"The Social Imagination" by C. Wright Mills

• C. Wright Mills wrote "The Social Imagination" in 1959.

What is a Society Made Of?

• The status quo and contemporary history must be considered when discussing success and failure.
• When societies industrialize, peasants become workers and feudal lords are liquidated or become businessmen. When classes rise or fall, people are employed or unemployed. When investments rise or fall, people gain hope or are ruined.
• The sociological imagination allows people to understand the historical scene regarding its implications for their inner life and external career.
• People are often falsely conscious of their social standings due to daily experiences. Modern society considers the roots of the variety of people's psychologies.
• People's personal unease is focused on explicit troubles, and public indifference turns into involvement with public issues.
• Backgrounds influence attitudes, behavior, and opportunities.
• The capacity to see sociological institutions play out depending on how people differ in social or historical circumstances.
• Intersection between biography and history.
• The ability to view personal problems in broader social historical conditions.
• To understand oneself, it is important to understand the relationship between self and society.
• A person must be able to distance themselves to see society from a different perspective.
• You must consider an alternative perspective on how things interact and influence each other.
• The sociological imagination can shift perspectives from political to psychological, from family to national budgets, and from theology to military to oil to poetry.

Personal vs. Public

• The sociological imagination distinguishes between personal troubles and public issues.

Personal

• Personal troubles are issues stemming from an individual's circumstances.
• They originate within an individual's biography and are not rooted in broader social trends.

Public

• Public issues are social conditions that individuals alone cannot solve.
• They are beyond individual control and require social change in communities, governments, and other factors.
• Incorporating historical understanding of those trends best understands public issues.
• Example: Aftermath of World War II.
• Marie is an 18-year-old living in Tondo, Manila. She is pregnant with her third child.
• Personal problem: what led to the situation in her personal life
• Public issue: lack of access to birth control, lack of sex education, poverty, etc
• Rise to disease cases in the US
• Personal problem: specific behaviours that lead to sickness
• Public issue: Lack of access to healthcare, overpopulation, socialized activities
• Key takeaways: consider personal troubles in the context of larger public issues.
• Understand oneself by understanding the relationship between self and society.
• Limitations: Theories help predict sociological futures but may not be the best description of sociological imagination.

Sociology and Berger

• During his life, Berger wrote many books that examined the intersections of religion, society, government, and the economy.
• His 1966 book "The Social Construction of Reality" made him a leading sociologist of religion.
• It was later named the fifth most influential sociology book of the 20th century by the International Sociological Association.

Sociology and Psychology

• Psychology is not the same as sociology.
• Social work is a certain practice in society, while sociology is an attempt to understand it.
• Values of sociologists irrelevant, only value relevant is their scientific integrity. Sociology as a Past time
• Sociology is pastime to those who like it and bores the rest.
• Sociology is passion, and sociologists will repeatedly ask their own questions.

Sociology as a Form of Consciousness

• Society sees motives and forces that can be understood scientifically.
• The sociological perspective is measured by "seeing through" and "looking back".

A Society According to Berger

• A group of people live in a community and share cultural components and consists of social events.

What is Social? What are Social Situations and Events?

• Sociologists use "social" to describe the quality of interaction, interrelationship, and mutuality.
• Two men chatting is social interaction, but not a society. Society consists of social events.
• Max Weber: A "social" situation is when people orient their actions towards one another.
• Studying the web of meanings, expectations, and conduct that result from such mutual orientation is Sociology.
• Max Weber: Social situations are instances where people orient their actions towards one another.
• Therefore, social consciousness is a perspective shift that finds new light in the world, transforming meaning when the familiar becomes unfamiliar.
• The first wisdom of sociological consciousness is "things are not what they seem," that social reality has "many layers of meaning."
• It is the realization that things may not always appear as they seem.
• Berger introduced four perspectives or "motifs" that aim to approximate the truth.

