Analytical Paper: Sociology 101

Dimaampao, Ali M. (2004-12198)

Instructor Hannah Glimpse Nario

Sociology 101

10 February 2016

Analytical Essay on Social Imagination and Perspective

What is sociology? Sociology is the study of social behaviors and their impact on society (Mulcahy n.d.). In Wright Mills’s “The Promise” and Antony Giddens’s “What Do Sociologists Do?” the people who could change or give great impact to the society are termed to as scholarly and human agents respectively. Mills (1959) outlines the needed considerations or factors on how to become intellectual and self-conscious member on a society. On the other hand, Giddens’s (1987) presents what a human agent is and situates the agent in a spectrum of social situations that produces exploratory take on social reality that delimits the character of the agent. Moreover, Peter Berger’s concepts in “Sociology as a Form of Consciousness” advances the scope of concepts on social realities by qualifying the society itself its descriptive characters and presents attitudes that are enabling one to decipher what’s behind the ‘natural’ social realities.

Mills (1959) starts of by stating that men “feel that their private lives are a series of traps” (p. 3) because they do not address their trouble in “terms of historical change and institutional contradiction” (p. 3). Mills (1959) believes men lack enough understanding as to why they are unable to understand how sufficient knowledge on “structural transformations that usually lie behind” (p. 4) their personal troubles so one could help one to maneuver his/her life toward better decisions; and the Mills’s clue relies to imagination.

Mills (1959) coins the term sociological imagination as a tool for a quality mind. Mills (1959) takes on sociological imagination as “to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society” (p. 6). Mills (1959) enumerates sample experiences of class of people in an industrialized society. “Peasant becomes a worker” and a...