sociological Imagination.

  The Sociological Imagination

  The Sociological Imagination allows its possessor to see the world beyond the limited confines of subjective experience. It also allows its possessor to see the world from a perspective other than one’s own. In short, it’s a perspective for seeing reality beyond your own body and experiences. As Peter Berger stated, “sociology is not so much a field as a perspective and if this perspective fails, nothing is left” (Berger 1992 , 18). The intellectual, or thoughtful person does not need a doctoral degree, or any other degree, to employ the perspective of the Sociological Imagination to think in new and highly creative ways about the world. The Sociological Imagination belongs to the intellectually curious public, to those who want to better understand the world and their place in it. And if we, as a human species, fail to develop the Sociological Imagination, then indeed, as Berger says, perhaps nothing is left. We argue that your ability to become even better police officers and law enforcement agents depends on developing the Sociological Imagination to apply human rights policing to your professional careers.

  In 1959, the now infamous sociologist Charles Wright Mills wrote the seminal The Sociological Imagination to describe the unique ways sociologists (if they possess the imagination) think to understand the world beyond the private orbit of their lives (Mills 2000

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  Social Science and Historical Perspectives

  Society, Science, and Ways of Knowing

  • Jack David Eller(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As we said in the first chapter, although humans have always lived in social groups with defined rules, roles, and institutions, “society” was one of the last things to be discovered by scholars and scientists. This is particularly surprising because “society” would seem to be central to social thought. Some of the questions that would eventually fall within the domain of sociology were previously asked, to be sure, although they were posed by philosophy, theology, or other disciplines like political science or economics and therefore were not posed in a distinctly “sociological” way. And thoughts and speculations about society were not accompanied by empirical and statistical investigations into social organization and social behavior.

  Sociology has self-consciously come to stress and prize the ability to see beyond and outside of the individual’s immediate experience or “mind” to the forces that operate on, integrate, and construct individuals. Following C. Wright Mills, they are proud to call this the “Sociological Imagination.” Writing originally in 1959, Mills insisted that most people are not “aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history” and the web of rules and institutions that form their own particular society (2000: 4). Thus, the Sociological Imagination begins with “the ideas that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances” (5). That is, there are many unseen—and in some cases unseeable—external and interpersonal factors that shape our individual thoughts, opinions, and behaviors, factors that we did not individually create but that we perpetuate through our social action. It requires imagination to “see” these factors and forces.

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  Social Theory and Nursing

  • Martin Lipscomb(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As we have seen, the first step towards the rehabilitation of the social sciences is to acquire and cultivate what Mills calls the Sociological Imagination. Mills makes it clear that the Sociological Imagination is not restricted to sociologists; it is an idea that has implications and applications across all disciplines with a social remit, including nursing and the other helping disciplines. To exercise the Sociological Imagination is to perform an act of resistance against the attempts to neuter the social sciences by a turn on the one hand to abstracted empiricism and, on the other, to grand theory.

  Abstracted empiricism is a consequence of a bureaucratised university in which quality is measured not by the social impact of research, but by the supposed scientific credibility of the methods employed by the researcher. The research agenda is therefore determined according to the kinds of questions amenable to large-scale quantitative data collection methods, which effectively precludes the independent researcher in favour of large teams chasing big money in order to conduct government- and industry-sponsored projects. Grand theory is a turn in the oppo site direction, away from data towards unsubstantiated theoretical speculations, but which similarly insulates the academic against issues and problems from the outside world.

  The Sociological Imagination calls for a staunch individualism and a wresting back of control by the individual academic of her or his academic freedom. Mills’ call for every person to be their own theorist and methodologist is not simply an invitation to an anarchic free-for-all; rather, it is an acknowledgement that academic scholarship begins not with decisions about research methods or grand theories, but with the real problems of real people. Appropriate methods and theory emerge and evolve out of the intellectual and practical encounter with these problems in partnership with all interested parties, which is to say, all those who are interested in resolving the problems and

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  The Age of the Social

  The Discovery of Society and The Ascendance of a New Episteme

  • Sal Restivo(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  C. Wright Mills (1961) inspired a “new sociology” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His life and work are in part the foundation of some of the mid-to-late twentieth century’s “new” sociologies. Mills conceived a social science opposed to the technologies of bureaucracies governed by methodological pretensions, concepts that obscure more than they enlighten, and opposed to a focus on minor issues and troubles that are not related to urgent public concerns. In referring his conception of sociology to the promise of such classic social analysts as Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Mannheim, Mills outlined the nature and foundations of “the Sociological Imagination.”

