What Does Sociological Imagination Mean

In this paper I will be discussing and explaining what is meant when we hear the term Sociological Imagination and what it means. The sociological imagination enables us to group history and biography and the relations between the two within society. “The Promise” (Mills, 1959). It also helps us understand the ability to observe in a wider social context the actions that are influenced according to situations. “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” “The Promise” (Mills, 1959). Another definition of the term is to break away from your daily routine and relive it in a new perspective. It is important that people are able to relate to certain problems in which

they experience in their everyday lives to the global societal issues. A historical event that influenced my life is the recession. I remember when I was in high school all I needed to do was walk in, fill out an application and have an interview on the spot.

It seemed before the recession, finding a job was very easy and simple. After the recession hit, I didn’t understand exactly what it meant, I didn’t understand what was going to happen. Soon after, I slowly started to see the effects of the recession. The unemployment rates were going up, finding a job wasn’t easy to find anymore, it forced a lot of young kids to move back home with their families and it also caused for many students to delay further education since they wouldn’t be able to afford it. In the book Mills states “If only a few people were unemployed, we could reasonably explain their unemployment by saying they were lazy, lacked good work habits, and so forth. If so, their unemployment would be their own personal trouble. But when millions of people are out of work, unemployment is best understood as a public issue.”(Mills, 1959, P.9) For example, I am one of the many families that were affected by the recession. I couldn’t find a job for one year and I had applied to hundreds of jobs, yet it was so difficult to get employed. Another effect the recession caused was for my father to get laid off at the age of

47. This incident affected me mentally and put me into a depression. It was if all things were crashing down on me. It was then I became fully aware that it wasn’t just me who was enduring pain from the recession, it was all of America. Everyone around the world was going through what I was going through maybe even more severe than my situation. I then grasped from that point on that there was nothing I can do except be positive and keep pushing through to do what I can to overcome this dreadful situation we as a country were going through. Finally I found a job, but it was part-time and it was manual labor. However I couldn’t complain due to the fact that there were so many other unemployed people. During this time I had a part time job barely making any money and it was just stressing me out. I just wanted to be able to help my father with the bills. The recession put so much stress on my family for a while, that we budgeted on how we spent our money and we tried methods of what we could sacrifice to budget. It was just a constant fear and struggle of what was going to come next. In the article “The Promise” Mils states that “The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful.” ”The Promise” (Mills, 1959). In conclusion, the historical events that occur in this world affect not just you but society as a whole. In the terms of sociological imagination, it helps us understand how our personal experiences link to larger social forces of life.