What Is The Sociological Imagination

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Introduction to Sociology SCGL 1001- Official Assessment Task 1 The Sociological Imagination- C Wright Mills Precis Analysis and Exercise Part 1: Summary of the ideas expressed by C Wright Mills C Wright Mill’s book “The Sociological Imagination” is “an incitement to look at sociology with a fresh and clearer vision.[1]” As a classical sociologist, he expresses sociological imagination as a method to allow individuals to think outside familiar routine, see a connection between their problems and social issues and provide a greater awareness of how the values we cherish or feel threatened affect society. Sociological imagination is a method which allows individuals to think outside familiar routine, look from another perspective and “gauge our own fate by locating ourselves within a particular historical period”.[2] As a result, individuals can also grasp history and biography thus leading to three specific questions. Firstly, “individuals can question the structure of their society, its essential components and their relation”[3]. Secondly, they enquire their “society’s standing in history and its meaning for humanity’s development”[4]. Finally, they specifically “analyse the varieties of men and women that prevailed in the society and period”[5]. Individuals can also view that events which affect them personally are also major social issues. This distinction is an essential tool to the sociological imagination[6]. Two key words form this idea, “troubles” “occur within the character of the individual and also among immediate relations whom they are directly aware of”. [7]“Issues” involves going beyond personal troubles and affect the overlapping institutions that form society as a whole resulting in the alteration of their structure. Sociological imagination leads individuals to understand that the roots of societal problems derive from the values they
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