Stretching the Sociological Imagination

Essays in Honour of John Eldridge

Andrew Smith, Matt Dawson, Bridget Fowler, David Miller, Andrew Smith, Matt Dawson, Bridget Fowler, David Miller, Kenneth A. Loparo, David Rampton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137493637
• eBook ISBN: 9781137493644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection calls for renewed attention to the concept of the sociological imagination, allowing social scientists to link private issues to public troubles. Inspired by the eminent Glasgow-based sociologist, John Eldridge, it re-engages with the concept and shows how it can be applied to analyzing society today.

1

Stretching Exercises: Stimulating the Sociological Imagination

John Eldridge

C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination has achieved legendary status in the 50 or so years since its publication. I have always enjoyed it primarily for its intellectual and moral challenge but also for its mischievous sense of fun. According to Mills: ‘To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination’ (Mills 1959: 10–11).

For those who were taught sociology and those who practiced it the possibility of a fruitful form of self consciousness was held out. There was something inherently worthwhile and indeed exciting about this. Through the exercise of the sociological imagination we learn new ways of thinking and the capacity for astonishment is made lively again. Mills nailed his colours to the mast. He distinguished between what he termed the personal troubles of the milieu and the public issues of social structure. He offers thumb nail sketches of what he has in mind with reference to unemployment, war, marriage and the metropolis. Whatever our experiences and troubles within any of these contexts, which may well matter deeply to us as individuals, the explanation of the phenomena which they represent cannot be found in the immediate environment of the individual but in the wider institutional nexus – the state, the economy, the range of social institutions that both sustain a society and create difficulties, tensions and conflicts that can be identified as public issues. This is the level at which reason can and should be applied to human affairs.

But for Mills, the promise of sociology as an emancipatory practice was not being fulfilled. He wrote:

My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodological’ pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialise it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.

(Mills 1959: 20)

Were there ways of counteracting what he regarded as a crisis in the social sciences? The Appendix of the book, ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, offered some practical advice to would-be researchers. In this chapter I want to build on that and discuss some of the ways in which the sociological imagination can be stimulated and cultivated. But as a preface to this, we may recall the strong advice of these words:

try to understand men and women as historical and social actors, and the ways in which the variety of men and women are intricately selected and intricately formed by the variety of human societies. Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion, orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the second half of the twentieth century.

(Mills 1959: 225)

We can now extend the time period of course. But the thrust of the argument remains the same.

Cross-classification

Mills claimed that ‘in many ways cross-classification is the very grammar of the sociological imagination. Like all grammar it must be controlled and not allowed to run away from its purpose’ (Mills 1959: 213). Mills saw cross-classification as a technique for dealing with quantitative and qualitative materials. It was a tool which enabled the sociologist to clarify and critique one’s own and other people’s work and possibly to make innovating conceptual moves as a result:

Charts, tables and diagrams of a qualitative sort are not only ways to display work already done, they are very often genuine tools of production. They clarify the ‘dimensions’ of the types, which they also help you to imagine and build … When they work, they help you to think more clearly and to write more explicitly. They enable you to discover the range and the full relationships of the very terms with which you are thinking and of the facts with which you are dealing.

(Mills 1959: 213)

I have discussed the usefulness of cross-classification in various places (Eldridge 1985; Cressey et al. 1985; Eldridge 2010).

For example, in offering a framework for the analysis of job satisfaction studies as early as 1948, Mills demonstrates how, by the use of cross-classification and introducing concepts of power and participation, it is possible to move from purely subjective measures of job satisfaction to structural considerations. This involved inventing new categories but also showed the ways in which empirical findings would be shaped and re-shaped by such inventiveness. In such ways conventional thinking in a discipline can be challenged (Mills 1948).

But cross-classification techniques can also be used to throw light on the research process itself. In 1953 Mills wrote about the macroscopic and the molecular as two styles of social research – the large scale and the small scale (Mills 1963). This he cross-classifies against what he terms the problematic (what is the research question?) and the explanatory (what constitutes an explanation?) (Table 1.1).