  Mills’ sociology is characterized by:

  1    a focus on the interrelations of the essential parts of whole societies, comparisons of whole societies, and analysis of the relationships between particular societal features and social continuities and changes;

  2    placing given societies in the context of the total history of humanity, identifying how particular societal features are affected by, and affect historical periods, comparisons of the historical periods and their “characteristic ways of history-making,” and analysis of the mechanics of societal change in history;

  3    identification of the varieties of human beings which prevail, and are emerging in given societies, the types of human beings found in given historical periods, an analysis of modes of selection, formation, liberation, repression, sensitization, and blunting of human beings, an uncovering of human nature as it is revealed in a given society or period, and the relationship between societal features and human nature.

  For Mills, the Sociological Imagination is the basis for grasping the nature of society and for understanding ourselves as living at the nexus of our biographies, histories, and societies. The Sociological Imagination operates within two realms: personal troubles and public issues. Troubles happen in the self and its relation to others in the self’s immediate context of personal experience and what feels like willful action. Issues are public; they are related to the institutions of a total historical society, the overlapping and interpenetration of individual “immediate milieux

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  Sport, Exercise and Social Theory

  An Introduction

  • Gyozo Molnar, John Kelly(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  terrible as it can reveal the obstacles you will have to face to achieve those potentials. For instance, if you realise that when you graduate there will be thousands of university graduates with similar qualifications applying for the same jobs, it is terrible news as you know that there will be fierce competition out there. Conversely, the early realisation of such competition would allow you to make necessary provisions so that you stand out. You would have time and opportunity to ensure that you have gained additional skills and experiences that would potentially give you the cutting edge. As Mills (1959/2000: 5) wrote: ‘The Sociological Imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals’.

  As we said, the concept of SI is concerned with understanding your position and role(s) in society. Whatever degree of knowledge and understanding you have of your options, limitations, and roles in your immediate and more distant social milieux, by actively employing the concept of SI, your level of social and self-awareness can be

  REFLECTION

  Now relate what Mills states back to the example we outlined earlier by asking the following questions: What is the larger social/ historical scene regarding higher education? What is the relevance of that in relation to you? In what ways have social structures (social/historical scene) had a bearing on your life choices? What can you do to maximise your potential given the current social scene?

  significantly increased. ‘The first fruit of this imagination… is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauges his own fate’(Mills, 1959/2000: 5). The enhancement of self-awareness can be achieved by exploring a few fundamental sociological concepts and by adopting related self-reflective, self-investigative practices. This sociological self-discovery can be effectively used exploring the connections between personal troubles and social issues.

  TROUBLES VERSUS ISSUES

  Mills was genuinely concerned with people's lack of ability to distinguish and identify personal troubles and social issues and to recognise the historical and structural forces that have an effect upon their lives. He believed that most people ‘do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world’ (1959/2000: 4). Therefore, one of the salient aspects of SI is for us to recognise the necessity that although we need to differentiate between social issues (structure) and personal troubles (agency), these concepts are constantly interacting whereby they construct and reconstruct society and our situation within it. That is, social issues are connected to (our/your) personal troubles and vice versa.

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  Literary Lives

  Biography and the Search for Understanding

  • David Ellis(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 The Sociological Imagination

  It is by means of the Sociological Imagination that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.

