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Essays on Sociological Imagination

Sociological imagination essay topic examples, essay types and topics, argumentative essays.

Argumentative sociological imagination essays require you to present and defend a viewpoint on a sociological issue or concept. Consider these topic examples:

• 1. Argue for or against the idea that social media has transformed the way we form and maintain relationships, considering its impact on social interactions and personal identity.
• 2. Defend your perspective on the role of economic inequality in shaping opportunities and life outcomes, and discuss potential solutions to address this issue.

Example Introduction Paragraph for an Argumentative Sociological Imagination Essay: The sociological imagination allows us to examine how individual experiences are intertwined with larger societal forces. In this essay, I will argue that the rise of social media has redefined our notions of friendship and identity, fundamentally altering the way we connect and interact with others.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for an Argumentative Sociological Imagination Essay: In conclusion, our sociological examination of the impact of social media on relationships highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of modern social interactions. As we navigate this evolving landscape, we must consider the profound influence of technology on our lives.

Compare and Contrast Essays

Compare and contrast sociological imagination essays involve analyzing the differences and similarities between sociological concepts, theories, or societal phenomena. Consider these topics:

• 1. Compare and contrast the perspectives of functionalism and conflict theory in explaining the role of education in society, emphasizing their views on social inequality and the education system.
• 2. Analyze the differences and similarities between rural and urban communities in terms of social structure, opportunities, and challenges, highlighting the impact of location on individuals' lives.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Sociological Imagination Essay: Sociological theories provide diverse lenses through which we can analyze and understand society. In this essay, we will compare and contrast the perspectives of functionalism and conflict theory in their explanations of the role of education in shaping social inequalities and the education system.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Sociological Imagination Essay: In conclusion, the comparison and contrast of functionalism and conflict theory underscore the complexity of educational systems and their implications for social inequality. As we delve into these theories, we are reminded of the multifaceted nature of sociological analysis.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive sociological imagination essays enable you to provide detailed accounts and analysis of societal phenomena, social issues, or individual experiences. Here are some topic ideas:

• 1. Describe the impact of globalization on cultural diversity, exploring how it has shaped the cultural landscape and individuals' sense of identity.
• 2. Paint a vivid picture of the challenges faced by immigrant communities in adapting to a new cultural and social environment, emphasizing their experiences and resilience.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Descriptive Sociological Imagination Essay: The sociological imagination encourages us to delve into the intricate dynamics of society and culture. In this essay, I will immerse you in the transformative effects of globalization on cultural diversity, examining how it has redefined our identities and cultural experiences.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Descriptive Sociological Imagination Essay: In conclusion, the descriptive exploration of the impact of globalization on cultural diversity reveals the interconnectedness of our world and the evolving nature of cultural identities. As we navigate this globalized society, we are challenged to embrace diversity and promote intercultural understanding.

Persuasive Essays

Persuasive sociological imagination essays involve convincing your audience of the significance of a sociological issue, theory, or perspective, and advocating for a particular viewpoint or action. Consider these persuasive topics:

• 1. Persuade your readers of the importance of gender equality in the workplace, emphasizing the societal benefits of promoting diversity and inclusion.
• 2. Argue for the integration of sociological education into school curricula, highlighting the value of fostering sociological thinking skills for informed citizenship.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Persuasive Sociological Imagination Essay: Sociological insights have the power to shape our understanding of pressing issues. In this persuasive essay, I will make a compelling case for the significance of promoting gender equality in the workplace, underscoring its positive effects on society as a whole.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Persuasive Sociological Imagination Essay: In conclusion, the persuasive argument for gender equality in the workplace highlights the broader societal benefits of creating inclusive and diverse environments. As we advocate for change, we are reminded of the transformative potential of sociological perspectives in addressing contemporary challenges.

Narrative Essays

Narrative sociological imagination essays allow you to share personal stories, experiences, or observations related to sociological concepts, theories, or societal phenomena. Explore these narrative essay topics:

• 1. Narrate a personal experience of cultural adaptation or encountering cultural diversity, reflecting on how it has shaped your perspectives and understanding of society.
• 2. Share a story of social activism or involvement in a community project aimed at addressing a specific societal issue, highlighting the impact of collective action.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Narrative Sociological Imagination Essay: The sociological imagination encourages us to explore our personal experiences within the broader context of society. In this narrative essay, I will take you through my personal journey of encountering cultural diversity and reflect on how it has influenced my worldview and understanding of society.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Narrative Sociological Imagination Essay: In conclusion, the narrative of my cultural adaptation experience underscores the transformative power of personal encounters with diversity. As we embrace the sociological imagination, we are reminded that our stories contribute to the broader narrative of societal change.

The Sociological Imagination: C. Wright Mills Analysis

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Understanding The Concept of Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

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The concept of sociological imagination involves the ability to step outside of our familiar daily routines and examine them from a fresh and critical perspective. It encourages us to think beyond the confines of our personal experiences and consider the broader social, cultural, and historical factors that shape our lives.

The phrase was introduced by C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist, in his 1959 publication "The Sociological Imagination." Mills used this term to describe the unique perspective and understanding that sociology provides. He emphasized the importance of looking beyond individual experiences and examining the larger social structures and historical contexts that shape our lives.

The roots of sociological imagination can be traced back to earlier sociological thinkers such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, who emphasized the importance of understanding society as a whole and the impact of social structures on individuals. Throughout the years, sociological imagination has evolved and expanded, with various scholars and researchers contributing to its development. It has become a fundamental tool for sociologists to analyze social issues, explore the intersections of individual lives and societal structures, and understand the complexities of human behavior. Today, sociological imagination continues to be a crucial concept in sociology, empowering individuals to critically analyze the social world and recognize the larger societal forces that shape their lives.

The application of sociological imagination encompasses a wide range of areas and disciplines, allowing us to understand and analyze various social phenomena, such as: Social Problems: Poverty, inequality, crime, and discrimination by understanding their underlying social structures and historical contexts. Public Policy: By analyzing social issues from a sociological perspective, policymakers can develop more informed and effective solutions. It helps in understanding the impact of policies on different social groups and anticipating their consequences. Education: Sociological imagination helps educators understand how social factors influence student experiences and academic outcomes. It highlights the significance of social class, race, gender, and other dimensions of inequality in educational settings, enabling educators to create inclusive and equitable learning environments. Health and Well-being: Applying sociological imagination to health allows us to recognize how social factors such as socioeconomic status, access to healthcare, and cultural norms impact individual and community well-being. Media and Culture: Sociological imagination aids in analyzing media representations, cultural practices, and popular trends. It helps us understand how media influences public opinion, shapes cultural values, and perpetuates or challenges social norms and stereotypes.

Functionalism, Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, Structuralism, Feminist Theory, Postmodernism.

The topic of sociological imagination holds immense importance as it allows us to go beyond our individual experiences and understand the broader social forces that shape our lives. It encourages critical thinking and helps us make connections between personal troubles and societal issues. By developing sociological imagination, we gain a deeper awareness of the social structures, cultural norms, and historical contexts that influence our thoughts, actions, and relationships. Sociological imagination enables us to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and recognize the complexities of social life. It fosters empathy by helping us understand diverse perspectives and experiences. Furthermore, it empowers us to analyze social problems and inequalities, contributing to the pursuit of social justice and positive social change. The application of sociological imagination extends beyond academia, as it has practical implications for various fields such as policy-making, social work, and community development. It equips individuals with the skills to critically engage with the world, navigate complex social dynamics, and contribute to building more inclusive and equitable societies.

The topic of sociological imagination is essential for studying various social phenomena and understanding the intricate connections between individuals and society. Incorporating sociological imagination into the study process enhances critical thinking skills, expands analytical perspectives, and encourages a deeper comprehension of the social world. By utilizing sociological imagination, students can transcend individualistic explanations and recognize the broader social forces at play. It enables them to analyze social issues from multiple angles, considering historical, cultural, economic, and political factors that shape human behavior and social structures. This sociological lens challenges preconceived notions and encourages a more nuanced understanding of complex social phenomena. Moreover, the application of sociological imagination in study helps students develop empathy and cultural sensitivity by fostering an appreciation for diverse perspectives and experiences. It promotes a holistic view of society, emphasizing the interconnections between individuals and social institutions. By employing sociological imagination, students can better grasp the mechanisms of power, inequality, and social change, enabling them to contribute to informed decision-making, policy development, and social advocacy.

1. Hughes, E. C. (1963). Race relations and the sociological imagination. American Sociological Review, 879-890. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2090308) 2. Mudge, S. L., & Chen, A. S. (2014). Political parties and the sociological imagination: Past, present, and future directions. Annual Review of Sociology, 40, 305-330. (https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-071312-145632) 3. Denzin, N. K. (1990). Presidential address on the sociological imagination revisited. Sociological Quarterly, 31(1), 1-22. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1990.tb00314.x) 4. Holliday, A. (1996). Developing a sociological imagination: Expanding ethnography in international English language education. Applied Linguistics, 17(2), 234-255. (https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-abstract/17/2/234/142850) 5. Durham, D. (2000). Youth and the social imagination in Africa: Introduction to parts 1 and 2. Anthropological quarterly, 73(3), 113-120. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/35/article/2059/summary) 6. Benjamin, R. (2016). Racial fictions, biological facts: Expanding the sociological imagination through speculative methods. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. (https://oar.princeton.edu/handle/88435/pr1kc67) 7. Dannefer, D., Kelley-Moore, J., & Huang, W. (2016). Opening the social: Sociological imagination in life course studies. Handbook of the Life Course: Volume II, 87-110. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20880-0_4) 8. Horowitz, I. L. (1962). In Memoriam: The Sociological Imagination of C. Wright Mills. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/223270?journalCode=ajs)

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Have you ever wondered why your family cooks turkey on Thanksgiving? If you ask, you might get all kinds of reasons: because it’s tradition, because it tastes good, because it’s what the pilgrims ate back in the early days of America. All of those factors—taste, personal history, and world history—lead to one small action of you eating turkey on a holiday.

That’s the premise of sociological imagination. Like imagination in the more typical sense, the sociological imagination asks us to use our brains to think differently about things and consider why we do the things we do.

In this article, we’ll introduce the concept of sociological imagination, its history, how it changed the sociological field, and how you can use it every day to change your way of thinking about the world.

What Is Sociological Imagination?

The sociological imagination is a method of thinking about the world. As you may have guessed, it’s part of the field of sociology, which studies human society.

When you put “sociological”—studying society—and “imagination”—the concept of forming new ideas, often creatively—together, you get a pretty good definition of the concept: a method of thinking about both individuals and society by considering a variety of sociological contexts. 

The societal imagination encourages people to think about their lives not just on an individual level, but also considering societal, biological, and historical context. Societal context tells us about our culture—when we consider it, we think about how our desires, actions, and thoughts are shaped by our community and how that community is changing. Biological context tells us about how “human nature” impacts our desires and needs. And lastly, historical context considers our place in time; how have events of the past led up to where we are currently?

Basically, the concept of sociological imagination suggests that who you are as an individual is also the you shaped by your immediate surroundings, your family, your friends, your country, and the world as a whole. You may make individual choices about what to eat for lunch, but what you choose—a tuna sandwich, lobster ravioli, or shrimp tacos—is also determined by societal factors like where you live and what you’ve grown up eating.

To use the sociological imagination is to shift your perspective away from yourself and look at things more broadly, bringing in context to individual actions.

