John Wright Mills And The Sociological Imagination Essay

To be quite frank, I always thought I was ordinary. I never really put much thought, nor understood the deeper meaning as to why I have always acted a certain way, talked a certain way, or even made choices for a certain reason. Of course I have always known that these could be attributed to the way I was socialized as a child, but I never thought deeper into how my actions, beliefs, and values played into this bigger picture of society. To this day, the biggest decision I have ever made in my life has been deciding to go to university, but I never really dwelled on the concept of â€Å"Why?† C. Wright Mills wrote of a concept called the â€Å"sociological imagination.† Sociological imagination is our way of understanding the relationship between ourselves and society by looking at society and our individual lives through different lenses (1959). For instance, take an upper class man who has anything his heart could ever desire, he sees the world through a brightly coloured lens, but if this man takes a minute to step out of his picture perfect life, he can contemplate and imagine how others may live. He may think of an unemployed man who cannot enjoy life’s finer things. This is sociological imagination, the ability to see how, on the small, individual scale, we interact with society and how others also interact within this same society. As Mills explains, â€Å"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,†Show MoreRelatedSociology and Sociological Imagination978 Words   |à ‚  4 PagesSociology and Sociological imagination Sociology is the scientific study of human behavior in a social context that looks the values, attitudes and composition of a given society. 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