The sociological imagination: insights, themes and skills

Chapter aims

• To describe some of the key features of sociology

• To introduce the three core themes that will be used throughout the book

• To discuss the roles that theorising and research play in developing sociological knowledge

Introduction

This chapter addresses three main tasks. Firstly, we say a few things about sociology – about what it is and what you can do with it. Secondly, we introduce the core themes that act as running threads throughout the book. These themes are interesting in their own right, but they also give us a useful 'handle' on the wide range of material covered in this book, and in the study of the discipline more generally. Thirdly, we want to highlight the two main characteristic and indispensable skills of social inquiry: theorising and researching. We particularly stress the role of theory in what sociologists do, because theorising is sometimes perceived by starting students as being 'difficult'. This is actually a misperception, partly because research itself – or, expressed simply, finding out – is not exactly easy. People are complicated. But partly, too, it is because theory can very quickly become rewarding and enjoyable, once you get over any initial inhibitions around grasping and manipulating unfamiliar terminology. Students at all levels can readily 'catch' the infectious feeling of sharing in the real insights and engaging debates that theoretical ideas facilitate more than anything else. We want you to be that kind of infected and infectious student.

Why study sociology?

Let's begin with the most practical reason for studying anything at university: getting a decent job.

Sociology gives you valuable skills that can be applied to a wide range of endeavours. It is of increasing value in relation to employment and careers. Gone are the days when sociology was regarded, employment-wise, as something that you only took if you wanted to be a lecturer, a social worker or a prison educational officer (vital though those occupations are).

Why sociology is valuable

Three sociological insights tell us why this should be so. Firstly, we now live in a world with a more flexible job market, where 'generic skills' and adaptable credentials are more important than training in the kind of specialist but limited expertise that may quickly go out of date in today's era of 'precarious' work. Many first degrees from universities no longer take you straight into specialised employment – often you also have to take a higher degree, or learn 'on the job' with little background preparation. Secondly, we live in a society where the supply, interpretation and use of information are more important than they used to be. This hugely increases the face value of our two sociological skills: researching (finding out) and theorising (thinking about and explaining). In the world of big data we are positively awash with concepts and facts, and it takes people with good critical judgement to decide which are most valid and important for particular purposes. Being a 'researcher' is itself now an accepted occupation in its own right, whether undertaken as a freelancer or while institutionally employed in government departments, the press, think-tanks, large corporations, or the educational sector. Thirdly, in proportion as work becomes more information- driven and as organisations become more streamlined in competitive global markets, they risk losing sight of the human side of things, and feel the need to have a 'people-centred' aspect to their systems.

Few are better placed than sociologists to understand the pressures, perspectives and contradictions in achieving 'work–life balance' and in seeing where people from different social and ethnic backgrounds are 'coming from'. So, putting all this together: sociology turns out to deliver an ideal 'knowledge-society, people-centred' basis for a wide range of valued jobs in the media, politics, education and health, voluntary or third-sector work and commercial businesses.

Now to some of the 'intrinsic' motivations for doing sociology.

• Sociology facilitates self-knowledge and self-development. For people who have just left school, sociology provides a deeper understanding of the contemporary social world and our place within it than do many other disciplines. For more-mature students, sociology gives intellectual shape to the practical knowledge that they have already acquired in real life. Sociology enhances understanding partly by challenging common-view assumptions that are passed down to us, whether through our families, our peers or the mass media. The result is frequently liberating.

• Sociology helps us understand the situation of other people. Sociology is not just about self-development and self-understanding – it is not a 'selfish' subject – because it tells us that our individual situations and fate are intrinsically bound up with those of others. We are social beings. Some of these are 'people like us' while many are (apparently) very different, and sociologists seek to understand what makes everyone 'tick'.