If you’re thinking about lunch, you’re probably more likely to choose something that’s familiar to you. In another culture or even another part of your city, a person who is very similar to you might choose a different food because of what’s familiar to them. If we zoom out a little further, we might realize that people in landlocked states might be unlikely to choose a seafood-based lunch at all because fresh fish is more expensive than it is on the coast. Zoom out more, and you might realize that fish isn’t even on the menu for some cultures because of societal taboos or restrictions.

And those are just spatial boundaries. You can also consider your family’s relationship with eating fish, or how your cultural and ethnic heritage impacted where you are, what food you have access to, and your personal tastes. All of this lets you see yourself and your culture in a new light, as a product of society and history.

In this sense, using a sociological imagination lets you look at yourself and your culture as a third-party observer. The goal is not to be dispassionate and distant, but rather to see yourself not as “natural” or “normal,” as a part of larger systems, the same way that all people are.

Why the Sociological Imagination Is Useful

Part of the appeal of using a sociological imagination is that it helps people avoid apathy . In this context, apathy refers to a sense of indifference or disinterest in examining the morality of their leaders. According to C. Wright Mills , creator of the idea of sociological imagination, if we accept that our beliefs, traditions, and actions are all normal and natural, we are less likely to interrogate when our leaders and community members do things that are immoral.

Considering sociological context allows individuals to question and change society rather than just live in it. When we understand historical and social contexts, we’re better equipped to look at our actions and the actions of our community as a result of systems—which can be changed—rather than as inherent to humanity.

In more technical terms, Mills was challenging the dominant structural functionalist approach to sociology. Structural functionalism suggests that society is composed of different structures that shape the interactions and relationships between people, and those relationships can be understood and analyzed to help us learn more about a society.

What differed for Mills and his concept of the sociological imagination was that he believed that society was not only a series of systems, but that the role of the individual should also be considered. In fact, Mills believed that social structures arise because of conflict between groups , typically the elite and the others, such as the government and the citizens or the rich and the poor.

Where Does the Term Come From?

As previously mentioned, C. Wright Mills is the origin of the term “sociological imagination.” In his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination , the Columbia University professor of sociology suggested that sociologists rethink the way they were engaging with the field. During his time, many sociologists engaged in a sort of top-down view of the world, focusing on systems rather than on individuals. Mills believed both were important, and that society should be understood as a relationship between different systems that originated in conflict.

Though his book has since been named one of the most important sociological texts of the 20th century, Mills was not popular among his contemporaries. Mills was particularly concerned with class in social spheres, particularly the elite and the military, and how conflict between the elite and the non-elite impacted the actions of individuals and vice-versa.

Mills was also opposed to the tendency of sociologists to observe rather than act. He believed that sociology was a great tool for changing the world, and believed that using the sociological imagination encouraged people of all kinds, including sociologists, to expose and respond to social injustice.

Mills referred to the tendency of sociologists to think in abstraction “grand theory.” This tendency led to sociologists of the time being more concerned with organization and taxonomy over understanding—because Mills was so concerned with the experience of the individual as well as the experience of the whole, this contributed to his feeling that the sociological field was too far removed from the actual humans that comprise society.

Because so much of Mills’ ideas of the sociological imagination were intended to bring sociologists closer to the people and their concerns, he developed a series of tenets to encourage them to think differently.

Mills’ Sociological Imagination Tips

Mills' book was all about how the sociological imagination could help society, but it wasn't only a theoretical approach.  The Sociological Imagination contained tips for sociologists as well as the general public to help them better contextualize the world!

Avoid Existing Sets of Procedures

So much of sociology was based on existing systems that Mills felt the field focused on method over humanity. To combat this, he suggested that sociologists should function as individuals and propose new theories and methodologies that could challenge and enhance established norms.

Be Clear and Concise

Mills believed that some of the academic language used in the field of sociology encouraged the sense of distance that so troubled him. Instead, he advocated that sociologists be clear and concise when possible, and that they do not couch their theories in language intended to distance themselves from society and from criticism.

Observe the Macro and Micro

Prior to Mills’ work, structural functionalism was the primary philosophy of the field. Mills disagreed with the top-down approach to sociology, and encouraged sociologists to engage with the macro, as they had been doing, in addition to the micro. He believed that history is comprised of both the big and small, and that study of each is required for a robust field.

Observe Social Structure as Well as Milieu

Building off of his last point, Mills also suggested that social structure and individual actions, which he called “milieu,” were interconnected and equally worthy of study. He explained that individual moments, as well as long spans of time, were equally necessary to understanding society.

Avoid Arbitrary Specialization

Mills advocated for a more interdisciplinary approach to sociology. Part of the sociological imagination is thinking outside of the boundaries of yourself; to do so, Mills suggested that sociologists look beyond their specialized fields toward a more comprehensive understanding.

Always Consider Humanity and History

Because so much of sociology in the time of Mills’ writing was concerned with systems, he advocated for more consideration of both humanity and history. That meant looking at human experience on an individual and societal level, as well as within a specific and broad historical context.

Understand Humanity as Historical and Social Actors

Mills wanted sociologists to consider humans as products of society, but also society as products of humanity. According to Mills, people may act on an individual basis, but their individual desires and thoughts are shaped by the society in which they live. Therefore, sociologists should consider human action as a product of not just individual desires, but also historical and social actors.

Consider Individuals in Connection with Social Issues—Public is Personal, Personal is Public

One of Mills’ biggest points was that an individual problem is often also a societal problem. He suggested that sociologists should look beyond the common discourse and find alternate explanations and considerations.

 2 In-Depth Sociological Imagination Examples

The sociological imagination can be complex to wrap your mind around, particularly if you’re not already a sociologist. When you take this idea and apply it to a specific example, however, it becomes a lot easier to understand how and why it works to broaden your horizons. As such, we've developed two in-depth sociological imagination examples to help you understand this concept.

Buying a Pair of Shoes

Let’s start with a pretty basic example—buying a pair of shoes. When you think about buying a new pair of shoes, your explanation may be fairly simple, such as that you need a new pair of shoes for a particular purpose, like running or a school dance, or that you simply like the way they look. Both of those things may be true, but using your sociological imagination takes you out of the immediacy of those to answers and encourages you to think deeper.

So let’s go with the first explanation that you need a new pair of running shoes. Our first step toward using the sociological imagination is asking yourself ‘why?’ Well, so you can go running, of course! But why do you want to go running, as opposed to any other form of exercise? Why get into exercise at all? Why new running shoes rather than used ones?

Once you start asking these questions, you can start to see how it’s not just an individual choice on your part —the decision to buy running shoes is a product of the society you live in, your economic situation, your local community, and so on. Maybe you want to go running because you want to get into shape, and your favorite Instagram profile is big into running. Maybe you recently watched a news report about heart health and realized that you need a new exercise regimen to get into shape. And maybe you’ve chosen new shoes over used ones because you have the financial means to purchase a name-brand pair.

If you were a different person in a different context—say if you lived in a poorer area, or an area with more crime, or another country where other forms of exercise are more practical or popular—you might have made different choices. If you lived in a poorer area, designer shoes may not even be available to you. If there was a lot of crime in your area, running might be an unsafe method of exercise. And if you lived in another country, maybe you’d take up biking or tai chi or bossaball.

When you consider these ideas, you can see that while you’re certainly an individual making individual decisions, those decisions are, in part, shaped by the context you live in. That’s using your sociological imagination—you’re seeing how the personal decision of buying a pair of running shoes is also public, in that what is available to you, what societal pressures you experience, and what you feel are all shaped by your surroundings.

Who People Choose to Marry

Marriage for love is the norm in American culture, so we assume that the same is true and always has been true. Why else would anybody marry?

When we use our sociological imaginations, we can figure it out. You might get married to your partner because you love them, but why else might you get married? Well, it can make your taxes simpler, or make you more qualified to get a home loan. If your partner is from another country, it might help them stay within the US. So even in the United States, where marriage is typically thought of as a commitment of love, there are multiple other reasons you might get married.

Throughout history, marriage was a means to make alliances or acquire property, usually with a woman as a bargaining chip. Love wasn’t even part of the equation—in fact, in ancient Rome one politician was ousted from the Senate for having the gall to kiss his wife in public .

It wasn’t until the 17th and 18th centuries that love became a reason to marry, thanks to the Enlightenment idea that lives should be dedicated to pursuing happiness. But at that point, women were still seen more like property than people—it wasn’t until the women’s rights movements of the 1900s that American women advocated for their own equality in marriage.

In other cultures, polygamy might be acceptable, or people might have arranged marriages, where a person’s family chooses their spouse for them. That sounds strange to us, but only because in our culture the norm is marrying for love, with other reasons, such as financial or immigration concerns, being secondary.

So even for an individual, there might be multiple factors at play in the decision to be made. You may never articulate these desires because getting married for love is our cultural norm (and it wouldn’t sound very good in a wedding speech), but these kinds of considerations do have subconscious effects on our decision-making.

Sociological Imagination in the Sociology Community

As you might have gathered from the numerous challenges Mills’ concept of the sociological imagination posed to established practices, he wasn’t a super popular figure in sociology during his time.

Many sociologists were resistant to Mills’ suggested changes to the field. In fact, Mills is sometimes heralded to be ahead of his time , as the values he espoused about human connection and societal issues were prominent thoughts in the 1960s, just after his death. 

One of his former students wrote about how Mills stood in contrast to other sociologists of the era, saying:

“Mills’s very appearance was a subject of controversy. In that era of cautious professors in gray flannel suits he came roaring into Morningside Heights on his BMW motorcycle, wearing plaid shirts, old jeans and work boots, carrying his books in a duffel bag strapped across his broad back. His lectures matched the flamboyance of his personal image, as he managed to make entertaining the heavyweight social theories of Mannheim, Ortega and Weber. He shocked us out of our Silent Generation torpor by pounding his desk and proclaiming that every man should build his own house (as he himself did a few years later) and that, by God, with the proper study, we should each be able to build our own car! “Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps,” Mills wrote in the opening sentence of The Sociological Imagination, and I can hear him saying it as he paced in front of the class, speaking not loudly now but with a compelling sense of intrigue, as if he were letting you in on a powerful secret.”

Though Mills’ philosophy is hugely important to today’s sociology field, his skewering of power and the myopic nature of his era’s academics didn’t make him many friends .

However, as time has gone on, the field has come to regard him differently. His challenge to the field helped reshape it into something that is concerned with the macro as well as the micro. Conversations—even negative ones—about Mills’ proposals helped circulate his ideas, leading to The Sociological Imagination eventually being voted as the second most important sociological text of the 20th century .

How to Apply Sociological Imagination to Your Own Life

The great thing about sociological imagination is that you don’t need to be a trained sociologist to do it. You don’t need a huge vocabulary or a deep understanding of sociological texts—just the willingness to step outside of your own viewpoint and consider the world in context.

This helps you escape your own perspective and think about the world differently. That can mean you’re able to make decisions less tinged with cultural bias—maybe you don’t need those expensive running shoes after all.

To train your sociological imagination, get into the habit of asking questions about behavior that seems “normal” to you. Why do you think it’s normal? Where did you learn it? Are there places it may not be seen as normal?

