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| Erdapfel, Martin Behaim (1490-1492) Oldest surviving terrestrial globe |
With Peter Holley and Sanna
Saksela-Bergholm we are organizing
the Mid-term Conference of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 15: Global, Transnational & Cosmopolitan Sociology. The
conference is supported by the European Sociological Association (ESA), the Swedish School of Social Science, the Centre
for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), the University of Helsinki’s Migrationand Diaspora Studies Research Group, and the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-CurieActions.
Read more HERE.
The conference clearly
draws on Charles Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959) and his challenge
to a structural functionalist approach for an integrated study of self and
society, history and biography: “Neither the life of an individual nor the
history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” (3) The sociological
imagination is not a theoretical or a conceptual tool strictu sensu. It is a task and a promise: “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history
and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its
task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of
the classic social analyst.” (6)
This “quality of
mind” sustains the interpretation of peoples’ lives within the broader social
and historical context. Developing this quality, both the social scientist and
the ordinary person can partially evade their private life “traps” by
connecting “personal troubles” to “public issues”.
Nowadays men 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 men 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.” (3)
“Troubles” are
private matters and mirror subjective challenges. “Issues” represent problems that
transcend the private sphere of individuals, hence they are “public matter(s)” and
deserve sociological consideration.
Yet men do not usually define the troubles
they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction…
Seldom aware of the intricate connection
between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history,
ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of
men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might
take part. (3-4, emphasis mine)
In times of
“fake news” and pretentious “fact checkers”, Mills’ lesson comes in handy: people
do not need more information in the “Age of Fact”. It is not a question of bad information
or good information filtered by self-styled guardians of the news inhabiting a
temple of knowledge. In actual fact
and as a matter of fact, in the Age of Fact information dominates individuals’
attention and “overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it”. (5) People need
to interpret and hence have a better grasp of what is going on in the world and
what is happening in their private lives. Mills is calling for a crucial
“quality of mind” to comprehend “the interplay of man and society, of biography
and history, of self and world”. (4)
Thus, the
sociological imagination – defined by Mills as a form of self-consciousness
– refers to the ability to see beyond isolated subjective experiences and
understand them in connection with the wider social themes impinging on them.
According to Mills, the aptitude to see connections and patterns is the essence
of sociological talent tout court.
The sociological imagination enables its
possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for
the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals… It is the
capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the
most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the
two (5 and 7).
Social analysts who
have been “imaginatively aware” of the task-promise of their study, have always
asked three kinds of questions: (1) What is the structure of this particular
society as a whole? (2) Where does this society stand in human history? And the
third question, that I would like to cite in full, is:
What varieties of
men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they
selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What
kinds of “human nature” are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in
this society in this period? And what is the meaning for “human nature” of each
and every feature of the society we are examining? (7)
In a certain
sense, the sociological imagination can, as a whole, be considered as the
pursuit of a humanist sociology. And
it is probably this kind of imagination that could help the researcher to
overcome the challenges of a global world.
Mills introduces
the expression “abstracted empiricism” (Chapter 3): the work of sociologists who
equate empiricism with science and make a fetish of quantitative research
techniques. In a word, data and statistical analyses are not sufficient for an appropriate
sociological interpretation. Without theoretical categories and comparative
historical analyses, the data is meaningless.
Regarding
theories, Mills proposes another expression, “grand theory” (Chapter 2): the
sociological practice of coming up with very abstract theorizing, which is
obfuscating the fruitful interpretation of the social world. There is a
famous passage (Appendix: “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”) in which Wright
Mills summarises the basic practice underlying (good) sociological research.
Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set
of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the sociological
imagination. Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the
rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become
such a craftsman yourself. Let every man be his own methodologist; let every
man be his own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the
practice of a craft. (224)
