Integrity Score 100
No Records Found
No Records Found
No Records Found
The sociological imagination is the capacity to socially see objects and how they communicate and affect. If a person needs to have a sociological imagination, he/she must be able to separate himself from the situation and think from another viewpoint. This skill is essential to creating a sociological understanding of the world. This concept was created by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills. He defined the concept as “the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society." Mills starts with criticism of existing sociological patterns at the time, then moves on to describe sociology in a political and historical context, as he sees it. His criticism centred on the fact that at the time academic sociologists were frequently interested in promoting views and theories and in reproducing an unequal status quo. He rightly explained that every problem that is faced by an individual comes out from the roots of the society and those problems are also faced by many other individuals and not just one. There is a major possibility that the problem faced by one person may seem unique to that individual but in reality, the same problem is being dealt with by many individuals but in different ways. Under this concept, the problems faced by the individual are divided in two separate fields- Personal Troubles and Social or Public Issues. Personal troubles define the character of an individual and range of their immediate relation to others. Mills stated that we act as actors and actresses in our personal lives who decide on our friends, family, work, school and other issues that are under our control. The outcome for these issues is highly influenced by us at an individual level. Social or public challenges lie beyond one’s personal reach and the range of their inner life. They involve the institutions and structures of society and, in addition, they are not embedded in the individual but in society. These issues are simply out of control of an individual’s life. Therefore, it is through social imagination that an individual learns to differentiate between the personal and social layers of their life.