Consider a relatively common tradition like Christmas, for example. Even if you don’t come from a particularly religious family, you may still celebrate the holiday because it’s common in our society. Why is that? Well, it could be that it’s a tradition. But where did that tradition come from? Probably from your ancestors, who may have been more devout than your current family. You can trace this kind of thinking backward and consider your personal history, your family history, and the surrounding cultural context (not all cultures celebrate Christmas, of course!) to understand how something that feels “normal” got to that state.

But cultural context isn’t the only important part of the sociological imagination—Mills also suggested that sociologists should consider the personal and the public, as well. When you come upon something that seems like a personal issue, think about it in a societal context. Why might that person behave the way that they do? Are there societal causes that might contribute to their situation?

A common example of this is the idea of unemployment. If you are unemployed, you may feel simultaneous feelings of frustration, unease, and even self-loathing. Many people blame themselves for their lack of a job, but there are societal factors at play, too. For example, there may simply be no jobs available nearby, particularly if you’re trained in a specific field or need to hit a certain income level to care for your family. You may have been laid off due to poor profits, or even because you live in a place where it’s legal to terminate employment based on sexuality or gender identity. You may be unable to find work because you’re spending so much time caring for your family that you simply don’t have time to apply for many jobs.

So while unemployment may seem like a personal issue, there are actually lots of societal issues that can contribute to it. Mills’ philosophy asks us to consider both in conversation with one another—it’s not that individuals have no free will, but rather that each person is a product of their society as well as an individual.

What’s Next?

Psychology, like sociology, can give us insight into human behavior. If you're thinking of studying psychology in the future, this list of psychology master's programs can give you a great look at which colleges have the best programs!

Sociology can even help you understand works of literature, like The Great Gatsby ! Learn more about F. Scott Fitzgerald's take on the American Dream from our guide.

A good understanding of history is one of the core pieces to a good sociological imagination. To improve your historical knowledge, consider these high school history classes you should take !

Melissa Brinks graduated from the University of Washington in 2014 with a Bachelor's in English with a creative writing emphasis. She has spent several years tutoring K-12 students in many subjects, including in SAT prep, to help them prepare for their college education.

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What Is Sociological Imagination: Definition & Examples

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• The term sociological imagination describes the type of insight offered by sociology; connecting the problems of individuals to that of broader society.
• C. Wright Mills, the originator of the term, contended that both sociologists and non-academics can develop a deep understanding of how the events of their own lives (their biography) relate to the history of their society. He outlined a list of methods through which both groups could do so.
• Mills believed that American society suffered from the fundamental problems of alienation, moral insensibility, threats to democracy, threats to human freedom, and conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason, and that the development of the sociological imagination could counter these.

What is Sociological Imagination?

Sociological imagination, an idea that first emerged in C. Wright Mills’ book of the same name, is the ability to connect one’s personal challenges to larger social issues.

The sociological imagination is the ability to link the experience of individuals to the social processes and structures of the wider world.

It is this ability to examine the ways that individuals construct the social world and how the social world and how the social world impinges on the lives of individuals, which is the heart of the sociological enterprise.

This ability can be thought of as a framework for understanding social reality, and describes how sociology is relevant not just to sociologists, but to those seeking to understand and build empathy for the conditions of daily life.

When the sociological imagination is underdeveloped or absent in large groups of individuals for any number of reasons, Mills believed that fundamental social issues resulted.

Sociological Imagination Theory

C. Wright Mills established the concept of sociological imagination in the 20th century.

Mills believed that: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” the daily lives of society’s members and the history of a society and its issues.

He referred to the problems that occur in everyday life, or biography, as troubles and the problems that occur in society, or history, as issues.

Mills ultimately created a framework intended to help individuals realize the relationship between personal experiences and greater society (Elwell, 2002).

Before Mill, sociologists tended to focus on understanding how sociological systems worked, rather than exploring individual issues. Mills, however, pointed out that these sociologists, functionalists chief among them, ignored the role of the individual within these systems.

In essence, Mills claimed in his book, The Sociological Imagination , that research had come to be guided more by the requirements of administrative concerns than by intellectual ones.

He critiqued sociology for focusing on accumulating facts that only served to facilitate the administrative decisions of, for example, governments.

Mills believed that, to truly fulfill the promise of social science, sociologists and laypeople alike had to focus on substantial, society-wide problems, and relate those problems to the structural and historical features of the society and culture that they navigated (Elwell, 2002).

Mills’ Guidelines for Social Scientists

In the appendix of The Sociological Imagination, Mills set forth several guidelines that would lead to “intellectual craftsmanship.” These are, paraphrased (Mills, 2000; Ellwell, 2002):

Scholars should not split work from life, because both work and life are in unity.

Scholars should keep a file, or a collection, of their own personal, professional, and intellectual experiences.

Scholars should engage in a continual review of their thoughts and experiences.

Scholars may find a truly bad sociological book to be as intellectually stimulating and conducive to thinking as a good one.

Scholars must have an attitude of playfulness toward phrases, words, and ideas, as well as a fierce drive to make sense of the world.

The sociological imagination is stimulated when someone assumes a willingness to view the world from the perspective of others.

Sociological investigators should not be afraid, in the preliminary and speculative stages of their research, to think in terms of imaginative extremes, and,

Scholars should not hesitate to express ideas in language that is as simple and direct as possible. Ideas are affected by how they are expressed. When sociological perspectives are expressed in deadening language, they create a deadened sociological imagination.

Mills’ Original Social Problems

Mills identified five main social problems in American society: alienation , moral insensibility, threats to democracy, threats to human freedom, and the conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason (Elwell, 2015).

1. Threats to Democracy and Freedom

The end result of these problems of alienation, political indifference, and the economic and political concentration of power, according to Mills, is a serious threat to democracy and freedom.

He believed that, as bureaucratic organizations became large and more centralized, more and more power would be placed into the hands of a small elite (Elwell, 2006).

2. Alienation

Mills believed that alienation is deeply rooted in how work itself works in society; however, unlike Marx, C. Wright Mills does not attribute alienation solely to the means of production, but to the modern division of labor .

Mills observed that, on the whole, jobs are broken up into simple, functional tasks with strict standards. Machines or unskilled workers take over the most tedious tasks (Elwell, 2002).

As the office was automated, Mills argued, authority and job autonomy became the attributes of only those highest in the work hierarchy. Most workers are discouraged from using their own judgment, and their decision-making forces them to comply with the strict rules handed down by others.

In this loss of autonomy, the average worker becomes alienated from their intellectual capacities and work becomes an enforced chore (Elwell, 2015).

3. Moral Insensibility

The second major problem that C. Wright Mills identified in modern American society was that of moral insensibility. He pointed out that, as people had lost faith in their leaders in government, religion, and the workplace, they became apathetic.

He considered this apathy a “spiritual condition” that underlined many problems — namely, moral insensibility. As a result of moral insensibility, people within society accept atrocities, such as genocide, committed by their leaders.

Mills considered the source of cruelty to be moral insensibility and, ultimately, the underdevelopment of the sociological imagination (Elwell, 2002).

4. Personal Troubles

Personal troubles are the issues that people experience within their own character, and in their immediate relationships with others. Mills believed that people function in their personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within their control.

As a result, people have some issue on the outcomes of events on a personal level. For example, an individual employee who spends most of his work time browsing social media or online shopping may lose their job. This is a personal problem.

However, hundreds of thousands of employees being laid-off en masse constitutes a larger social issue (Mills, 2000).

5. Social and Public Issues

Social and public issues, meanwhile, are beyond one”s personal control. These issues pertain to the organization and processes of society, rather than individuals. For example, universities may, as a whole, overcharge students for their education.

This may be the result of decades of competition and investment into each school”s administration and facilities, as well as the narrowing opportunities for those without a college degree.

In this situation, it becomes impossible for large segments of the population to get a tertiary education without accruing large and often debilitating amounts of debt (Mills, 2000).

The sociological imagination allows sociologists to distinguish between the personal and sociological aspects of problems in the lives of everyone.

Most personal problems are not exclusively personal issues; instead, they are influenced and affected by a variety of social norms, habits, and expectations. Indeed, there is often confusion as to what differentiates personal problems and social issues (Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009).

For example, a heroin addiction may be blamed on the reckless and impulsive choices of an addict. However, this approach fails to account for the societal factors and history that led to high rates of heroin addiction, such as the over-prescribing of opiate painkillers by doctors and the dysregulation of pharmaceutical companies in the United States.

Sociological imagination is useful for both sociologists and those encountering problems in their everyday lives. When people lack in sociological imagination, they become vulnerable to apathy: considering the beliefs, actions, and traditions around them to be natural and unavoidable.

This can cause moral insensitivity and ultimately the commitment of cruel and unjust acts by those guided not by their own consciousness, but the commands of an external body (Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009).

Fast Fashion

Say that someone is buying themselves a new shirt. Usually, the person buying the shirt would be concerned about their need for new clothing and factors such as the price, fabric, color, and cut of the shirt.

At a deeper level, the personal problem of buying a shirt may provoke someone to ask themselves what they are buying the shirt for, where they would wear it, and why they would participate in an activity where they would wear the shirt over instead of some other activity.

People answer these questions on a personal level through considering a number of different factors. For example, someone may think about how much they make, and how much they can budget for clothing, the stores available in the community, and the styles popular in one”s area (Joy et al., 2012).

On a larger level, however, the questions and answers to the question of what shirt to buy — or even if to buy a shirt at all — would differ if someone were provided a different context and circumstances.

For example, if someone had come into a sudden sum of wealth, they may choose to buy an expensive designer shirt or quit the job that required them to buy the shirt altogether. If someone had lived in a community with many consignment shops, they may be less likely to buy a new shirt and more likely to buy one that was pre-owned.

If there were a cultural dictate that required people to, say, cover their shoulders or breasts — or the opposite, someone may buy a more or less revealing shirt.

On an even higher level, buying a shirt also represents an opportunity to connect the consumption habits of individuals and groups to larger issues.

The lack of proximity of communities to used-clothing stores on a massive scale may encourage excessive consumption, leading to environmental waste in pollution. The competition between retailers to provide the cheapest and most fashionable shirts possible results in, as many have explored, the exploitation of garment workers in exporting countries and large amounts of co2 output due to shipping.

Although an individual can be blamed or not blamed for buying a shirt made more or less sustainably or ethically, a discussion of why an individual bought a certain shirt cannot be complete without a consideration of the larger factors that influence their buying patterns (Joy et al., 2012).

The “Global Economic Crisis”

Dinerstein, Schwartz, and Taylor (2014)  used the 2008 economic crisis as a case study of the concept of sociological imagination, and how sociology and other social sciences had failed to adequately understand the crisis.

The 2008 global economic crisis led to millions of people around the world losing their jobs. On the smallest level, individuals were unable to sustain their lifestyles.

Someone who was laid off due to the economic downturn may have become unable to make their mortgage or car payments, leading to a bank foreclosing their house or repossessing their car.

This person may also be unable to afford groceries, need to turn to a food bank, or have credit card debt to feed themselves and their families. As a result, this person may damage their credit score, restricting them from, say, taking out a home ownership loan in the future.

The sociological imagination also examines issues like the great recession at a level beyond these personal problems. For example, a sociologist may look at how the crisis resulted from the accessibility of and increasing pressure to buy large and normally unaffordable homes in the United States.

Some sociologists, Dinerstein, Schwartz, and Taylor among them, even looked at the economic crisis as unveiling the social issue of how academics do sociology. For example, Dinerstein, Schwatz, and Taylor point out that the lived experience of the global economic crisis operated under gendered and racialized dynamics.

