C Wright Mills Sociological Perspective

C. Wright Mills used the term sociological imagination to describe the ability to look at issues from a sociological perspective. The sociological perspective is a quality of the mind that allows us to understand the relationship between our particular situation in life and what is happening at the social level.
He defines sociological imagination as “the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society”. The sociological imagination enables us to see how seemingly personal aspects of our lives are in fact very much influenced by the broader social conditions. An example would be unemployment, if someone loses his or her job, a person might think that this is a personal issue and that it is his or her personal problem that he or she does not have a job. However, if we begin to look around and see that millions of other workers just like him or her are also losing their job from the same kinds of reasons. We might begin to understand that our personal or private concern is actually a part of broader social problems in our society.
The sociological imagination allows us to get out of our own head with regard to how we think about social problems and it allows us to step in another person’s shoes, to see things from their perspective and to try as hard as we can to understand why that …show more content…
Wright Mills, we have to be able to develop a method or a way of looking of things from the point of view of the person experiencing the sociological phenomena. This means that we should not look at things from our own moral point of view and that we need to look at things from the point of view of the person experiencing the issue that concerns the problem. Because of this, we should step out of our own mindset, step out of the way we think things should be and the way we think we would react to a certain situation, and instead, try to step into the other person’s mindset, step into why they might be reacting and acting the way that they