the sociological imagination

(noun)

Coined by C. Wright Mills, the sociological imagination is the ability to situate personal troubles and life trajectories within an informed framework of larger social processes.

Examples of the sociological imagination in the following topics:

  • The Sociological Imagination

    • An analogy can help us better understand what Mills meant by the sociological imagination.
    • The sociological imagination takes the metaphorical fish out of the water.
    • The term sociological imagination describes the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology.
    • In describing the sociological imagination, Mills asserted the following.
    • Wright Mills' claim concerning the importance of the "sociological imagination" for individuals

  • What is Sociology?

    • Wright Mills (a prominent mid-20th century American sociologist) labeled the sociological imagination: the ability to situate personal troubles within an informed framework of social issues.
    • The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. "
    • As Mills saw it, the sociological imagination could help individuals cope with the social world by helping them to step outside of their personal, self-centric view of the world.
    • In employing the sociological imagination, people are able to see the events and social structures that influence behavior, attitudes, and culture.
    • The sociological imagination goes beyond armchair sociology or common sense.

  • Bachelor's Degree Occupations

    • Some sociologists find the adaptation of their sociological training and insights to the business world relatively easy.
    • Site selection requires understanding human ecology and consumer spending patterns, both of which are addressed using the sociological imagination.
    • Sociology majors can carry the sociological imagination into medical practice, offering sociological insights while practicing medicine.
    • Two factors seems to limit the occupational prospects of sociologists: The first limiting factor is their own imagination.
    • The sociological imagination is applicable to almost every occupation and field of research, from studying how physicists do their work to union organizing.

  • Applied and Clinical Sociology

    • Here, we will discuss the possibilities of applied sociology and one subfield, clinical sociology.
    • Some sociologists find that adapting their sociological training and insights to the business world is relatively easy.
    • Site selection requires understanding human ecology and consumer spending patterns, both of which are addressed using the sociological imagination.
    • Outside of the corporate world, sociology is often applied in governmental and international agencies such as the World Bank or United Nations.
    • Jane Addams is considered by many to be one of the earliest sociologists, though her contributions were mostly to the application of sociology to social work.

  • Conclusion

    • We've described some of the basic "nuts and bolts" tools for entering and transforming network data.
    • The "bigger picture" is to think about network data (and any other, for that matter) as having "structure. " Once you begin to see data in this way, you can begin to better imagine the creative possibilities: for example, treating actor-by-attribute data as actor-by-actor, or treating it as attribute-by-attribute.
    • Different research problems may call for quite different ways of looking at, and transforming, the same data structures.
    • We've hardly covered every possibility here, but we have looked at some of the most frequently used tricks.

  • Sociological Videos

    • The following are videos - including fiction movies, non-fiction documentaries and recorded lectures - examining topics in the field of sociology.
    • See this link for a sortable table of sociological videos: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/Sociological_Videos

  • Race and Ethnicity

    • A race is a human population that is believed to be distinct in some way from other humans based on real or imagined physical differences.
    • An individual is usually externally classified (meaning someone else makes the classification) into a racial group rather than the individual choosing where they belong as part of their identity.
    • Some of the social traits often used for ethnic classification include:
    • The term ethnicity focuses more upon a group's connection to a perceived shared past and culture.
    • An example of an ethnic group in the U.S. is Hispanic or Latino.

  • Preface

    • Through a couple extensions and revisions, it has evolved to cover more of the basic approaches to the analysis of social network data.
    • Its current form, written in 2005, covers most of the algorithms and approaches that are collected in the computer package UCINET, version 6.85.
    • The book is distributed free on the Internet in the hope that it may reach a diverse audience, and that the core ideas and methods of this field may be of interest.
    • We hope that you will find things here that may stimulate your imagination.
    • The concepts and techniques of social network analysis are informed by, and inform the evolution of these broader fields.

  • Defining automorphic equivalence

    • Formally "Two vertices u and v of a labeled graph G are automorphically equivalent if all the vertices can be re-labeled to form an isomorphic graph with the labels of u and v interchanged.
    • More intuitively, actors are automorphically equivalent if we can permute the graph in such a way that exchanging the two actors has no effect on the distances among all actors in the graph.
    • If we want to assess whether two actors are automorphically equivalent, we first imagine exchanging their positions in the network.
    • Then, we look and see if, by changing some other actors as well, we can create a graph in which all of the actors are the same distance that they were from one another in the original graph.
    • In the case of structural equivalence, two actors are equivalent if we can exchange them one-for-one, and not affect any properties of the graph.

  • Prejudice

    • Why don’t we instead notice whether their eyes are friendly, whether they are smiling, their height, the type of clothes they are wearing?
    • In fact, simply imagining interacting with members of different cultural groups might affect prejudice.
    • Indeed, when experimental participants were asked to imagine themselves positively interacting with someone from a different group, this led to an increased positive attitude toward the other group and an increase in positive traits associated with the other group.
    • These beliefs persist despite a number of high profile examples to the contrary.
    • Apply the concepts of in-group favoritism and prejudice to a real-life situation