Many female immigrant domestic laborers, for example, lost their jobs in Europe and North America as a result of the crisis.

While the things that sociologists had been studying about these populations up until that point — migration and return — are significant, the crisis brought a renewed focus in sociology into investigating how the negative effects of neoliberal globalization and the multiple crises already impacting residents of the global South compound during recessions (Spitzer & Piper, 2014).

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Joy, A., Sherry Jr, J. F., Venkatesh, A., Wang, J., & Chan, R. (2012). Fast fashion, sustainability, and the ethical appeal of luxury brands. Fashion theory, 16 (3), 273-295.

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Spitzer, D. L., & Piper, N. (2014). Retrenched and returned: Filipino migrant workers during times of crisis. Sociology, 48 (5), 1007-1023.

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1.2: The Sociological Imagination

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Learning Objectives

• Discuss C. Wright Mills’ claim concerning the importance of the “sociological imagination” for individuals

The Sociological Imagination

Early sociological theorists, like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, were concerned with the phenomena they believed to be driving social change in their time. Naturally, in pursuing answers to these large questions, they received intellectual stimulation. These founders of sociology were some of the earliest individuals to employ what C. Wright Mills (a prominent mid-20 th century American sociologist) would later call the sociological imagination: the ability to situate personal troubles and life trajectories within an informed framework of larger social processes. The term sociological imagination describes the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology. While scholars have quarreled over interpretations of the phrase, it is also sometimes used to emphasize sociology’s relevance in daily life.

C. Wright Mills

In describing the sociological imagination, Mills asserted the following. “What people 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. 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. ” Mills believed in the power of the sociological imagination to connect “personal troubles to public issues. ”

As Mills saw it, the sociological imagination helped individuals cope with the social world by enabling them to step outside their own, personal, self-centered view of the world. By employing the sociological imagination, individual people are forced to perceive, from an objective position, events and social structures that influence behavior, attitudes, and culture.

In the decades after Mills, other scholars have employed the term to describe the sociological approach in a more general way. Another way of defining the sociological imagination is the understanding that social outcomes are shaped by social context, actors, and actions.

• Because they tried to understand the larger processes that were affecting their own personal experience of the world, it might be said that the founders of sociology, like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, exercised what C. Wright Mills later called the sociological imagination.
• C. Wright Mills, a prominent mid-20th century American sociologist, described the sociological imagination as the ability to situate personal troubles and life trajectories within an informed framework of larger social processes.
• Other scholars after Mills have employed the phrase more generally, as the type of insight offered by sociology and its relevance in daily life. Another way of describing sociological imagination is the understanding that social outcomes are shaped by social context, actors, and social actions.
• the sociological imagination : Coined by C. Wright Mills, the sociological imagination is the ability to situate personal troubles and life trajectories within an informed framework of larger social processes.

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Towards a sociology of imagination

• Published: 08 September 2020
• Volume 50 , pages 357–380, ( 2021 )

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• Todd Nicholas Fuist   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0375-3238 1  

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Cultural sociologists have devised numerous theoretical tools for analyzing meaning making among individuals and groups. Yet, the cognitive processes which underpin these theories of meaning making are often bracketed out. Drawing on three different qualitative research projects, respectively on activists, religious communities, and gamers, this article synthesizes work in sociology, psychology, and philosophy, to develop a sociology of imagination. Current work highlights that (1) imagination is a higher order mental function, (2) powerful in its effects, which (3) facilitates intersubjectivity, and (4) is socially constructive. However, sociology can additionally contribute to scholarly understandings of imagination, which have often focused on individualistic mental imaging, by highlighting the degree to which (a) imagination allows individuals and groups to coordinate identities, actions, and futures, (b) imagination relies on widely shared cultural elements, and (c) imagination is often undertaken collectively, in groups. The article concludes with suggestions for future sociological work on imagination.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to Courtney Ann Irby, Meghan Burke, and Jack Delehanty, as well as the reviewers and editors at Theory and Society, for useful comments on this work.

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Appendix: Names and description of groups in studies one and two

Study 1: A “moderate” liberal group called College Liberals, two “radical” groups called Urban Anarchists and Radical Media Alliance, and a community group called Neighborhood Organizers. All names of groups are pseudonyms,

Study 2: The congregations were (1) Dignity/Chicago, an LGBT-identified Catholic church; (2) Emerald City Metropolitan Community Church, a nondenominational LGBT-identified congregation; (3) Mind Body Soul Church*, an African Methodist Episcopal congregation, (4) Neighborhood Church*, a nondenominational, multiracial congregation; and (5) Welcome and Shalom Synagogue*; an LGBT-identified Jewish Temple. The communes were (1) Jesus People USA and (2) Reba Place Fellowship. The nonprofit organizations were (1) Cornerstone Community Outreach, a homeless shelter and (2) Sharing Love and Faith*, a shelter and community organization. Groups with asterisks are pseudonyms.

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Fuist, T.N. Towards a sociology of imagination. Theor Soc 50 , 357–380 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09416-y

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Accepted : 01 September 2020

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09416-y

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1 Module 1: Society, Culture and the Sociological Imagination

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish between the concepts of society and culture and discuss the relationship between them
• Describe the different levels of analysis in sociology: micro-level sociology, meso-level sociology, macro-level sociology, and global-level sociology
• Elaborate the meaning of the sociological imagination
• Explain why the relationship between the individual and society is a challenging problem within sociology
• Compare ways of understanding the evolution of types of societies
• Describe the difference between pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial and post-natural societies
• Discuss how a societies relationship to the environment is related to societal development
• Explain why it is worthwhile to study sociology.
• Identify ways sociology is applied in the real world.

1.0 Introduction to Society, Culture and Sociology

A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. In practical, everyday terms, societies consist of various types of institutional constraint and coordination exercised over our choices and actions. The type of society we live in determines the nature of these types of constraint and coordination. The nature of our social institutions, the type of work we do, the way we think about ourselves and the structures of power and social inequality that order our life chances are all products of the type of society we live in and thus vary globally and historically.

A culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms, and artifacts.  Humans are social creatures. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens , nearly 200,000 years ago, people have grouped together into communities in order to survive. Living together, people developed forms of cooperation which created the common habits, behaviours, and ways of life known as culture — from specific methods of childrearing to preferred techniques for obtaining food. Peter Berger (b. 1929) argued that this is the result of a fundamental human predicament (1967). Unlike other animals, humans lack the biological programming to live on their own. They require an extended period of dependency in order to survive in the environment. The creation of culture makes this possible by providing a protective shield against the harsh impositions of nature. Culture provides the ongoing stability that enables human existence. This means, however, that the human environment is not nature per se but culture itself.

Over the history of humanity, this has lead to an incredible diversity in how humans have imagined and lived life on Earth, the sum total of which Wade Davis (b. 1953) has called the  ethnosphere .   The ethnosphere is the entirety of all cultures’ “ways of thinking, ways of being, and ways of orienting oneself on the Earth” (Davis, 2007). It is our collective cultural heritage as a species. A single culture, as the sphere of meanings shared by a single social group, is the means by which that group makes sense of the world and of each other. But there are many cultures and many ways of making sense of the world. Through a multiplicity of cultural inventions, human societies have adapted to the environmental and biological conditions of human existence in many different ways.

This raises the distinction between the terms “culture” and “society” and how we conceptualize the relationship between them. In everyday conversation, people rarely distinguish between these terms, but they have slightly different meanings, and the distinction is important to how we examine them. As indicated above, a culture represents the beliefs, practices, and material artifacts of a group, while a society represents the social structures, processes, and organization of the people who share those beliefs, practices, and material artifacts. Neither society nor culture could exist without the other, but we can separate them analytically.

Sociology  is the systematic study of society and social interaction. The word “sociology” is derived from the Latin word socius (companion) and the Greek word logos (speech or reason), which together mean “reasoned speech or discourse about companionship”. How can the experience of companionship or togetherness be put into words or explained? While this is a starting point for the discipline, sociology is actually much more complex. It uses many different theories and methods to study a wide range of subject matter, and applies these studies to the real world. A selection of these different theories and methods and their application to various social phenomena will be examined in subsequent modules.

Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society and the relationship of society and culture. One sociologist might analyze video of people from different societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run. Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the end of the colonial era.

These examples illustrate the ways in which society and culture can be studied at different levels of analysis , from the detailed study of face-to-face interactions to the examination of large-scale historical processes affecting entire civilizations. It is common to divide these levels of analysis into different gradations based on the scale of interaction involved. In general, sociologists break the study of society down into four separate levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global.

The study of cultural rules of politeness in conversation is an example of micro-level sociology. At the micro- level of analysis, the focus is on the social dynamics of intimate, face-to-face interactions. Research is conducted with a specific set of individuals such as conversational partners, family members, work associates, or friendship groups. In the conversation study example, sociologists might try to determine how people from different cultures interpret each others’ behaviour to see how different rules of politeness lead to misunderstandings. If the same misunderstandings occur consistently in a number of different interactions, the sociologists may be able to propose some generalizations about rules of politeness that would be helpful in reducing tensions in mixed-group dynamics (e.g., during staff meetings or international negotiations). Other examples of micro-level research include seeing how informal networks become a key source of support and advancement in formal bureaucracies, or how loyalty to criminal gangs is established.  The micro and meso levels of sociological analysis are explored in greater detail within Sociology 112.

Macro -level sociology focuses on the properties of large-scale, society-wide social interactions that extend beyond the immediate milieu of individual interactions: the dynamics of institutions, class structures, gender relations, or whole populations. The example above of the influence of migration on changing patterns of language usage is a macro-level phenomenon because it refers to structures or processes of social interaction that occur outside or beyond the intimate circle of individual social acquaintances. These include the economic, political, and other circumstances that lead to migration; the educational, media, and other communication structures that help or hinder the spread of speech patterns; the class, racial, or ethnic divisions that create different slangs or cultures of language use; the relative isolation or integration of different communities within a population; and so on. Other examples of macro-level research include examining why women are far less likely than men to reach positions of power in society, or why fundamentalist Christian religious movements play a more prominent role in American politics than they do in Canadian politics. In each case, the site of the analysis shifts away from the nuances and detail of micro-level interpersonal life to the broader, macro-level systematic patterns that structure social change and social cohesion in society.

In global- level sociology, the focus is on structures and processes that extend beyond the boundaries of states or specific societies. As Ulrich Beck (2000) has pointed out, in many respects we no longer “live and act in the self-enclosed spaces of national states and their respective national societies.” Issues of climate change, the transmission of pathogens, the introduction of new technologies, the investment and disinvestment of capital, the images of popular culture, or the tensions of cross-cultural conflict, etc. increasingly involve our daily life in the affairs of the entire globe, by-passing traditional borders and, to some degree, distance itself. The example above of the way in which the world became divided into wealthy First World and impoverished Third World societies reflects social processes — the formation of international institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and non-governmental organizations, etc. — which are global in scale and global in their effects. With the boom and bust of petroleum or other export commodity economies, it is clear to someone living in Fort McMurray, Alberta, that their daily life is affected not only by their intimate relationships with the people around them, nor only by provincial and national based corporations and policies, etc., but by global markets that determine the price of oil and the global flows of capital investment. The context of these processes has to be examined at a global scale of analysis. The macro and global levels of sociological analysis are a primary focus of Sociology 111 and will be examined in greater depth in subsequent modules in this course.