Four Motifs of Social Consciousness

Debunking Motif

• Look beyond common goals, awareness of deeper meanings, skeptical of official interpretations.
• Example: debunking false information about causes of calamities/climate change

Relativization Motif

• Any society is composed of two (sometimes multiple) sectors.
• Issues will always be about dominance of dominant vs. non-dominant.
• There are many ways of looking at the world, it helps up considering perspectives of others, even if we disagree with them.
• Helps us understand complex issues like human rights in the Philippines. Encourages critical thinking.

Cosmopolitan Motif

• Openness to other ways of thinking and acting, separate from own.
• Mills: focuses on what defines the social issue.
• Berger: looks at how the issue is constructed.

Gans' Uses of Poverty

Herbert Gans

• German-American sociologist, Professor at Columbia University from 1971-2007.
• Gans used Robert Merton's concepts of "manifest," "latent," and "dysfunction" to his analysis of poverty.

Robert K. Merton

• American sociologist, a founding father of sociology also contributing to criminology.

Manifest

• The intended function of social policies, processes, or actions, to affect benefits.

Latent

• Not consciously intended but produced benefits.

Dysfunction

• Harmful and unintended outcome.
• The promotion of contraceptives helps couples manage family size.
• The promotion of contraceptives helps prevent mortalities in unassisted abortions.
• The promotion of contraceptives leads to the rise of young people's early engagement in sexual activities.
• Taking care of yourself for good health and well-being lowers health complications and prevents diseases in the long run.
• Financial restraints are added to the promotion of health insurance.

Structional Functionalist

Manifest

• A "thing" in society that is both intentional and an expected outcome of manifestation

Latent

• Something beneficial to society w/o intention & is sometimes unrecognized consequences of social phenomenon

Function of Poverty

• Poverty is not promoted but only goal highlighted of poverty's latent function.
• Poverty consequences are related to other socio-economic groups.
• Learning from their consequences may offer understanding.

Why Do We Study Poverty

• Social scientific use of sociologist-anthropologist.
• Poverty ensures that society's dirty work gets done. (ex: garbage collecting)
• The poor are required to work at low wages, the activities of the upper class are subsidized.
• Exploits their employees, giving underpay with unfair treatment resulting the employers overall benefit to gain more assets and income.
• Alleged deviants as an identification of the poor to uphold legitimacy of conventional norms.
• Rich people demonize poor for being lazy when rich are working hard from norm.
• Members of the poor are identified as group.
• Behaviours includes, alcohol, sexual uninhibited and narcotic one. When a crime happen, assumptions point fingers to poor sans investigations.

Modern Sociology in the Philippines

• Modern sociology emerged in the Philippines post-world wars.
• It is a development from Europe and US.

Prominent Filipino Sociologists

• Randolf “Randy” David and Walden Bello.

David

• Randolf "Randy" David is a public intellectual and journalist. He played an important role in achieving social justice in the Philippines.
• Anti-dictatorship movement, part of his work.
• Important contributions to Philippine Sociology and social awareness.

Prominent Authored Books

• Reflections on Sociology and Philippine Society, 2001
• Nation, Self, and Citizenship: An Invitation to Philippine Sociology, 2002
• David's Narrative on being Filipino: To be part of the nation and care for events of success and failures, for Filipinos did not always think that way. It took time and history for them to arrive at that conclusion

Walden Bello

• Walden Bello was a professor in the University of the Philippines Diliman from 1997-2009. Leading critics of economic globalization and key figure of movement restoring democracy and coordinating anti-martial laws and establishing Philippines Human Rights Lobby.

Prominent Authored Books

• The Pacific People and Power, 1992
• Deglobalization, 1999
• On globalization and resistance: essays from the future in the balance, 2001
• The food wars, 2009

Understanding Walden Bello's Contribution to Sociology

• Faced prison, libel, and repression as a peace organizer, human rights advocate, journalist, and public intellectual.
• His thesis focuses on the Global South.
• To Peter Berger's sociological consciousness and sociology being an individual pastime is where Randy David's sociological imagination can be traced back to. Different from other sociology scholars and Bello himself, in it's application.