The Social Network and The Sociological Imagination.

Help clarify The Sociological Imagination

• Help clarify C. Wright Mill's "The Sociological Imagination" to me! So I've been doing some reading into traditional sociology, and Mills' concept of the sociological imagination is, of course, a classic. It seems to base its idea of the ideal quality of mind around the continual use of three questions to examine every social situation: 1. what is the structure of this society or web of social relations? 2. what is this society's place in context of human history? 3. who is prevalent in this society? I'm okay with number 2 and 3, but I'm a bit stuck in terms of 'the structure of this society'. The original text, and other sources I've found via google, talk about "the essential components", "how they relate to one another", "how it differs from other varieties of social order". I'm sort of interpreting "the essential components" to mean something along the lines of the various 'institutions' found in society - e.g. government, education, the family unit, etc., but I get the feeling this interpretation is a bit broad and not really conducive to developing my own sociological imagination. Do you have any tips or analogies that could clarify this for me? Thanks!

• Answer:

  If I recall correctly, in Central Problems in Social Theory Anthony Giddens observes that a social system is integrated or tightly knit if a change in one aspect (institution, lifeway, etc.) has noticeable ramifications in another. An example might be the notion of the family as model for the state that early modern French historians have identified (e.g. Peter Sahlins in Si l'on faisait payer les étrangers... or Jennifer Heuer in The Family and the Nation). Changes in one produce changes, or at least tensions in need of resolution, in the other. I think that's what Mills was getting at with structure: that is, the degree of integration of different social institutions or forms. I read Giddens with Bill Sewell at Chicago in the 1990s; you might find Sewell's article "A Theory of Structure," now available in his Logics of History, useful as you puzzle through this point. Structure is one of those metaphors that is inescapable yet difficult to pin down.