Sociological Imagination

Abstract

Coined by C. Wright Mills, the “sociological imagination” describes an imaginative way of thinking about the intersection of biography and history, or an awareness of how individuals' specific circumstances and life experiences are linked to or reflective of larger social and historical forces. Writing during a period of enormous change in postwar 1950s America, Mills described a sense among people of increasingly feeling “trapped” in their private lives by “seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure” of society, unable to understand or control the larger social and political forces shaping their everyday worlds. While one can find traces of the sociological imagination in Mills's earlier writings, more recently scholars have used it to examine the shifting social contract between employers and workers, the conflation of financial crises with individual greed, and the resistance of institutions to social and demographic changes.

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