C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination

Prospects for Creative Inquiry

Jon Frauley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317170228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In spite of its widespread use within criminology, the term 'criminological imagination', as derived from C. Wright Mills' classic The Sociological Imagination, has yet to be fully developed and clarified as an analytic concept capable of guiding theorizing or empirical enquiry. This volume, with a preface by Elliot Currie, engages with and reflects on this concept, exploring C. Wright Mills' work for criminological enquiry. Bringing together the latest work of leading scholars in the fields of criminology and sociology from around the world, C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination investigates the emergence and lineage of a criminological concept indebted to Mills' thought, adapting and applying it to a specifically criminological context. With attention to theoretical concerns and, as well as the application of the criminological imagination in concrete empirical research, this volume sheds new light on the methodological and analytical aspects of the criminological imagination as a multifaceted concept and explores the possibilities that it offers for the emergence of an imaginative criminological practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in sociology and social theory, criminology, criminal justice studies, law and research methods.

Part I C. Wright Mills, the Criminological Imagination and the Criminological Field

1 For a Refractive Criminology

Against Science Machines and Cheerful Robots

Jon Frauley

DOI: 10.4324/9781315570709-2

… let your mind become a moving prism catching light from as many angles as possible. (Mills 1959, 214)

Serious differences among social scientists … have rather to do with what kinds of thinking, what kinds of observing, and what kinds of links, if any, there are between the two. (Mills 1959, 33)

In 1959 sociologist C. Wright Mills offered a trenchant (and still relevant) critique of empiricist and theoreticist social science, outlining a strategy for rejecting what he thought had become a mainly reductionist and technique-driven bureaucratic enterprise. His path-breaking book The Sociological Imagination is concerned to illustrate the rise of a ‘bureaucratic ethos’ and the implication of this for social life as well as the impact this ethos was having on the process, objectives and organization of social science and knowledge production. Mills argued for a particular ‘quality of mind’ that he believed necessary for the production of holistic and politically engaging descriptions and understandings of social reality. To understand experiences of unrest and apathy, he maintained, it was necessary to identify and then connect two fundamental aspects of social life: ‘personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘public issues of social structure’:

Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of his immediate milieu – the social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by him to be threatened …. Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary men. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call ‘contradictions’ or ‘antagonisms’. (Mills 1959, 8–9)

The imaginative and speculative quality of mind envisioned by Mills was needed, he believed: (1) to adequately clarify how human beings and their experiences were situated and shaped within the political, economic, institutional, discursive, and importantly, historical constraints of their society, and (2) to contribute to personal and social transformation and thus use this knowledge of our contemporary societal constraints to live a more authentic and meaningful life. Employing a sociological imagination could lead to a citizenry actively and politically engaged in issues of consequence.

As a methodology,¹ the sociological imagination sought to bridge what Mills considered to be a detrimental gap between studies of social action, on the one hand, and studies of social structure on the other, as well as a division between abstract theorizing (i.e., the theoreticism of ‘grand theory’) and atheoretical empirical research (i.e., the empiricism and methodological individualism of ‘abstracted empiricism’).² In chastising ‘research technicians’ for self-identifying as (social) scientists and ridiculing ‘science machines’ for masquerading as (social) sciences, he advocated a ‘creative ethos’ and the practice of ‘intellectual craftsmanship’ as a counter to technocracy.³ Thus the book is a methodological and political call for a reflective and self-critical practice of knowledge production, one that can illuminate structural and ideational constraints on freedom as well as the possible points of intervention for fostering positive social transformation and strengthening social democracy (Scimecca 1976, 194; Krisberg 1974; Frauley 2010). As a methodology it offers a hopeful and humanist sociological practice, and as a politics it denigrates liberalism and liberal social science as being ahistorical and blind to its own oppressive conditions of existence.

¹ To clarify my usage, ‘method’ is used to refer to the technique of data collection, analysis and interpretation; ‘methodology’ is used to refer to the study of these techniques as well as modes of reasoning and knowledge-production and the broader philosophical or meta-theoretical principles that subtend social enquiry. See Blaikie (2000), Mouton (1996) and Mills (1959, 57–8). ² Empiricism holds that what we can experience directly through our senses is all there is and all that is worthy of knowing. It also assumes that we can experience reality directly apart from any kind of theoretical or conceptual intermediary. A variation of this is the use of theoretical concepts to order data or the search within data for examples of ‘variables’ without any attempt to utilize the concepts to fabricate a description and explanation or to say what is of significance in the data and why this is. Abstracted empiricism is empiricist because it is atheoretical and strips observations from their larger context. With abstracted empiricism, social theories become collections of variables (Mills 1959, 63, 69). Theoreticism, according to Pearce (1989, 14), occurs when theories are developed in a manner apart from any reference to an empirical referent; in turn, empirical examples are marshalled only to illustrate concepts. The problem, according to Pearce, is that this form of theory-construction and subsequent manner of illustrating concepts amounts to a substitute for investigating or exploring the complexity of social phenomena. Grand theory was theoreticist because it proceeded without observations or simply held that what was observed was an illustration of theoretical concepts without regard for specific empirical differences. Of grand theory Mills wrote: ‘The magical elimination of conflict, and the wondrous achievement of harmony, remove from this “systematic” and “general” theory the possibilities of dealing with social change, with history. … Virtually any problem of substance that is taken up in the terms of grand theory is incapable of being clearly stated’ because it is loaded with ‘sponge words’ (1959, 42–3). Grand theory involves the ‘fetishism of the Concept’, whereas abstracted empiricism has to do with the fetishism of method. Both of these schools ‘represent abdications of classic social science. The vehicle of their abdication is pretentious over-elaboration of “method” and “theory”; the main reason for it is their lack of firm connection with substantive problems’ (Mills 1959, 74–75). ³ On ‘technocracy’, see Postman (2011) and Lyotard (1979).

