intro to sociology

The Sociological Imagination ASSIGNMENT #1 PART II Sociological Imagination Please read the passage below, it is Chapter 1 from Mills’ Sociological Imagination; when you are done, please use the information found in this text to answer the questions following the passage. Chapter One: The Promise C. Wright Mills (1959) Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them. No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. The first fruit of this imagination – and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it – is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of ‘human nature’ are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure.’ This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science. Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with others; they have to do with one’s self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of one’s immediate milieu – the social setting that is directly open to her personal experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by her to be threatened. Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements (failure of one or more social structures in society: Family, School, Government, Media, etc.) and often too it involves what Marxists call ‘contradictions’ or ‘antagonisms.’ In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. 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. Consider marriage. Inside a marriage two people may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them. These are structural issues; to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux. In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination. Using the information in this document please answer the following questions. FOR EACH QUESTION, your answers must be at least 3-4 sentences 1. Please tell me what the word “milieu” means? Why is this an important component of Sociological Imagination? 2. Now that you know what a milieu is, please use the information from this article, and IN YOUR OWN WORDS, define Sociological Imagination. 3. Which is the best description of the sociological imagination and why? a. It is a way of thinking that looks at personal troubles in the context of larger public issues. b. It imagines what the future might be like. c. It is a way of thinking that defines an incident by the observable personal behaviors. d. It is a way of understanding a person’s biological make-up. 4. Using the sociological imagination, what is the most likely description of eating disorders and why? a. They are hereditary and are genetically passed along within families. b. They are personal troubles that stem from a lack of control or anxiety. c. They are a family issue related to lack of control in one’s environment. d. They are social issues related to standards of beauty that emphasize a slender body. 5. Focusing on the two examples that Wright used in this article (Unemployment and Marriage) please elaborate on each Public Issue- using your Sociological Imagination. For this question I am looking for an in-depth discussion.

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