The relationship, between the micro, meso, macro, and global remains one of the key conceptual problems confronting sociology. What is the relationship between an individual’s life and social life? The early German sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out that macro-level processes are in fact nothing more than the sum of all the unique interactions between specific individuals at any one time (1908/1971), yet they have properties of their own which would be missed if sociologists only focused on the interactions of specific individuals. Émile Durkheim’s classic study of suicide (1897/1951) is a case in point. While suicide is one of the most personal, individual, and intimate acts imaginable, Durkheim demonstrated that rates of suicide differed between religious communities — Protestants, Catholics, and Jews — in a way that could not be explained by the individual factors involved in each specific case. The different rates of suicide had to be explained by macro-level variables associated with the different religious beliefs and practices of the faith communities; more specifically, the different degrees of social integration of these communities. We will return to this example in more detail later. On the other hand, macro-level phenomena like class structures, institutional organizations, legal systems, gender stereotypes, population growth, and urban ways of life provide the shared context for everyday life but do not explain its specific nuances and micro-variations very well. Macro-level structures constrain the daily interactions of the intimate circles in which we move, but they are also filtered through localized perceptions and “lived” in a myriad of inventive and unpredictable ways.

1.1 The Sociological Imagination

Although the scale of sociological studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, the sociologists involved in them all have something in common. Each of them looks at society using what pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) called the sociological imagination , sometimes also referred to as the “sociological lens” or “sociological perspective.” In a sense, this was Mills’ way of addressing the dilemmas of the macro/micro divide in sociology. Mills defined sociological imagination as how individuals understand their own and others’ lives in relation to history and social structure (1959/2000). It is the capacity to see an individual’s private troubles in the context of the broader social processes that structure them. This enables the sociologist to examine what Mills called “personal troubles of milieu” as “public issues of social structure,” and vice versa.

Mills reasoned that private troubles like being overweight, being unemployed, having marital difficulties, or feeling purposeless or depressed can be purely personal in nature. It is possible for them to be addressed and understood in terms of personal, psychological, or moral attributes — either one’s own or those of the people in one’s immediate milieu. In an individualistic society like our own, this is in fact the most likely way that people will regard the issues they confront: “I have an addictive personality;” “I can’t get a break in the job market;” “My husband is unsupportive,” etc. However, if private troubles are widely shared with others, they indicate that there is a common social problem that has its source in the way social life is structured. At this level, the issues are not adequately understood as simply private troubles. They are best addressed as public issues that require a collective response to resolve.

Obesity, for example, has been increasingly recognized as a growing problem for both children and adults in North America. Michael Pollan cites statistics that three out of five Americans are overweight and one out of five is obese (2006). In Canada in 2012, just under one in five adults (18.4%) were obese, up from 16% of men and 14.5% of women in 2003 (Statistics Canada, 2013). Obesity is therefore not simply a private concern related to the medical issues, dietary practices, or exercise habits of specific individuals. It is a widely shared social issue that puts people at risk for chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also creates significant social costs for the medical system.

Pollan argues that obesity is in part a product of the increasingly sedentary and stressful lifestyle of modern, capitalist society. More importantly, however, it is a product of the industrialization of the food chain, which since the 1970s has produced increasingly cheap and abundant food with significantly more calories due to processing. Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper and therefore more profitable to produce than natural sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the 1980s. As Pollan argues, trying to find a processed food in the supermarket without a cheap, calorie-rich, corn-based additive is a challenge. The sociological imagination in this example is the capacity to see the private troubles and attitudes associated with being overweight as an issue of how the industrialization of the food chain has altered the human/environment relationship — in particular, with respect to the types of food we eat and the way we eat them.

By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens, sociologists are able to examine what influences behaviour, attitudes, society and culture. By applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so without letting their own biases and preconceived ideas influence their conclusions.

1.1.1 Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society

All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in a vacuum. Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over another. Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the behaviour of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal pressures. When general patterns persist through time and become habitual or routinized at micro-levels of interaction, or institutionalized at macro or global levels of interaction, they are referred to as social structures.

As we noted above, understanding the relationship between the individual and society is one of the most difficult sociological problems. Partly this is because of the reified way these two terms are used in everyday speech. Reification refers to the way in which abstract concepts, complex processes, or mutable social relationships come to be thought of as “things.” A prime example of reification is when people say that “society” caused an individual to do something, or to turn out in a particular way. In writing essays, first-year sociology students sometimes refer to “society” as a cause of social behaviour or as an entity with independent agency. On the other hand, the “individual” is a being that seems solid, tangible, and independent of anything going on outside of the skin sack that contains its essence. This conventional distinction between society and the individual is a product of reification, as both society and the individual appear as independent objects. A concept of “the individual” and a concept of “society” have been given the status of real, substantial, independent objects. As we will see in the modules to come, society and the individual are neither objects, nor are they independent of one another. An “individual” is inconceivable without the relationships to others that define their internal, subjective life and their external, socially-defined roles.

One problem for sociologists is that these concepts of the individual and society, and the relationship between them, are thought of in terms established by a very common moral framework in modern democratic societies — namely, that of individual responsibility and individual choice. The individual is morally responsible for their behaviours and decisions. Often in this framework, any suggestion that an individual’s behaviour needs to be understood in terms of that person’s social context is dismissed as “letting the individual off” for taking personal responsibility for their actions. Talking about society is akin to being morally soft or lenient.

Sociology, as a social science, remains neutral on these types of moral questions. For sociologists, the conceptualization of the individual and society is much more complex than the moral framework suggests and needs to be examined through evidence-based, rather than morality-based, research. The sociological problem is to be able to see the individual as a thoroughly social being and, yet, as a being who has agency and free choice. Individuals are beings who do take on individual responsibilities in their everyday social roles, and risk social consequences when they fail to live up to them. However, the manner in which individuals take on responsibilities, and sometimes the compulsion to do so, are socially defined. The sociological problem is to be able to see society as: a dimension of experience characterized by regular and predictable patterns of behaviour that exist independently of any specific individual’s desires or self-understanding. At the same time, a society is nothing but the ongoing social relationships and activities of specific individuals.

A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and society are inseparable. It is impossible to study one without the other. German sociologist Norbert Elias (1887-1990) called the process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of individuals and the society that shapes that behaviour figuration . He described it through a metaphor of dancing. There can be no dance without the dancers, but there can be no dancers without the dance. Without the dancers, a dance is just an idea about motions in a choreographer’s head. Without a dance, there is just a group of people moving around a floor. Similarly, there is no society without the individuals that make it up, and there are also no individuals who are not affected by the society in which they live (Elias, 1978).

1.2 Understanding The Evolution of Types of Societies

The founder of sociology, August Comte (1798–1857), provided the first sociological theory of the evolution of human societies. His best known sociological theory was the law of three stages , which held that all human societies and all forms of human knowledge evolve through three distinct stages from primitive to advanced: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. The key variable in defining these stages was the way a people conceptualized causation or how they understood their place in the world.

In the theological stage, humans explain causes in terms of the will of anthropocentric gods (the gods cause things to happen). In the metaphysical stage, humans explain causes in terms of abstract, “speculative” ideas like nature, natural rights, social contracts, or “self-evident” truths. This was the basis of Comte’s critique of the Enlightenment philosophers whose ideas about natural rights and freedoms had led to the French Revolution but also to the chaos of its aftermath. In his view, the “negative” or metaphysical knowledge of the philosophers was based on dogmatic ideas that could not be reconciled when they were in contradiction. This lead to inevitable conflict and moral anarchy. Finally, in the positive stage, humans explain causes in terms of positivist, scientific observations and laws (i.e., “positive” knowledge based on propositions limited to what can be empirically observed). Comte believed that this would be the final stage of human social evolution because positivist science could empirically determine how society should be organized. Science could reconcile the division between political factions of order and progress by eliminating the basis for moral and intellectual anarchy. The application of positive philosophy would lead to the unification of society and of the sciences (Comte, 1830/1975).

Karl Marx offered another model for understanding the evolution of types of society. Marx argued that the evolution of societies from primitive to advanced was not a product of the way people thought, as Comte proposed,   but of the power struggles in each epoch between different social classes over control of property. The key variable in his analysis was the different modes of production or “material bases” that characterized different forms of society: from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to industrial production.  This historical materialist approach to understanding society explains both social change and the development of human ideas in terms of underlying changes in the  mode of production. In other words the type of society and its level of development is determined principally by how a people produces the material goods needed to meet its needs. Their world view, including the concepts of causality described by Comte, followed from the way of thinking involved in the society’s mode of production.

On this basis, Marx categorized the historical types of society into primitive communism, agrarian/slave societies, feudalism, and capitalism.  Primitive communists, for example, are hunter gatherers like the Haida whose social institutions and worldview develop in sync with their hunting and gathering relationship to the environment and its resources. They are defined by their hunter-gatherer mode of production.

Marx went on to argue that the historical transformations from one type of society to the next are generated by the society’s capacity to generate economic surpluses and the conflicts and tensions that develop when one class monopolizes economic power or property: land owners over agricultural workers, slave owners over slaves, feudal lords over serfs, or capitalists over labourers. These class dynamics are inherently unstable and eventually lead to revolutionary transformations from one mode of production to the next.

To simplify Comte’s and Marx’s schemas, we might examine the way different types of society are structured around their relationship to nature. Sociologist Gerhard Lenski (1924-2015) defined societies in terms of their technological sophistication. With each advance in technology the relationship between humans and nature is altered. Societies with rudimentary technology are at the mercy of the fluctuations of their environment, while societies with industrial technology have more control over their environment, and thus develop different cultural and social features. On the other hand, societies with rudimentary technology make relatively little impact on their environment, while industrial societies transform it radically. The changes in the relationship between humans and their environment in fact goes beyond technology to encompass all aspects of social life, including its mental life (Comte) and material life (Marx). Distinctions based on the changing nature of this relationship enable sociologists to describe societies along a spectrum: from the foraging societies that characterized the first 90,000 years of human existence to the contemporary postnatural, anthropocene societies in which human activity has made a substantial impact on the global ecosystem.

1.2.1 Preindustrial Societies

Before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of machines, societies were small, rural, and dependent largely on local resources. Economic production was limited to the amount of labour a human being could provide, and there were few specialized occupations. Production was (for the most part) for immediate consumption, although evidence of trade between groups also goes back to the earliest archaeological records. The very first occupation was that of hunter-gatherer.

Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Of the various types of preindustrial societies, Hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate the strongest dependence on the environment. As the basic structure of all human society until about 10,000–12,000 years ago, these groups were based around kinship or tribal affiliations. Hunter-gatherers relied on their surroundings for survival — they hunted wild animals and foraged for uncultivated plants for food. They survived on what nature provided and immediately consumed what they obtained. They produced no surpluses. When resources became scarce, the group moved to a new area to find sustenance, meaning they were nomadic. The plains Indians of North America, moved frequently to follow their main source of food. Some groups, like the Haida, lived off of abundant, non-depleting resources like fish, which enabled them to establish permanent villages where they could dwell for long periods of the year before dispersing to summer camps.

