Zygmunt Bauman - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Introduction to Sociology

Download Zygmunt Bauman - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! 1 Introductory Sociology 1 What is sociology? Lecture 2 Today I want to continue with our introductory theme and consider what it is that makes sociology special. I will argue that the sociological imagination, as it’s described, makes sociology privileged as a discipline for what it can potentially accomplish and achieve. Sociology is special for three reasons: • Sociology has a unique perspective, way of thinking or imagination • There is no limit to the range of topics that sociology can illuminate and it is thus magisterial in its comprehensiveness and coverage • It opens up for people a perspective on their own lives and is thus empowering and emancipatory There are various ways of referring to sociology’s special take on things. In recent years Zygmunt Bauman has referred to sociology as a special ‘way of thinking’. When I was young, Peter Berger’s famous book on sociology, entitled An Invitation to Sociology, referred to sociology as having a particular perspective. The most enduring of these terms however, is Charles Wright Mills’s phrase ‘the sociological imagination’. Mills first coined this in a book of the same name in 1959 and it has lasted now for nearly half-a-century. What’s an unreconstructed male chauvinist like Mills doing as one of sociology’s heroes? Well, he died young, at 46 in 1962 – from a heart attack, no doubt precipitated by his double dinners – and mythology has it that only the good die young. His work was radical and challenged the orthodox ideas in sociology at the time. Mills was a radical and his radicalism suited the 1960s. But none of this explains why he’s still so popular today. Read his work today and it jars. Yet there’s hardly a first year sociology class today that doesn’t make reference to his major book The Sociological Imagination. Indeed, his phrase ‘the sociological imagination’ has entered sociology’s vocabulary and is part of the induction of new sociological generations to the discipline. We still teach Mills. We teach him to newcomers to sociology and to old hands. Why? His ideas have transcended his time and speak to us today. His concerns reflect the mainstream sociological tradition as we continue to construct it in our teaching and research; his ideas remain central to the way we continue to define sociology. And the most enduring of these ideas is his depiction of the sociological imagination. Indeed, Mills is remembered these days almost exclusively for his book The Sociological Imagination, all his other works being neglected or forgotten. Mills is remembered – and his phrase invoked – because he wanted sociology to hold together in the one analytical framework four things – society, or what we call the social structure, individuals and their personal biography, history and politics. Sociology is not the study of people, nor the study of society in isolation. It studies the intersection between people and the social structure in which they’re located. What is more, it seeks to place this relationship between individuals and society in two contexts that affect it: a historical context, because societies and people have histories docsity.com 2 and the past can affect the future; and a political context, because power relations impact on people and societies and affects them. So, sociology should hold individual biography, the social structure, history and political power in balance in the one framework. This gives social reality a three dimensional quality. First, social reality is simultaneously microscopic, based around individuals’ personal worlds, and macroscopic, in that the institutional and structural order of society impacts on people’s personal milieux. Social reality is also simultaneously historical and contemporary, in that present structures, circumstances, events, processes and issues have a historical relevance that may impact on their current form and future development. Thirdly, reality is simultaneously social and political; society is deeply impacted by the operation of power within the nation state and beyond and politics affects both the social structure and the personal biographical worlds of people, and is in turn affected by them. The sociological imagination therefore involves a co- ordination of personal biographical experience, social structural conditions, historical forces and political power and looks at the intersection of them all. The defining mark of sociology for Mills therefore, becomes the examination of the connection between social structures and individuals’ personal biography and experience as they are located and shaped historically and politically. In this formulation, sociology is magisterial, for it is the Queen of the social sciences. History, politics, anthropology and biography are all subsumed under sociology as part of the sociological imagination. There is hardly a topic that cannot be studied sociologically, that is to say, cannot be understood in terms of the sociological imagination – that is, the biographies and lives of the people involved, the social structure within which it takes place and how history and power relations impact on it. Of course, this is not to say that this is all we need to know about the topic. Sociology is not a substitute for physics, chemistry or whatever. God forbid if sociologists were left to build bridges, heal cancer or counsel divorcees. I am not saying that sociology is all we need to study; only that everything can have a sociological take on it. We can’t cure cancer, but we can study how medics go about curing cancer. We can’t build bridges, but we can study the social relations, power relations, personal lives and history of the civil engineers who do. My point is that there’s nothing that can’t be illuminated by the sociological imagination. And that’s what makes it special. It’s special also because it’s empowering and emancipatory. Sociology gives people an insight into their own lives, it helps them understand themselves, other people, society and the broad social situations, power relations and historical location they find themselves in. As Mills says, ordinary people do not readily comprehend these things on their own because they are fixed on their immediate lives. In these personal milieux people do not fully grasp the big social structures, doing so only as these structural conditions impinge on their life locally and thus impose themselves on their consciousness. ‘Small’ people can feel swamped by ‘big’ institutions and processes and fail to comprehend the forces operating on them and dictating them. Mills believed that sociology could be put to the service of the ‘small’ person by unravelling the connections and making public the way in which ‘big’ institutions have taken over docsity.com