The sociological imagination promises empirically informed theorizing and theoretically informed empirics for speculation, perspectivalism and synthesis. What are produced are robust and holistic understandings and explanations of the ‘threats’ to a society’s ‘cherished values’ – threats often experienced existentially as ‘uneasiness’ and ‘indifference’ and politically as ‘malaise’ and ‘apathy’. Thus this quality of mind has just as much to do with battling ant-intellectualism in the classroom and beyond as it does the empiricist and theoreticist research that contributes little to the production or expansion of an intellectual stock of knowledge. If we are to continue to develop, test and reformulate the criminological stock of knowledge⁴ that informs, frames, and guides research and teaching and which enables us to produce criminological descriptions, interpretations, understandings and explanations, we must take the empirical element (e.g., justice programming, public policy, punishment, law enforcement, criminalization, victimization or what have you) as a fecund stimulus for advancing conceptual mappings and framings to develop multidimensional conceptual frameworks that will help us access the various dimensions and facets of our objects of study so that we might better understand them, their reproduction and transformation over time (see Layder 1993). Accumulating information on the distribution of various incidences of crime across different regions, for instance, does not necessarily help social scientists expand their stock of knowledge or tackle problems within social science that pertain to theory construction, analysis or methodology. Of course, such information may be very important for crime prevention programs and strategic policing initiatives – and this is work criminologists should be engaged in, if for no other reason than to question and critique existing models and methods of social control and highlight the implications of said models – but the objective cannot be to only produce information for social control strategies.

⁴ The ‘criminological stock of knowledge’ refers to the ideas, interpretive frameworks and methodologies of criminology, and not the accumulation of information on crime, criminals and so on.

The quality of mind advanced by Mills facilitates ‘refractive thinking’. It is beneficial and necessary to reflect on the place and role of this type of thinking for criminal justice studies and criminological enquiry, especially if we are to defend them as rigorous and insightful fields of enquiry that can produce new or deeper understandings, more adequate explanations, and holistic descriptions of social issues of consequence stemming from criminalization and criminal justice administration as well as related practices. Importantly, we must identify and then reject the organizational features of these criminology and criminal justice studies that impugn refractive thinking and the development of what Mills termed ‘intellectual craftsmanship’. In short, we must identify and be wary of what he called an ‘engineering imagination’ (i.e., bureaucratic ethos) because it acts to interpellate its user, to borrow from Althusser (1971), as a ‘cheerful and willing robot’ (Mills 1959, 71, 72; 1951, 233). The cheerful robot is not only a subjectivity that is characterized by the experience of alienation and dehumanization, it is also an institutional role within the ‘bureaucratic machines’ of technocracies – ‘The society in which this man, this cheerful robot, flourishes is the antithesis of the free society – or in the literal and plain meaning of the word, of a democratic society’ (Mills 1959, 171, 172) – and it views intelligence ‘as a kind of skilled gadget that they hope to market successfully’ (Mills 1959, 106, passim). The cheerful robot is characteristically ‘disengaged’ and: ‘inattentive to political concerns of any kind. They are neither radical nor reactionary. They are inactionary. If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many citizens of many societies are indeed idiots’ (Mills 1959, 41).

We must ask ourselves: ‘Are criminal justice studies and criminology in the business of producing idiots?’ ‘Are criminology and justice studies “science machines”?’ ‘Do justice studies and criminology produce symbols of power that legitimate domination or do they strive to identify and deconstruct such symbols?’ ‘Do justice studies and criminology help to reproduce contemporary forms of domination by producing cheerful robots to take up positions in the crime control industry, or do they help thwart their reproduction from the inside by graduating “intellectual craftspersons” to fill those positions?’ These questions would have us confront the dominance within criminology and justice studies of an engineering imagination that promotes technocratic practice, intellectual and political disengagement, and which thwarts – or rather involves scholars in thwarting – the realization of the methodological and theoretical promise of the sociological imagination for studies of crime, criminalization and crime control.

A criminological imagination would see scholars aim for a ‘unity of trouble and issue’ (Krisberg 1974, 150). It can offer a vantage point on the ways crimes and harms are connected to social institutions as an alternative to the great majority of one-sided or ‘post-social’ criminological theories currently employed which inadequately guide empirical research (Wozniak 2009; Simon 1985, 1988, 1991; Barton et al., 2007; Williams 1984; O’Malley 1996). The desire to produce such a meta-view or big picture is to install imagination, speculation and intuition as guiding forces behind the production of criminological insight (Williams 1984, 96, 97 passim; Williams 1999; McShane and Williams 1989, 563). Such a meta-view will, according to the few criminological scholars who have taken up Mills, aid in challenging both intellectually and practically the agendas of those who engage in elite deviance,...