Will I love The Sociological Imagination?

I could easily have chosen The Power Elite, White Collar, or The Causes of World War Three; in fact, this list could have been composed of just books by Mills. Mills came along when the dominant theoretical outlook was a kind of conservative “functionalism” led by a now somewhat neglected Harvard sociologist named Talcott Parsons and his “grand theories” that could explain “everything."

These have fallen by the wayside and been replaced by Robert Merton's “theories of the middle range” and micro-theories. More powerfully, grand theory and functionalism were replaced by conflict theory; that is, we learn more about… show more.

Mills’ description of the sociological imagination has become central to the way I think.

He writes of the importance of linking personal troubles to social issues, of moving from the deeply personal to the impersonal, and of linking biography and history.

The sociological imagination is at the heart of my research on domestic economic abuse. It links the stories of personal devastation to the global social issue of family violence. The personal gets transformed to policy and legal issues of the criminalisation of coercive control.  

This sociological classic is a stinging critique of much academic sociology as amounting to little more than verbose platitudes and cliches that hardly reach beyond common sense. But the book is also an eloquent advocacy of an often neglect academic virtue – imagination. Mills argues that social science can bring dazzling insights to the world we inhabit if it reaches beyond data and observations to identify underlying patterns and truths.