The sociological imagination

When you chose your subjects after Class 10, you probably heard plenty of advice: 'work hard and you will succeed', 'take a subject the market wants', 'that job is not for girls', 'the family needs you to earn soon'. Each piece of advice points to a different force at work.

• Your own effort matters, and sociologists never say it does not.
• But the outcome also depends on wider factors: the job market and what the economy needs (a hill district may create jobs in tourism rather than farming), government policy, what each place counts as a 'good job', your family and social background, and gender.
• These factors are economic, political, cultural and historical at once. That is why sociology studies human society as an interconnected whole, and how society and the individual shape each other.

The sociological imagination. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills used this phrase for a way of seeing that connects biography (one person's life) with history (the times and society they live in). What we see on the surface is often not the whole story: sociology looks for what lies beneath what everyone can see.

Mills drew a key distinction:

• Personal troubles of the milieu: problems that belong to a person and their immediate surroundings, which they know about directly, such as one person who cannot find a seat on a crowded bus every morning.
• Public issues of social structure: problems that go beyond any one person, rooted in how a whole society is organised, such as a city where buses are packed for everyone because public transport has not grown with the population.
• Many problems that feel private turn out to be public issues once you see how many people share them and why.

Homelessness is the book's example. One family without a home may look like a private failure. But when people move in large numbers from villages to cities for work, land prices rise, cheap housing runs short, slums grow, and wages do not keep up, homelessness becomes a public issue. The state then responds with policy, such as the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin, which helps poor rural families build pucca houses.

Example (new): a student who studies under a street lamp because her home has no electricity may score a little lower than a classmate with a quiet room and a tutor. Looking only at the marks, people may call her careless. The sociological imagination asks what her circumstances are, and how many students share them.