Most of the caloric intake of hunters and gatherers came from foraging for edible plants, fruits, nuts, berries, and roots. The largely meat-based diet of the Inuit is a notable exception. Richard Lee (1978) estimated that approximately 65% of the hunter-gatherer diet came from plant sources, which had implications for the gender egalitarianism of these societies. With the earliest economic division of labour being between male hunters and women gatherers, the fact that women accounted for the largest portion of the food consumed by the community ensured the importance of their status within the group. On the other hand, early reports of missionaries among the Algonquins of the north shore of Lake Superior observed women with their noses cut off and small parts of their scalp removed as punishment for adultery, suggesting that (at least among some groups) female subordination was common. Male Algonquins often had seven or eight wives (Kenton, 1954).

As a result of their unique relationship and dependence on the environment for sustenance, the ideal type or model that characterized hunter-gatherer societies includes several common features (Diamond, 1974):

• The distribution of economic surplus is organized on a communalistic, shared basis in which there is little private property, work is cooperative, and gift giving is extensive. The use of resources was governed by the practice of usufruct , the distribution of resources according to need (Bookchin, 1982).
• Power is dispersed either shared equally within the community, or shifting between individual members based on individual skills and talents.
• Social control over the members of society is exercised through shared customs and sentiment rather than through the development of formal law or institutions of law enforcement.
• Society is organized on the basis of kinship and kinship ties so there are few, if any, social functions or activities separate from family life.
• There is little separation between the spheres of intimate private life and public life. Everything is a matter of collective concern.
• The life of the community is all “personal” and emotionally charged. There is little division of labour so there is no social isolation.
• Art, story telling, ethics, religious ritual and spirituality are all fused together in daily life and experience. They provide a common means of expressing imagination, inspiration, anxiety, need and purpose.

One interesting aspect of hunter-gatherer societies that runs counter to modern prejudices about “primitive” society, is how they developed mechanisms to prevent their evolution into more “advanced” sedentary, agricultural types of society. For example, in the “headman” structure, the authority of the headman or “titular chief” rests entirely on the ongoing support and confidence of community members rather than permanent institutional structures. This is a mechanism that actively wards off the formation of permanent institutionalized power (Clastres, 1987). The headman’s main role is as a diplomatic peacemaker and dispute settler, and he held sway only so long as he maintained the confidence of the tribe. Beyond a headman’s personal prestige, fairness in judgement and verbal ability, there was no social apparatus to enable a permanent institutional power or force to emerge.

Similarly the Northwest Pacific practice of the potlatch, in which goods, food, and other material wealth were regularly given away to neighboring bands,  provided a means of redistributing wealth and preventing permanent inequality from developing. Evidence also shows that even when hunter-gatherers lived in close proximity with agriculturalists they were not motivated to adopt the agricultural mode of production because the diet of early agricultural societies was significantly poorer in nutrition (Stavrianos, 1990; Diamond, 1999). Recent evidence from archaeological sites in the British Isles suggests for example that early British hunter-gatherers traded for wheat with continental agriculturalists 2,000 years before agricultural economies were adopted in ancient Britain (Smith et. al., 2015; Larson, 2015). They had close contact with agriculturalists but were not inclined to adopt their sedentary societal forms, presumably because there was nothing appealing about them.

These societies were common until several hundred years ago, but today only a few hundred remain in existence, such as indigenous Australian tribes sometimes referred to as “aborigines,” or the Bambuti, a group of pygmy hunter-gatherers residing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Still, in 2014, members of the Amazonian Mashco-Piro clan emerged out of their voluntary isolation at the border of Peru and Brasil to make “first contact” with the Brazilian government’s Indigenous people’s authority (Funai) in order to seek protection from suspected drug-traffickers (Collins, 2014). Hunter-gatherer groups largely disappeared under the impact of colonization and European diseases, but it is estimated that another 75 uncontacted tribes still inhabit the Amazonian rainforest.

Horticultural and Pastoral Societies

Around 10,200 BCE, another type of society developed in ancient Anatolia, (now part of Turkey), based on the newly developed capacity for people to grow and cultivate plants. Previously, the depletion of a region’s crops or water supply forced hunter-gatherer societies to relocate in search of food sources. Horticultural societies formed in areas where rainfall and other conditions provided fertile soils to grow stable crops with simple hand tools. Their increasing degree of control over nature decreased their dependence on shifting environmental conditions for survival. They no longer had to abandon their location to follow resources and were able to find permanent settlements. The new horticultural technology created more stability and dependability, produced more material goods and provided the basis for the first revolution in human survival: the neolithic revolution .

Changing conditions and adaptations also led some societies to rely on the domestication of animals where circumstances permitted. Roughly 8,000 BCE, human societies began to recognize their ability to tame and breed animals. Pastoral societies rely on the domestication of animals as a resource for survival. Unlike earlier hunter-gatherers who depended entirely on existing resources to stay alive, pastoral groups were able to breed livestock for food, clothing, and transportation, creating a surplus of goods. Herding, or pastoral, societies remained nomadic because they were forced to follow their animals to fresh feeding grounds.

With the emergence of horticultural and pastoral societies during the neolithic revolution, stable agricultural surpluses began to be generated, population densities increased, specialized occupations developed, and societies commenced sustained trading with other local groups. Feuding and warfare also grew with the accumulation of wealth. One of the key inventions of the neolithic revolution therefore was structured, social inequality: the development of a class structure based on the appropriation of surpluses. A social class can be defined as a group that has a distinct relationship to the means of production. In neolithic societies, based on horticulture or animal husbandry as their means of production, control of land or livestock became the first form of private property that enabled one relatively small group to take the surpluses while another much larger group produced them. For the first time in history, societies were divided between producing classes and owning classes. Moreover, as control of land was the source of power in neolithic societies, ways of organizing and defending it became a more central preoccupation. The development of permanent administrative and military structures, taxation, as well as the formation of specialized priestly classes to spiritually unite society originated on the basis of the horticultural and pastoral relationship to nature.

Agricultural Societies

While pastoral and horticultural societies used small, temporary tools such as digging sticks or hoes, agricultural societies relied on permanent tools for survival. Around 3,000 BCE, an explosion of new technology known as the Agricultural Revolution made farming possible — and profitable. Farmers learned to rotate the types of crops grown on their fields and to reuse waste products such as fertilizer, which led to better harvests and bigger surpluses of food. New tools for digging and harvesting were made of metal, making them more effective and longer lasting. Human settlements grew into towns and cities, and particularly bountiful regions became centres of trade and commerce.

This era in which some classes of people had the time and comfort to engage in more contemplative and thoughtful activities, such as music, poetry, and philosophy, became referred to as the “dawn of civilization” by some because of the development of leisure and arts. Craftspeople were able to support themselves through the production of creative, decorative, or thought-provoking aesthetic objects and writings.

As agricultural techniques made the production of surpluses possible, social classes and power structures became further entrenched. Kinship ties became secondary to other forms of social allegiance and power. Those with the power to appropriate the surpluses were able to dominate the society on a wider scale than ever before. Classes of nobility and religious elites developed. As cities expanded, ownership and protection of resources became an ever pressing concern and the militarization of society became more prominent. Difference in social standing between men and women, already initiated in neolithic societies, became more pronounced and institutionalized. Slavery  — the ownership and control of humans as property — was also institutionalized as a large scale source of labour. In the agricultural empires of Greece and Rome, slavery was the dominant form of class exploitation. However, as slaves were largely acquired through military acquisition, ancient slavery as an institution was inherently unstable and inefficient.

Feudal Societies

In Europe, the 9th century gave rise to feudal societies . Feudal societies were still agriculturally based but organized according to a strict hierarchical system of power founded on land ownership, military protection, and duties or mutual obligations between the different classes. Feudalism is usually used in a restricted sense by historians to describe the societies of post-Roman Europe, from roughly  the 9th to the 15th centuries (the “middle ages”), although these societies bare striking resemblance to the hierarchical, agricultural-based societies of Japan, China, and pre-contact America (e.g., Aztec, Inca) of the same period.

In Europe the class system of feudalism was organized around the parceling out of manors or estates by the aristocracy to vassals and knights in return for their military service. The nobility, known as lords, rewarded knights or vassals by granting them pieces of land. In return for the resources that the land provided, vassals promised to fight for their lords. These individual pieces of land, known as fiefdoms, were cultivated by the lower class of serfs. Serfs were not slaves, in that they were at least nominally free men and women, but they produced agricultural surpluses for lords primarily through forced agricultural service. In return for maintaining and working the land, serfs were guaranteed a place to live and military protection from outside enemies. They were able to produce food and goods for their own consumption on private land allotments, or on common allotments shared by the community. Power in feudal society was handed down through family lines, with serf families serving lords for generations and generations.

In later forms of feudalism, the forced labour of the serfs was gradually replaced by a system of rents and taxation. Serfs worked their own plots of land but gave their lords a portion of what they produced. Gradually payment in the form of goods and agricultural surplus was replaced by payment in the form of money. This prompted the development of markets in which the exchange of goods through bartering was replaced by the exchange of goods for money. This was the origin of the money economy. In bartering, the buyer and the seller have to need each other’s goods. In a market economy, goods are exchanged into a common medium of value — money — which can then be exchanged for goods of any nature. Markets therefore enabled goods and services to be bought and sold on a much larger scale and in a much more systematic and efficient way. Money also enabled land to be bought and sold instead of handed down through hereditary right. Money could be accumulated and financial debts could be incurred.

Ultimately, the social and economic system of feudalism was surpassed by the rise of capitalism and the technological advances of the industrial era, because money allowed economic transactions to be conceived and conducted in an entirely new way. In particular, the demise of feudalism was initiated by the increasing need to intensify labour and improve productivity as markets became more competitive and the economy less dependent on agriculture.

1.2.2 Industrial Societies

In the 18th century, Europe experienced a dramatic rise in technological invention, ushering in an era known as the Industrial Revolution. What made this period remarkable was the number of new inventions that influenced people’s daily lives. Within a generation, tasks that had until this point required months of labour became achievable in a matter of days. Before the Industrial Revolution, work was largely person- or animal-based, relying on human workers or horses to power mills and drive pumps. In 1782, James Watt and Matthew Boulton created a steam engine that could do the work of 12 horses by itself.

Steam power began appearing everywhere. Instead of paying artisans to painstakingly spin wool and weave it into cloth, people turned to textile mills that produced fabric quickly at a better price, and often with better quality. Rather than planting and harvesting fields by hand, farmers were able to purchase mechanical seeders and threshing machines that caused agricultural productivity to soar. Products such as paper and glass became available to the average person, and the quality and accessibility of education and health care soared. Gas lights allowed increased visibility in the dark, and towns and cities developed a nightlife.

One of the results of increased wealth, productivity, and technology was the rise of urban centres. Serfs and peasants, expelled from their ancestral lands, flocked to the cities in search of factory jobs, and the populations of cities became increasingly diverse. The new generation became less preoccupied with maintaining family land and traditions, and more focused on survival. Some were successful in acquiring wealth and achieving upward mobility for themselves and their family. Others lived in devastating poverty and squalor. Whereas the class system of feudalism had been rigid, and resources for all but the highest nobility and clergy were scarce, under capitalism social mobility (both upward and downward) became possible.

It was during the 18th and 19th centuries of the Industrial Revolution that sociology was born. Life was changing quickly and the long-established traditions of the agricultural eras did not apply to life in the larger cities. Masses of people were moving to new environments and often found themselves faced with horrendous conditions of filth, overcrowding, and poverty. Social science emerged in response to the unprecedented scale of the social problems of modern society. The relationships between the rise of modern industrial society and the development of sociology is explored in greater detail in Module Two.