The research process, he contends, is neither wholly deductive nor wholly inductive. Mills deploys the image of the shuttle to indicate what is happening inside each phase of research both in defining the problem and in explaining it. He expresses it formally in this way:

We move from macroscopic to molecular in both problem and solution phase (1 to 3 and 2 to 4); then we relate the two on the molecular level (3 and 4); then we go back to the macroscopic (3 to 1 and 4 to 2). After that we can speak cautiously (bearing in mind the shuttles made) of relations on the macroscopic level (1 and 2).

(Mills 1963: 563)

What is interesting about this exposition is that, despite Mills’s strictures concerning molecular research in the abstracted empiricist form, he still recognises that work done at that level had potential for sociological work, providing its does not get disconnected from macroscopic concerns. Indeed, just as the macroscopic researcher needs to cultivate a technical imagination, so the research technicians need to develop an imaginative concern for macroscopic meaning. It is the consciousness of this process at whatever level sociologists are working at any given time which creates a basis for intellectual craftsmanship.

Table 1.1 The research process for Mills

	Problematic	Explanatory
Macroscopic	1	2
Molecular	3	4

Source: Adapted from Mills (1963: 560).

Among other things, then, the technique of cross-classification can inform our understanding of the relationship between theory and method. As it happens, there are parallel observations about this relationship between theory and method in the work of the historian E.P. Thompson, who refers specifically to Mills in his celebrated essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (Thompson 1978). There Thompson points to Marx and Darwin, giants of social and natural science respectively.

In both men we can see that exciting dialectic of making and breaking, the formation of conceptual hypotheses, that friction between ‘molecular’ research and ‘macroscopic’ generalisation to which Wright Mills often referred. In any vital intellectual tradition this dialectic, this abrasion between models and particulars, is always evident.

(Thompson 1978: 274)

And when Thompson reflects on the character of historical practice, he sees it as a kind of dialogue

with an argument between received, inadequate, or ideologically informed concepts or hypotheses on the one hand, and fresh or inconvenient evidence on the other; with the elaboration of new hypotheses; with the testing of these hypotheses against the evidence, which may involve interrogating existing evidence in new ways, or renewed research to confirm or disprove the new notions; with discarding those hypotheses which fail these tests, and refining or revising those which do, in the light of this engagement.

(Thompson 1978: 43)

It is precisely what Thompson termed the creative quarrel at the heart of cognition that allows intellectual growth to take place. In such ways is the historical and sociological imagination kindled, sustained and disciplined.

Juxtapositions and contrasts

The deployment of juxtapositions and contrasts is of course closely connected with the practice of cross-classification. Here we see the imagination at work in thoughtful, sometimes playful ways. Some of this is now well established and built into the edifice of the sociological tradition. We can think of examples such as culture and society, tradition and modernity, sacred and profane, class and status, elites and masses. In each case some kind of contrast is implied. At the same time we are encouraged to understand one concept by reference to another.

When Max Weber writes about class and status, for example, he wants to show the difference between the two concepts and their potential interconnections. So class is defined in essentially economic terms – the collective standing of groups of people in terms of their property, income, skill and market situation – which shape their life chances. Status is also a collective term which refers to shared life styles between groups of people and may be marked out by matters such as education, occupation, membership of social circles, which may have positive or negative effects on the social standing of people and the social esteem that is accorded to them. Weber, who was a trained economist as well as a sociologist, finds a way of making a distinction between production, which class stratification relates to, and patterns of consumption which lead to specific styles of life and status orders. But he is careful to point out that interrelationships may well exist between life chances and life style. The empirical question is: how do these connections manifest themselves in different situations?

Weber sought conceptual clarity not for its own sake but in order to engage in work that involved wrestling with the big themes of social change. This was strategically done though the extensive use of ideal types. These pure types, or utopian constructs as he called them, were a necessary way for him to gain a sharper sense of the dynamics of social change. The key question for him was: are these types useful? If they were they became part of his conceptual repertoire: types of action, of rationality, of organisation, of bureaucracy, of leadership and of political authority serve as examples. They marked out the ground he was exploring and, in the process, enabled him to grapple with questions of causation in social life and action, together with questions of meaning.

Raymond Aron, still one of the best commentators on Weber, gives us a good sense of how the use of ideal types constitute imaginative acts on the part of the sociologist:

The ideal type can be used equally well in formulating a problem (how did capitalism, regarded as the achievement of a particular kind of organisation of labour which is only found in the West, originate?), or in expounding the results, or in research (to what extent does reality conform to the ideal type?).