  (C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

  (New York, 1959), p. 7)

  A recent life of the English cricketer Wally Hammond was subtitled 'The Reasons Why'. What needed to be explained was why almost all the people who met Hammond in his later years found him so singularly disagreeable. According to his biographer, the explanation lay in the mercury injections he was obliged to take for his syphilis. But, complained the reviewer of the book in the Times Literary Supplement , do we really need 'a chemical explanation for an unpleasant temperament?'; and even if we do, would not Hammond's 'daily heavy drinking' serve equally well? This was to oppose one organicist explanation with another, but the reviewer was in fact the partisan of a quite different approach. It was, he pointed out, only for a brief period that Hammond was recognised as 'the greatest cricketer in the world' so that 'the brooding discontent of the decline is adequately (if less sensationally) explicable as a reaction to the loss of that stature'.1

  It would be hard to over-estimate the effect on people's behaviour of how they are regarded within the various social groups to which they belong and, for many sociologists, over-estimation would in any case be impossible given the exclusive importance they attach to social affiliation. In the wake of Durkheim's pioneer work on suicide, his followers were bound to go further in attempts to 'collectivise' what we are accustomed to think of as essentially private phenomena. Even our memories of the past, Maurice Halbwachs ingeniously argued, are not exclusively our own: 'one remembers something only by adopting the perspective of one or more social groups, and by placing oneself again in one or more currents of collective thought'; and on the same page he conveniently defined what was, and to some extent still is the classic sociological approach:

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  Imagination in Human and Cultural Development

  • Tania Zittoun, Alex Gillespie(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 .

  Sociocultural or cultural psychology is the field of research that examines the mind as social, cultural and historical (Boesch, 1991 ; Bruner, 2003 ; Cole, 2007 ; Valsiner, 2014  a). This approach considers not only social and cultural phenomena in themselves, but also how people uniquely experience these phenomena. Thus, sociocultural psychology studies how people relate to other people, social situations, material spaces, social norms, institutions, discourses, and shared myths. Sociocultural psychology is a dialogical approach to human life because it considers that any human action, from dreaming to building a house, is already and always part of social relations or an internalized dynamic which connects these activities to other people, institutions, and our own collective history (Linell, 2009 ; Marková, 2003 , 2006 ). Each action within the sociocultural environment is, in this sense, part of the individual’s dialogue with their sociocultural environment. While there is a huge amount that has been written about this approach, we want to highlight just a few aspects.

  Philosophical assumptions

  Psychology, despite often construing itself as an empirical breakaway from philosophy, has always been, and remains, dependent upon philosophical assumptions. In order to avoid making implicit common sense assumptions about ontology (i.e., what is assumed to exist) or epistemology (i.e., how we come to know what we assume to exist) we will briefly make explicit the main assumptions, or axioms (Danziger, 2008 ; Valsiner, 2012

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  Reimagining Climate Change

  • Paul Wapner, Hilal Elver(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Sociological Imagination of climate futures Matthew Paterson    

  Introduction

  The framing of this volume invokes C. Wright Mills. On rereading the opening passage of his Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959), I am tempted simply to cut and paste the entire passage. Mills opens with:

  Nowadays men [sic ] often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct … Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies.

  (Mills 1959, 3)

  This is Mills’s purpose in elaborating what he calls a Sociological Imagination – as a set of intellectual resources that enable people to “understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career of a variety of individuals” (Mills 1959, 5). He does so with an explicit political and transformative aim: “By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues” (Mills 1959, 5).

  Many of the motifs in these (and other) passages are apposite to understanding the impasse(s) we face in climate politics. Trap, troubles, inner life, uneasiness, indifference, involvement … all could be used to understand the way that many people around the world experience climate change – as something simultaneously of momentous importance and deep abstraction from daily life, and as the product of activities in daily life that are supposed to be acts of freedom and prosperity but are at the same time often experienced as a trap. Climate change thus provokes trouble and unease. But, following Mills, this trouble and unease can at the same time generate indifference precisely because the traps of daily life prevent us from seeing the “larger historical scene” that might enable our “involvement with public issues.” In climate change debates to date, perhaps the best expressions of these are in Kari Norgaard’s account of Living in Denial , her meticulous study of the complicated avoidance of dealing with climate change in a small Norwegian town, and in Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change

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