• Sociology helps us understand the world. We have long since moved beyond an exclusive interest in humans alone to think about all of those other things that contribute to human being and that make the world what it is. Thus, we are increasingly interested in energy, technology, non-human animals and the broader environment. Indeed, given how pressing today's environmental problems are, it is imperative that sociologists think of these topics and their many connections. There is open talk of the prospect of the Sixth Mass Extinction event and/or movement into a new geological age, the Anthropocene; both of these, should they occur, will be the consequence of human activities.

• Sociology helps us comprehend and shape social change. A memorable slogan of one of the 'founders' of sociology, Karl Marx, was that the point was not only to interpret the world, but to change it. Sociology was born in the heat of a changing modern world around two hundred years ago, and it constantly forces us to think about whether society is 'progressing' or not; about who the winners and losers of social change are; about whose side we are on; and about how things can be changed for the better, and for everyone. Sociology is thus closely bound up with questions of social justice and attracts the sort of people who care about the world and the wellbeing of others.

What sociology is

Sociologists in Aotearoa New Zealand have spent a lot of time thinking about what sociology is and why we should do it (SAANZ, 2016). For co-author Steve Matthewman,

sociology is the discipline that seeks to understand ourselves and our world. It has a critical edge: sociologists expose relations of power and mechanisms of domination. Sociology also concerns itself with justice: we identify inequalities and commit to human flourishing. Finally, sociology has a utopian impulse. Part of our task is to educate and agitate for a better world.

On its website, the University of Canterbury's Sociology department defines sociology as:

the systematic study of society. Its practitioners analyse society in a great variety of ways to connect people's lives with public issues and concerns. Society is everywhere so sociology's scope is wide. This diversity is seen in the breadth of topics taught. At Canterbury, these include sociology of the body; ethnicity; mental health; criminology; exploring the past; the environment; and death studies. Add cities, religion, social movements and everyday life to this mix and you get a sense of the depth and diversity of this rich and rewarding discipline.

For Corrina Tucker, a lecturer at Massey University:

The initial attraction to sociology for me was that it allowed me to make much greater sense of my life and place in the world. In understanding that our agency is shaped by a multitude of systems, structures and experiences, I am able to better critically examine and question the complexities of our social world. This opens up possibilities for new ways of thinking about our social worlds, and for making progress towards more sustainable and equitable lives.

Sociology is a properly academic, and indeed a 'scientific', discipline: like other sciences, sociology takes a distinctive subject matter for analysis – one that represents an independent and complex reality – and produces systematic knowledge, rather than merely subjective opinion, about this reality. Sociology is also fascinating and compelling. And the scope of sociology is very broad – so broad, in fact, that a multitude of topic areas can be covered and a multitude of points of view can be debated. In sociology, little is ruled out as necessarily wrong, and no views, not even scientific views, are sacred. So while sociologists do strive to ensure that their work is as thorough, and in that sense as impartial, as it can be, sociology is conducted by people who are already involved in what they study and are part of it. Sociology probably cannot, then, ever be a wholly disinterested enterprise, if by that we mean seeking to attain a 'God's-eye view' of the world. We can reach towards objectivity as far as possible, but in sociology there will always be much scope for moral and political debate and attachment.

Objectivity and interpretation

Defenders of pure objectivity – such people are not usually real scientists – sometimes tell us that 'the facts speak for themselves'. But in fact, facts never speak for themselves; they always have to be interpreted to take on any significance. And interpretation always involves theorising and imagination and empathy as well – hence one of the key catch-phrases of our discipline: 'the sociological imagination'. The originator of this phrase was C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist working in the 1950s, and his message still speaks to us today.

Mills describes the promise of sociology as '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' (Mills, 1959, p. 7). Mills emphasises that what we often experience as private troubles in life – unemployment perhaps, or relationship difficulties, or personal apathy – need to be seen not as personal matters at all, but rather as public issues: things to be debated and explored as general social phenomena. It was sociology's great task, Mills thought, to open up the interface between private troubles and public issues, and he went on to outline three key general steps in developing an adequate sociology of contemporary social life (Mills, 1959, pp. 6–7):

1. What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does this society differ from other varieties of social order?