It was during this time that power moved from the hands of the aristocracy and “old money” to the new class of rising bourgeoisie who were able to amass fortunes in their lifetimes. In Canada, a new cadre of financiers and industrialists like Donald Smith (1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal) and George Stephen (1st Baron Mount Stephen) became the new power players, using their influence in business to control aspects of government as well. Eventually, concerns over the exploitation of workers led to the formation of labour unions and laws that set mandatory conditions for employees. Although the introduction of new “postindustrial” technologies (like computers) at the end of the 20th century ended the industrial age, much of our social structure and social ideas — such as the nuclear family, left-right political divisions, and time standardization — have a basis in industrial society.

1.2.3 Postindustrial Societies

Information societies , sometimes known as postindustrial or digital societies, are a recent development. Unlike industrial societies that are rooted in the production of material goods, information societies are based on the production of information and services.

Digital technology is the steam engine of information societies, and high tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft and RIM are its version of railroad and steel manufacturing corporations. Since the economy of information societies is driven by knowledge and not material goods, power lies with those in charge of creating, storing, and distributing information. Members of a postindustrial society are likely to be employed as sellers of services — software programmers or business consultants, for example — instead of producers of goods. Social classes are divided by access to education, since without technical and communication skills, people in an information society lack the means for success.

1.2.4 Postnatural Society: The Anthropocene

Recent scientific and technological developments transform the relationship to nature to a such a degree that it is possible to talk about a new postnatural society . Advances in computing, genetics, nano-technology and quantum mechanics create the conditions for society in which the limits imposed by nature are overcome by technological interventions at the molecular level of life and matter. Donna Haraway (1991) describes the new “cyborg” reality that becomes possible when the capacities of the body and mind are enhanced by various prosthetic devices like artificial organs or body parts. When these artificial prosthetics do not simply replace defective anatomy but improve upon it, one can argue that the conditions of life have become postnatural. In his science fiction novel Holy Fire (1996), Bruce Sterling extrapolates from recent developments in medical knowledge to imagine a future epoch of posthumanity , i.e., a period in which the mortality that defined the human condition for millennia has effectively been eliminated through the technologies of life preservation.

Through genetic engineering, scientists have been able to create new life forms since the early 1970s. This research is fueled by the prospect of using genetic technologies to solve problems, like disease and aging, at the level of the DNA molecule that contains the “blueprint” of life. Food crops can be designed that are pest-resistant, drought-resistant or more productive.  These technologies are therefore theoretically capable of solving environmentally imposed restrictions on our collective ability to feed the hungry. Similarly, nanotechnologies, which allow the physical properties of materials to be engineered at the atomic and subatomic level, pose the possibility of an infinitely manipulable universe. The futurologist Ray Kurzweil (2009) suggests that on the basis of nanotechnology “we’ll be able to create just about anything we need in the physical world from information files with very inexpensive input materials.” Others caution that the complexity of risks posed by the introduction of these molecular technologies into the environment makes their use decidedly dangerous and their consequences incalculable. This is a very postnatural dilemma; one that would not have occurred to people in earlier types of society.

What are the effects of postnatural technologies on the structure and forms of social life and society? At present, these technologies are extremely capital-intensive to develop, which suggests that they will have implications for social inequality — both within societies and globally. Wealthy nations and wealthy individuals will be the most likely beneficiaries. Moreover, as the development of postnatural technologies do not impact the basic structures of capitalism, for the forseeable future decisions on which avenues of research are to be pursued will be decided solely on the basis of profitable returns. Many competing questions concerning the global risks of the technologies and the ethics of their implementation are secondary to the profit motives of the corporations that own the knowledge.

In terms of the emergent life technologies like genetic engineering or micro-biochemical research, Nikolas Rose (2007) suggests that we are already experiencing five distinct lines of social transformation:

• The “molecularization” of our perspective on the human body, or life in general, implies that we now visualize the body and intervene in its processes at the molecular level.  We are “no longer constrained by the normativity of a given order.” From growing skin in a petri dish to the repurposing of viruses, the body can be reconstructed in new, as yet unknown forms because of the pliability of life at the molecular level.
• The technologies shift our attention to the optimization of the body’s capacities rather than simply curing illness. It becomes possible to address our risk and susceptibility to future illnesses or aging processes, just as it becomes feasible to enhance the body’s existing capacities (e.g., strength, cognitive ability, beauty, etc.).
• The relationship between bodies and political life changes to create new forms of biological citizenship. We increasingly construct our identities according to the specific genetic markers that define us, (e.g., “we are the people with Leber’s Amaurosis”), and on this basis advocate for policy changes, accommodations, resources, and research funding, etc.
• The complexity of the knowledge in this field increasingly forces us to submit ourselves to the authority of the new somatic specialists and authorities, from neurologists to genetics counselors.
• As the flows of capital investment in biotechnology and biomedicine shift towards the creation of a new “bioeconomy,” the fundamental processes of life are turned into potential sources of profit and “biovalue.”

Some have described the postnatural period that we are currently living in as the Anthropocene . The anthropocene is defined as the geological epoch following the Pleistocene and Holocene in which human activities have significantly impacted the global ecosystem (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Climate change is the primary example of anthropocenic effect, but it includes a number of other well-known examples from soil erosion and species extinction to the acidification of the oceans. Of course this impact began at least as early as the 19th century with the effects on the environment caused by the industrial revolution. Arguably, however, it is the recently established knowledge and scientific evidence of these effects which constitutes the current era as the anthropocene. In the anthropocene we become aware of the global nature of the catastrophic risks that human activities pose to the environment. It is also this knowledge that enables the possibility of institutional, economic, and political change to address these issues. Current developments like the use of cap and trade or carbon pricing to factor in the cost of the environmental impact into economic calculations, the shift to “green” technologies like solar and wind power, or even curbside recycling have both global implications and direct repercussions for the organization of daily life.

1.3 Why Study Sociology?

When Bernard Blishen picked up the phone one day in 1961, he was surprised to hear Chief Justice Emmett Hall on the other end of the line asking him to be the research director for the newly established Royal Commission on Health Services. Publically funded health care had been introduced for the first time in Canada that year, by a socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government in Saskatchewan, amid bitter controversy. Doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike and private health care insurers mounted an expensive anti-public health care campaign. Because it was a Conservative government commission, appointed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Blishen’s colleagues advised him that it was going to be a whitewash document to defend the interests of private medical care. However, Blishen took on the project as a challenge, and when the commission’s report was published it advocated that the Saskatchewan plan be adopted nationally (Vaughan, 2004).

Blishen went on to work in the field of medical sociology and also created a widely-used index to measure socioeconomic status known as the Blishen scale. He received the Order of Canada in 2011 in recognition of his contributions to the creation of public health care in Canada.

Since it was first founded, many people interested in sociology have been driven by the scholarly desire to contribute knowledge to this field, while others have seen it as a way not only to study society, but also to improve it. Besides the creation of public health care in Canada, sociology has played a crucial role in many important social reforms such as equal opportunity for women in the workplace, improved treatment for individuals with mental and learning disabilities, increased recognition and accommodation for people from different ethnic backgrounds, the creation of hate crime legislation, the right of Indigenous populations to preserve their land and culture, and prison system reforms.

The prominent sociologist Peter L. Berger (b. 1929), in his 1963 book Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective , describes a sociologist as “someone concerned with understanding society in a disciplined way.” He asserts that sociologists have a natural interest in the monumental moments of people’s lives, as well as a fascination with banal, everyday occurrences. Berger also describes the “aha” moment when a sociological theory becomes applicable and understood:

[T]here is a deceptive simplicity and obviousness about some sociological investigations. One reads them, nods at the familiar scene, remarks that one has heard all this before and don’t people have better things to do than to waste their time on truisms — until one is suddenly brought up against an insight that radically questions everything one had previously assumed about this familiar scene. This is the point at which one begins to sense the excitement of sociology (Berger, 1963).

Sociology can be exciting because it teaches people ways to recognize how they fit into the world and how others perceive them. Looking at themselves and society from a sociological perspective helps people see where they connect to different groups based on the many different ways they classify themselves and how society classifies them in turn. It raises awareness of how those classifications — such as economic and status levels, education, ethnicity, or sexual orientation — affect perceptions.

Sociology teaches people not to accept easy explanations. It teaches them a way to organize their thinking so that they can ask better questions and formulate better answers. It makes people more aware that there are many different kinds of people in the world who do not necessarily think the way they do. It increases their willingness and ability to try to see the world from other people’s perspectives. This prepares them to live and work in an increasingly diverse and integrated world.

1.3.1 Sociology in the Workplace

Employers continue to seek people with what are called “transferable skills.” This means that they want to hire people whose knowledge and education can be applied in a variety of settings and whose skills will contribute to various tasks. Studying sociology can provide people with this wide knowledge and a skill set that can contribute to many workplaces, including:

• An understanding of social systems and large bureaucracies;
• The ability to devise and carry out research projects to assess whether a program or policy is working;
• The ability to collect, read, and analyze statistical information from polls or surveys;
• The ability to recognize important differences in people’s social, cultural, and economic backgrounds;
• Skill in preparing reports and communicating complex ideas; and
• The capacity for critical thinking about social issues and problems that confront modern society (Department of Sociology, University of Alabama).

Sociology prepares people for a wide variety of careers. Besides actually conducting social research or training others in the field, people who graduate from college with a degree in sociology are hired by government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations in fields such as social services, counseling (e.g., family planning, career, substance abuse), designing and evaluating social policies and programs, health services, polling and independent research, market research, and human resources management. Even a small amount of training in sociology can be an asset in careers like sales, public relations, journalism, teaching, law, and criminal justice.

Key Terms and Concepts

Society : a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture.

Culture : forms of cooperation and the common habits, behaviours, and ways of life of a group.

Ethnosphere : the entirety of all cultures’ “ways of thinking, ways of being, and ways of orienting oneself on the Earth” (Davis, 2007).

Sociology : the systematic study of society and social interaction.

Sociological Imagination : how individuals understand their own and others’ lives in relation to history and social structure.

Social Structures : general patterns that persist through time and become habitual or routinized at micro-levels of interaction, or institutionalized at macro or global levels of interaction.

Reification : the way in which abstract concepts, complex processes, or mutable social relationships come to be thought of as “things.”

Figuration : the process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of individuals and the society that shapes that behaviour.

The Law of Three Stages : a sociological theory which holds that all human societies and all forms of human knowledge evolve through three distinct stages from primitive to advanced: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive.

Historical Materialist : an approach to understanding society that explains both social change and the development of human ideas in terms of underlying changes in the  mode of production.

Usufruct : the distribution of resources according to need.

Social class : a group that has a distinct relationship to the means of production.

Anthroposcene : a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

1.4 References

Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a theory of religion . New York, NY: Doubleday.

Durkheim, Émile. (1951). Suicide: A study in sociology . New York: Free Press. (original work published 1897)

Haraway, Donna. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (Ch. 8) . London: Free Association

Kurzweil, Ray. (2009). Ray Kurzweil on the future of nanotechnology . Big think . Retrieved, Oct. 4, 2015, from http://bigthink.com/videos/ray-kurzweil-on-the-future-of-nanotechnology

Lee, Richard. (1978). Politics, sexual and nonsexual, in an egalitarian society. Social science information, 17.

