Why Sociology is a Perspective worth having?

Today, maintaining national identities in this global village has become a challenge for one
and all. Let us just face up to this hard task with sociological imagination. With this in mind, global awareness is merely a logical extension of the sociological imagination. As our place in society profoundly affects our life experiences. It stands to reason, then, that the position of our society in the larger world system affects everyone.

Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of the continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men or women. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of the world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part.

Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?

Above quoted inspiring words are the writings of a contemporary sociologist C. Wright Mills from the early nineteen sixties. He was one of the few contemporaries whose intelligence, verve, passion, scope and even contradictions seemed alert to most of the main moral and political traps of his time.  These words are from his best remembered work The Sociological Imagination in which he proposes the importance of adapting a sociological perspective towards life for a common man.

In times of turbulent changes happening on a global level and in individual crisis, it is suitable to say that it makes everyone feel a little off balance and prompts us to think and understand reality behind the ‘sense of trap’.

It is not only information that they need-in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of the reason that they need-although their struggle to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. (Mills)

In today’s world, it is utmost important to develop a capacity that enables us to see relationships between individual biographies & historical change. This capacity is known to us sociologists as Sociological Imagination.

To acquire this knowledge of reasoning, it is necessary not to let your thoughts follow a routine; you have to break free from immediacy of personal circumstances and put things into a wider context. Remember that the actions of people are much more important than the act itself. Thus, to have a sociological imagination, you must be able to pull yourself away from the situation and think from an alternative point of view.

Once you are able to understand the society and human social action in terms of social rules and processes that bind and separate people; not only as individuals, but also as members of associations, groups, institutions and organizations; you are able to see the contextual reality. This contextual understanding means that any social event or encounter is time, place and person specific.

Evoking sociological imagination makes one capable of Seeing the general in the particular (a society shapes the lives of its members, we begin to think sociologically by realizing how the society we live in-as well as the general categories into which we fall within the society-shapes our particular life experiences); Seeing the strange in the familiar (to challenge the familiar idea that we live our lives with, in terms of what we decide) and Seeing individuality in social context (to see general patterns in the personal actions of particular individuals)

Sociological methods, theories and concepts can be excellent tools to explore the origins and boundaries of the commonly accepted rules governing human behavior as an individual and as a group or a nation.

To be knowledgeable of sociology is an invitation to learn an alternative way of looking at familiar patterns of social life. Knowledge gives choice. Sociological imagination benefits us in many ways. The perspective helps us to: assess the truth behind the ‘common sense’; to differentiate between the opportunities and constrains in our lives; to empower ourselves as active participants in our society and to develop acceptance towards diverse encounters and opinions in the current globalized world.

But is this invitation worth accepting?