2. Where does this society stand in human history? What are its characteristic ways of history making?

3. 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?

In other words, good opening questions for the sociologist include: How is society structured? How does it differ from others? What causes society to change? What sort of people prosper? Who has power?

The three themes of the book

The social and the personal

The personal

This theme simply extends Mills's contrast between personal troubles and public issues. It can be explained like this. We are all unique individuals. We have our own names, our own identities. We are our parents' children and nobody else's. We have our peculiar routines and practices; our own social, political and sexual preferences; and our very own emotions and thoughts. Sociologists do not deny these things. And yet there is something misleading about them, because as individuals we are profoundly shaped by, and live our lives within, an essentially social setting. Indeed, as social beings our thoughts about ourselves are determined in large measure by our social interactions.

We are our parents' children, for one thing, and those parents are themselves inescapably people of a certain social type – P?keh? or M?ori, middle or working class, together or divorced, heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual or otherwise oriented, employed or unemployed, country folk or townies, Chinese or New Zealanders or Chinese New Zealanders. These social traits actually make up a large part of what we are; and they are social, not purely individual, characteristics.

The social

As individuals, we take on and reproduce social roles – as fathers, mothers, lovers, students, workers, etc. It is impossible to be lovers, for example, without negotiating in our most intimate encounters some very general and society-wide assumptions and expectations about sexuality, masculinity, femininity and so on. Similarly, it is impossible to be a parent without taking on board many authority structures and postures that are not so much freely chosen as imposed or at least pressed upon us by the norms and sanctions of the society in which we live.

Social roles are the expectations and attributes associated with social positions such as teacher, mother, father, worker, etc.

Identity refers to the distinctive characteristics of persons in relation to social groups.

Societal norms and pressures

We can choose some aspects of our working lives, of course, but few of us can choose whether to work or not – and anyway, the longer and harder and more thoughtfully we prepare ourselves for working options of a certain type, the more meaningful choice we are going to have. But that preparation itself involves immersion in further forms of strong socialisation – family values and rules, school, university, training, etc. – and the way we approach these matters is closely connected to our degree of social privilege. On top of that, schools and even governments do not themselves have that much room to manoeuvre in shaping the availability and nature of work: this is determined largely by the needs and fortunes of the labour market in a capitalist global economy. Then, once we do have a job, enter relationships and perhaps have children to provide for, further structuring routines kick in. We build up habits and expectations in relation to the requirements and incentives currently available, get used to talking and acting in certain ways, and run our lives according to particular levels of resource, peer pressures and available belief systems. Our very identities, in other words, are forged in and through these roles, jobs, habits and expectations. We are not robots – society does not programme us and fully determine who we are, what we do, or how we think (critical sociology would be impossible if that were so). But dramatic breaks from general patterns and norms are relatively rare, and when the break is in a 'downward' direction – unemployment, lack of professional fulfilment, unwanted relationship break-ups, children 'going off the rails', experience of sexual violence – the psychological consequences are very serious, often resulting in 'identity crisis' and even the collapse of our sense of self.

So even in a society in which there is a lot of talk about 'free choice' and 'self-empowerment', the power of external social reality on individual judgement and values cannot be underestimated. The social meets the psychological at this point, as illustrated in a famous 1970s experiment led by Philip Zimbardo. Researchers asked approximately seventy American college students to participate in a prison scenario, in which – by the toss of a coin – some were to play guards and some to play inmates. The author summarises:

At the end of only six days we had to close down our mock prison because what we saw was frightening. It was no longer apparent to most of the subjects (or to us) where reality ended and their roles began. The majority had indeed become prisoners or guards, no longer able to clearly differentiate between role playing and self. There were dramatic changes in virtually every aspect of their behaviour, thinking and feeling. (Zimbardo, 1990, p. 177)