Mills, C. Wright. (2000). The sociological imagination . (40th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. (original work published 1959)

Pollan, Michael. (2006). The omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. New York: Penguin Press.

Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Simmel, Georg. (1971). The problem of sociology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Georg Simmel: On individuality and social forms (pp. 23–27).  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (original work published 1908)

Statistics Canada. (2013). Overweight and obese adults (self-reported), 2012. Statistics Canada health fact sheets. Catalogue 82-625-XWE. Retrieved February 24, 2014, from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-625-x/2013001/article/11840-eng.htm

Ulrich Beck (2000)

Foundations in Sociology II Copyright © by Susan Robertson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Chapter 1: Introduction to Sociology

Sociological imagination, learning outcomes.

• Define the sociological imagination
• Apply the sociological imagination

The term culture refers to a group’s shared practices, values, and beliefs. Culture encompasses a group’s way of life, from routine, everyday interactions to the most important parts of group members’ lives. It includes everything produced by a society, including all of the social rules. Sociologists often study culture using the sociological imagination , which pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) described as an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person’s choices and perceptions. It is a way of seeing our own and other people’s behavior in relation to history and social structure.

The sociological imagination allows us to grasp the interconnectedness of history and biography. This module will introduce you to C. Wright Mills and his concept of the sociological imagination. The readings and videos will also provide a number of examples for us to explore how the sociological imagination can help us make sense of issues like obesity or the rising cost of college textbooks.

Figure 1 . Sociological imagination is making the connection between personal challenges and larger social issues. Occupy Wall Street protestors viewed the difficulty in finding jobs as connected to the larger U.S. social issue of increasing economic inequality. (Photo courtesy of David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 2.  The sociological imagination enables you to look at your life and your own personal issues and relate them to other people, history, or societal structures.

Many people believe they understand the world and the events taking place within it, even though they have not actually engaged in a systematic attempt to understanding the social world, as sociologists do. In this section, you’ll learn to think like a sociologist.

The sociological imagination , a concept established by C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) provides a framework for understanding our social world that far surpasses any common sense notion we might derive from our limited social experiences. Mills was a contemporary sociologist who brought tremendous insight into the daily lives of society’s members. Mills stated that “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both (Mills, 1959) .  The sociological imagination is making the connection between personal challenges and larger social issues. Mills identified “troubles” (personal challenges) and “issues” (larger social challenges), also known as biography, and history, respectively. Mills’ sociological imagination allows individuals to see the relationships between events in their personal lives (biography), and events in their society (history). In other words, this mindset provides the ability for individuals to realize the relationship between their personal experiences and the larger society in which they live their lives.

One illustration of this is a person’s decision to marry. In the United States, this choice is heavily influenced by individual feelings. However, the social acceptability of marriage relative to the person’s circumstances also plays a part. It is important to remember that culture is produced by the people in a society, and therefore sociologists take care not to treat the concept of “culture” as though it were alive in its own right. Reification is the term used to describe this mistaken tendency, where one treats an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence (Sahn, 2013).

Personal troubles are private problems experienced within the character of the individual and the range of their immediate relation to others. Mills identified that we function in our personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about our friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within our control. We have a degree of influence on the outcome of matters within this personal level. A college student who parties 4 nights out of 7, who rarely attends class, and who never does his homework has a personal trouble that interferes with his odds of success in college. However, when 50% of all college students in the United States never graduate, we label it as a larger social issue.

Larger social or public issues are those that lie beyond one’s personal control and the range of one’s inner life. These pertain to broader matters of organization and process, which are rooted in society rather than in the individual. Nationwide, students come to college as freshmen who are often ill-prepared to understand the rigors of college life. They haven’t often been challenged enough in high school to make the necessary adjustments required to succeed in college. Nationwide, the average teenager text messages, surfs the Net, plays video games, watches TV, spends hours each day with friends, and works at least part-time. Where and when would he or she get experience focusing attention on college studies and the rigorous self-discipline required to transition into college?

The real power of the sociological imagination is found in how we learn to distinguish between the personal and social levels in our own lives. This includes economic challenges. For example, many students do not purchase required textbooks for college classes at both 2-year colleges and 4-year colleges and universities. Many students simply do not have the money to purchase textbooks, and while this can seem like a “choice,” some of the related social issues include rising tuition rates, decreasing financial aid, increasing costs of living and decreasing wages. The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has sought to address this  personal trouble  as a  public issue  by partnering with institutional consortia and encouraging large city and state institutions to adopt OER materials. A student who does not purchase the assigned textbook might see this as a private problem, but this student is part of a growing number of college students who are forced to make financial decisions based on structural circumstances.

A majority of personal problems are not experienced as exclusively personal issues, but are influenced and affected by social norms, habits, and expectations. Consider issues like homelessness, crime, divorce, and access to healthcare. Are these all caused by personal choices, or by societal problems? Using the sociological imagination, we can view these issues as interconnected personal and public concerns.

For example, homelessness may be blamed on the individuals who are living on the streets. Perhaps their personal choices influenced their position; some would say they are lazy, unmotivated, or uneducated. This approach of blaming the victim fails to account for the societal factors that also lead to homelessness—what types of social obstacles and social failings might push someone towards homelessness? Bad schools, high unemployment, high housing costs, and little family support are all social issues that could contribute to homelessness. C. Wright Mills, who originated the concept of the sociological imagination, explained it this way: “the very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.”

Mills, C. W.: 1959, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, London.

• Modification, adaptation, and original content. Authored by : Sarah Hoiland for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Introduction to the Sociological Imagination. Authored by : Sarah Hoiland for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• The Sociological Imagination. Provided by : College of the Canyons. Located at : https://www.canyons.edu/Offices/DistanceLearning/OER/Documents/Open%20Textbooks%20At%20COC/Sociology/SOCI%20101/The%20Sociological%20Imagination.pdf . Project : Sociology 101. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Day 20 Occupy Wall Street October 5 2011. Authored by : David Shankbone. Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Day_20_Occupy_Wall_Street_October_5_2011_Shankbone_14.JPG . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• People graphic. Authored by : Peggy_Marco. Provided by : pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/en/network-society-social-community-1019778/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved

Sociological Imagination: Sociology Issues Essay

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced significant societal changes all over the world. The introduction of social distancing, face mask wearing, and economic downturn have led people to alter their lifestyles considerably. This paper aims to apply sociological imagination to COVID-19 to analyze how it has affected the lives of individuals and society as a whole. The paper will outline possible changes in social structures and social forces in the GCC region, which may happen as a result of the pandemic. I will also explain how these changes will affect my community and family.

The Definition of Sociological Imagination

Sociological imagination is a way to see the events of one’s own life in a broader context of social issues and trends. The term was coined by C. Wright Mills, who argued that “neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” (Smith-Hawkins, 2020, p. 8). Sociological imagination is defined as an awareness of the connection that exists between one’s behavior and experiences and the surrounding society that has shaped the individual’s choices and worldview (Griffiths et al., 2015). By applying sociological imagination to everyday life, people can see that their actions are largely influenced by the prevalent societal trends and practices.

Moreover, sociological imagination can show that the decisions people deem their own are actually made with the involvement of their families and communities. One may consider, for example, the decision to have children. In the past, having children was an indispensable part of people’s family lives. Nowadays, people have gained more freedom in deciding whether to have children. However, the eventual decision to reproduce is taken with regard to the culture in which the person lives. For example, in child-centric societies, people are less likely to remain childless because of the pressure they experience from their peers, parents, and the entire community. In Western countries, where the individualistic culture prevails, people do not experience such societal pressure in terms of having children, but they feel urged to boost their personal achievements. As a result, guided by these societal trends, they decide to postpone having children in order to build a career.

Although the term “sociological imagination” was invented by C. Wright Mills, the idea of integrating the lives of individuals and entire societies was used by earlier sociologists. For example, Karl Marx used sociological imagination to explain the process of social change (Griffiths et al., 2015). Marx argued that the social conflict between workers and capitalists would lead to tensions and revolts, which, subsequently, would end in a social change (Griffiths et al., 2015). Max Weber also applied his sociological imagination to understand society and argued that standard scientific methods were not applicable for predicting the behavior of human groups (Griffiths et al., 2015). Weber believed that sociology should take account of culture and get a deep understanding of different social groups rather than strive to obtain generalizable results (Griffiths et al., 2015). Thus, the concept of sociological imagination is essential in sociologists and has been used by scientists even before C. Wright Mills described and coined a term for it.

Possible Changes in Social Structures and Forces in a Post-COVID World

In a post-COVID world, many social structures are likely to change. According to Smith-Hawkins (2020), social structures are “any relatively stable pattern of social behavior found in social institutions” (p. 6). For example, one common social structure is status, which refers to the responsibilities and benefits that people exercise depending on their roles in society (Smith-Hawkins, 2020). In a post-COVID world, some people are likely to experience a change in their status. For example, the pandemic led many entrepreneurs to close their businesses because of the forced lockdown. As a result, these people are likely to lose their status as business owners and will have to find a new occupation. In addition, during the pandemic, the status of healthcare workers has significantly improved, which will probably influence the prestige and attractiveness of healthcare professions for individuals.

Another important social structure is formal organizations, such as banks, schools, hospitals, and others. Within these social structures, the changes include the emergence of new rules, such as face mask wearing, and the modification of the work format. During the pandemic, many organizations have transferred to remote work in response to the introduction of social distancing or were forced to lay off a large number of workers. As a result, individuals had to adapt to new circumstances. In the future, it is possible that the jobs that allow for the remote work format will become more valuable, along with various delivery services. In addition, these changes are likely to change people’s career choices in the future.

Social institutions are also part of social structures, and one important social institution that is likely to change in a post-COVID world is health and medicine. One possible change that healthcare in GCC will undergo is an increase in the use of telehealth. Social distancing, the contagiousness of the virus, and low access to care in rural areas are significant preconditions for the wide use of remote healthcare services.

Finally, in terms of social forces, it is likely that a social action directed toward improving economic policies will emerge. COVID-19 has sharpened social issues that have existed long ago in society, such as poverty and inequality. Many people have become unemployed or experienced a decrease in their incomes. These changes may lead to public discontent, forcing governments to revise their policies related to labor and the economy.

The Impact of Social Changes on the Community and Family

According to the concept of sociological imagination, individuals and society are closely interrelated, and individuals are highly influenced by changes occurring in society. Therefore, one can assume that the changes that will happen in a post-COVID world will influence communities and individuals with their families. Thinking of my community, I believe that healthcare workers will be respected even more than before for their contribution to the fight against the virus. I also think that many people in my community will experience a change in their status. Entrepreneurs who lost their businesses will have to change their social roles; many office workers will change their status to either unemployed or remote employees. As for the influence on my family, my relatives and I will have to adapt to the new economic environment and learn to function effectively under the circumstances of social distancing and remote work. Finally, if my assumptions about the social change in healthcare and policies related to labor and economy are right, both my community and family will benefit in terms of improved access to healthcare and labor conditions.

Griffiths, H., Keirns, N. J., Strayer, E., Cody-Rydzewski, S., Scaramuzzo, G., Sadler, T., Vyain, S., Bry, J., & Jones, F. (2015). Introduction to sociology (2 nd ed.). OpenStax College, Rice University. Web.

Smith-Hawkins, P. (Ed.). (2020). Introduction to Sociology (AUBH Bahraini ed.). Unpublished manuscript.

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