The Sociological Imagination PDF

One of the most basic debates in sociology is that about the relative power of agency vs. structure. On the one hand, some people argue individual people have a great capacity for acting freely and without constraints by larger social structures. Indeed, some argue that "social systems" do not reall...

One of the most basic debates in sociology is that about the relative power of agency vs. structure. On the one hand, some people argue individual people have a great capacity for acting freely and without constraints by larger social structures. Indeed, some argue that "social systems" do not really exist at all - they are merely convenient abstractions which have no reality outside of our minds and language. If social systems do exist in some fashion, it is only as a result of the actions of free human agents. On the other side of this debate are those who argue that social systems greatly constrain, if not completely determine, the actions of individuals. [That] what we think, feel and do cannot be realistically separated [from the broader system and institutions of their society] which are completely external to and independent [from] the individual. [Today, most sociologists adopt a mixed view, and posit that both structural and agential forces must be considered when examining human behavior.] One example often used [to demonstrate this concept] is the situation experienced by members of sports team. Each player possesses some freedom to exercise their own will, but their actions are nevertheless powerfully constrained by the accepted and traditional rules of behavior which characterize their particular sport. Pressure from authority figures and peers further prevent people from doing [whatever] they want, [and serves to make behavior relatively predictable]... – Prof. Austin Cline _________ The core challenge at the center of the field of sociology is understanding the relationship between structure and agency. Structure refers to the complex and interconnected set of social forces, relationships, institutions, and elements of social structure that work together to shape the thought, behavior, experiences, choices, and overall life courses of people. In contrast, agency is the power people have to think for themselves and act in ways that shape their [individual] experiences and life trajectories… Sociologists understand the relationship between social structure and agency to be an ever-evolving dialectic. In the simplest sense, a dialectic refers to a relationship between two things, each of which has the ability to influence the other, such that a change in one requires a change in the other. To consider the relationship between structure and agency a dialectical one is to assert that while social structure shapes individuals, individuals (and groups) also shape social structure. After all, society is a social creation -- the creation and maintenance of social order require the cooperation of individuals connected through social relationships. So, while the lives of individuals are shaped by the existing social structure, they none the less have the ability -- the agency -- to make decisions and express them in their behavior. – Prof. Nicki Lisa Cole For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, [driven by] a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts… Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures – C.W. Mills The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills (1959) Chapter One: The Promise Nowadays people 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. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close- up scenes of job, family, neighborhood… And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well- being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them… Even when they do not panic, people often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? … Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap? It is not only information that they need - in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need… What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination… The first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it - is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one... We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that they live out a biography, and live it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of this living, they contribute, however minutely, to the shaping of society and to the course of its history, even as [they themselves] are made by society and by its historical push and shove. 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… Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure.' This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science. [Public issues] have to do with matters that transcend the local environments of the individual and the range of their inner life. They have to do with the organization of … the institutions of an historical society as a whole … which overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of society. An issue is a public matter … [and] it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread troubles, that it cannot very well be [understood] in terms of the immediate environments [or everyday decisions of] ordinary people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements… In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and … [can best be explained by examining] the character of the individual, his skills, [decisions] and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to [understand its causes or] find its solution within the [biography] of any one of the [jobless] individuals. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the [broader] economic, [cultural] and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals. Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and [the myriad of] other systems and institutions that bear upon them… What we experience in various and specific milieu, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes [we experience in our private lives,] we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieu. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination. “The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.” -- C.W. Mills People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. – C.W. Mills "Men are free to make history, but some men are much freer than others. Such freedom requires access to the means of decisions and of power by which history may now be made… I am [further] contending that if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and also the mere objects of history-making" -- C.W. Mills "… [Images] of democracy are still used as working justifications of power in America. Surely we must all now recognize such descriptions as more fairy tale than useful approximation. The issues that now shape man's fate are neither raised nor decided by any public at large. The idea of a society that is at bottom composed of publics and run by publics is not a matter of fact; it is the proclamation of an ideal and, as well, the assertion of a legitimating masquerading as fact.” – C. W. Mills