American Sociological Imagination

Sociology is the scientific study of human social life, such as groups and societies. Sociologists find problems, either with individuals or societies, and look towards social factors as explanations. However, they are less concerned with factual research that shows how things occur. Sociologists want to know why things happen, and to do so they must look at the broader view of their subjects and cultivate their sociological imagination. American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) defined the sociological imagination as “the ability to link our personal lives and experiences with the social world.” This means that one must have the ability to break free from the immediacy of personal circumstances and put things in a wider context. This
In the Johnson reading (The Forest, the Trees, and the One Thing), the author mentions the expression "can't see the forest for the trees" (page 12) which is an expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole. This common saying is the very definition of someone who lacks a sociological imagination - someone who is unaware of the larger impact that their day-to-day interactions have on their society as a whole. This is especially prevalent in Body Ritual of Nacricema by Horace Miner, in which the author tells about a ridiculous culture filled with strange traditions that seem extremely foreign. As beginning sociology students, most of the class failed to look at the article from another perspective, thinking that the primitive mouth-rites and medicine men with their “latipso” visits were unappealing and brutal when in reality they mimic our own society from another perspective. Miner’s article challenges the idea of a sociological imagination by breaking our daily paradigm and forcing us to see a familiar idea from another
To study the function of some part of society is to show the relationship between the idea/concept/image and the part that it plays in the continued existence of a society. Sociologists using the Functionalist Perspective distinguish between manifest (intended) and latent (consequential) functions to determine what actions are functional and what actions are dysfunctional. According to Robert K. Merton, a major part of sociological explanation is uncovering the latent functions of social activities and functions. The final theory is the Social Conflict Theory, which has origins in Marxism and states that society is held together by power and coercion with much inequality. This theory lays an emphasis on conflict, class-divisions, power, and ideology. Many social conflicts are about power and the development of new ideas that are used to justify the actions of the powerful. Sociologists study the effects of these ideas to see where social problems originate within class