(Aron 1957: 74)

What is liberating about Weber’s approach to ideal type analysis is the recognition that such types can lose their relevance as new problems emerge. He is not therefore insisting that his ideal types are fixed and must be slavishly followed by any budding historian or sociologist. On the contrary:

there are sciences to which eternal youth is granted, and the historical disciplines are among them – all those to which the eternally onward flowing stream of culture perpetually brings new problems. At the very heart of their task lies not only the transiency of all ideal types but also at the same time the inevitability of new ones.

(Weber 1949: 104)

It is precisely this which constitutes a challenge to the sociological imagination of each generation.

There are quite other ways of looking at juxtapositions and contrasts as ways of illuminating social reality. We may look at the relationship between words and images in a text. Take, for example John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Seventh Man (1975), which is about male migrant workers in Europe. The title referred to the fact that at that time in Germany and Britain one out of every seven manual workers was an immigrant. The authors insist that the words and images should be read in their own terms. The pictures, seen as a sequence, are intended to make their own statement rather than as illustrations of the text. And so there are pictures of migrant workers from Turkey, Greece, North Africa and other places. They have mostly come from villages where they worked as peasants. We see them undergoing medical examinations – are they fit enough, capable enough, tall enough? We see them at railway stations, at passport control gates, at reception centres, in their places of work, in their barracks-like accommodation. These are the people who built new buildings and motorways, cleaned the cities, worked on the assembly lines, quarried the minerals, loaded the goods and buried the pipe lines. They came from places of rural poverty to the marginalised existence of migrant labour in the cities of Europe.

It is salutary to read A Seventh Man some 40 years on. It anticipates the theme of globalisation now in common parlance. Not only so, but it reminds us of the theoretical relationship between actor and structure in its human dimensions. And of course issues of migration are still very much on the European agenda. At such a time as this we can recall Berger’s words:

To outline the experience of the migrant worker and to relate to what surrounds him – both physically and historically – is to grasp more surely the political reality of the world at this moment. The subject is European, its meaning is global. Its theme is unfreedom. This unfreedom can only be fully recognised if an objective economic system is related to the subjective experience of those trapped within it. Indeed, finally, the unfreedom is that relationship.

(Berger and Mohr 1975: 1)

Metaphors and similes

Sociology without metaphor is dead or, we might say, impossible. We may well be shocked to realise that the concept of society itself is a metaphor. This, after all, is the concept which, until recently at least, was the defining feature, the very object of sociological study. Bauman points out that the metaphor of society, like all metaphors, was selective. It brought to the surface and made salient the quality of being in a ‘company’. He comments:

Explicitly or implicitly, the metaphor of society uses images of closeness, proximity, togetherness and mutual engagement. ‘Society’ could be used as a metaphor because the experience which sociologists struggled to grasp and articulate was that of a number of people in the same place interacting in many if not all of their activities, meeting each other often and talking to each other on many occasions. Being united in such a way, the quantity of people faced the prospect of living in close proximity to each other for a long time to come, and for that reason the unity of life setting was capped by the effort to close ranks, to make the co-existence ‘harmonious’, ‘orderly’, so that mutual benefits might follow.

(Bauman and Tester 2001: 101–2)

So here we are offered an image of how to see ourselves and others as social beings. To develop such a concept in the first place is an imaginative act, although today we would scarcely give it a second thought. We take it for granted. But Bauman goes on to point out that there is a paradox at the heart of this inventive moment. Why is this? It is because:

the kind of experience which sociologists struggled to catch in their conceptual net when using ‘society’ as a metaphor had become salient because it was already in a state of disrepair and in need of urgent and close attention, requiring new tools for it to be taught. It was precisely the ‘company’ that was mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword: For John Eldridge – Sociology in His Times and Ours
• Foreword: John Eldridge and the Birth of the Glasgow Media Group
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Stretching Exercises: Stimulating the Sociological Imagination
• Part I: Sociology of Work and Industry
• Part II: Social Theory
• Part III: Sociology of the Media
• Conclusion: Stretching the Sociological Imagination in the Neo-Liberal Academy
• Appendix: Bibliography of the Writings of John Eric Thomas Eldridge (b. 1936)
• Index