Having spent much of the past year writing about research methods, I found myself returning to a book I had not read properly for many years: C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. Published in 1959, it is still surprisingly fresh, especially when Mills turns from criticising sociology to explaining how researchers should actually go about their work.
First, a word or two about Mills himself. Most accounts of Mills emphasise his independent streak, something that seems to have characterised much of his life. He was politically radical, but never particularly interested in following an established political line. He studied at the University of Texas and later the University of Wisconsin, where he completed a doctorate on pragmatism and the sociology of knowledge. His early intellectual influences included John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and he also became interested in European sociology, particularly through the work of Max Weber.
By the time The Sociological Imagination appeared in 1959, Mills had already established an academic reputation through journal articles and a series of books critically examining political power and the organisation of American society. These included:
• The New Men of Power (1948), which explored whether organised labour had become integrated into established structures of power rather than challenging them.
• White Collar (1951), an exploration of the growing salaried middle class, particularly questions of alienation, conformity and the loss of control over work.
• The Power Elite (1956), which examined the connections between corporate, military and political elites. Interestingly, some of Mills’s concerns were echoed in Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the growing influence of the military-industrial complex, although Mills’s critique was more wide-ranging and deep-rooted.
Then came The Sociological Imagination in 1959. This was something of a provocation to established sociology to sharpen up its act.
Mills’s central argument was that we cannot properly understand individual lives without considering the wider social and historical circumstances in which people live. He made a distinction between what he called personal troubles and public issues.
For example, if you become unemployed, that may be a personal trouble weighing heavily on you. But if large numbers of people are unemployed at the same time, unemployment becomes a public issue, raising wider questions about how the economy is organised and how political decisions are made. The sociological imagination enables us to see these connections between private experience and public issues, without assuming that every personal difficulty can be explained entirely by social forces.
So how do we make these connections? Mills argues that sociological understanding requires us to bring together three dimensions:
• Biography: the experiences, opportunities and difficulties of individual people.
• History: the circumstances in which people live, including the economic, technological and political context.
• Social structure: the organisation of society, including its institutions, social relationships and systems of power.
Mills felt that much of sociology was failing to make these connections. Instead, researchers had become preoccupied with technical questions about measurement, surveys and statistical analysis. He was not criticising quantitative methods in themselves, but arguing that too much attention was being given to methodological techniques at the expense of more important sociological questions. He was also critical of highly abstract theory that had lost touch with social life. For Mills, sociology had a responsibility to help people understand the social forces shaping their lives.
The book was provocative. Mills was certainly not alone in criticising American society or questioning the direction of sociology, but he was unusually forceful in bringing these two concerns together.
On intellectual craftsmanship
The section of the book that most interested me was the appendix, entitled On Intellectual Craftsmanship. It is rather different from the main text. Instead of criticising sociology, Mills explains how he believes sociologists should actually go about their work. Several points struck me.
1. Research is a way of life, not just a professional activity. Social researchers should not separate their work entirely from their lives. What they read, experience and observe should feed into their intellectual interests. Equally, their research should help them make sense of the world around them. Mills was unusually open about the relationship between personal experience and intellectual work.
2. Researchers need to be creative and imaginative, but also dogged and organised. Mills wrote about the importance of keeping files of ideas, observations and reading notes. He conceived of these as a growing store of facts and ideas, ranging from the vaguest thoughts to more developed arguments. The files were not simply for storing information; ideas could be developed by continually revisiting, comparing and rearranging what had been collected.
3. Researchers should avoid becoming bound by a particular method. They should not allow their expertise in one approach to determine the questions they ask. Instead, methods should be selected according to the problem being investigated. Mills encouraged researchers to draw on different intellectual traditions and disciplines. His own work could easily fit under several labels: sociology, politics or, more specifically, political sociology. He wanted researchers to follow important questions rather than remain within disciplinary boundaries.
4. Researchers should actively exercise their sociological imagination. This might involve considering contrasting cases, looking for exceptions, making historical comparisons or changing the scale of analysis. Rather than accepting the first explanation that comes to mind, researchers should try looking at the problem from different perspectives.
5. Researchers should move continually between ideas and evidence. Research should not follow a rigid sequence in which theory is completed first, data collection follows and interpretation comes last. Instead, there should be movement back and forth between reading, examining evidence, asking questions and carrying out further investigation. This is how ideas develop and sometimes change direction.
6. Researchers should write clearly and avoid unnecessary academic jargon. Mills believed that clear writing was closely connected with clear thinking. He also wrote books that reached beyond academia to a wider readership interested in social and political questions. There is a slight irony here, however. Although The Sociological Imagination is largely free of unnecessary jargon, I sometimes found the writing laboured and repetitive. It is not always as clear as Mills claimed writing should be.
Why I still find Mills relevant
I liked The Sociological Imagination a great deal. It identified shortcomings in social research, some of which we can still recognise today, and offered a way towards a more thoughtful and socially responsible approach.
But I particularly liked the appendix. Mills was prepared to reflect on how he actually worked, how ideas occurred to him and how his intellectual interests developed. Academics rarely show this kind of self-awareness. For example, researchers may explain very convincingly why they have chosen a particular theoretical approach, but say much less about why that approach appealed to them in the first place. What was it about their own experiences, education or intellectual background that led them towards one theory rather than another? Mills seems much more willing to recognise that biography plays a part in intellectual work.
I also particularly liked his argument that being organised, keeping good notes and working hard at reading are not obstacles to creativity. Quite the opposite. They are the habits that allow imagination to develop.
That seems to me a useful lesson for anyone doing research, not just sociologists.
Reference
Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
