talking about a very important concept of Mills and that's the concept of the sociological imagination for Mills sociological research had become quite problematic he said that it had become the accumulation of facts for the purpose of facilitating administrative decisions in other words sociological research had gotten away from theoretical um understandings of society and More in tune with basic Bean counting let's go out let's count the these things let's report it back to the government and let's let the government decide whether intervention needs to take place one way or the other for Mills this was a disconnect from the whole idea of how we really should be approaching the study of society and thinking about Society in general so he said that the difference between effective sociological thought and that which fails rests upon a person's ability to imagine for him the sociological imagination was a quality of mind it allowed you to grasp relationships between your own personal self your biography and how you fit into the bigger picture history and Society it allowed you to step out of your personal sphere and put yourself into the public world to experience the world how other people experienced the world and in doing so allowed you to see the reality the sociological reality of everyday life an important component for Mills of the sociological imagination was that the features of social life have meanings for individuals and those meanings profoundly affect the value and character and uh the behavior of who those people are that make up that particular society or sociocultural system and he said that the role that sociology needs to play there is to bring reason to bear on human Affairs and to fulfill that role sociology needed to avoid furthering the bureaucratization of reason and of discourse what that means is sociology really needed to have uh intellectual thinkers who weren't interested in just reporting back what they felt reality was do but in fact being able to situate themselves in the social reality of others and then be able to report back in the clearest terms possible what that reality is in his own words he says I'm suggesting by addressing ourselves to issues and to troubles and by formulating them as problems of science we stand the best chance he believes the only chance to make reason democratically relevant to human Affairs in a free society and so to realize the classic values that underly the promise of our studies and so what he did was he set forth his own ideas about how we would do that work and he really does um a solid job of conveying a sense of what it means to be an intellectual scientist a person who concentrates on the very essence of what it means to be human and then who seeks to understand what those significant things are to humankind so let's break this down a little bit further to try and make it more practical for your life when I'm in a physical classroom and I talk to my students about the sociological imagination I try to do so by example so let's imagine that we're all sitting in a classroom together and I ask you the following question how many of you struggle to make ends meet month to month well I'm going to guess that a lot of you would have your hands in the air right now and I'm guessing that based on my having ask this question to classes over and over and over semester after semester so let's assume that more than half of you struggle to make ends meet at least at some point during the year you see that as your individual problem and you probably also see that as being influenced by something you're doing or not doing that impact your outcome so perhaps you feel like you need to take a second job perhaps you have an addiction to shopping and you're spending too much money you're you're not staying on your budget perhaps you live in a very expensive house perhaps you have a very expensive car maybe you've had a whole slew of tickets and your car insurance is very expensive so whatever the situation is for you personally you think of this as an individual circumstance an individual issue but when I look out at my classroom and I see so many students with their hands in the air so many of my students telling me that they have to rob Peter to pay Paul every single month I want to know more about that and upon investigation what I find is that most of my students are doing everything they can to keep their head above water most of my students attempt to live within a budget most of my students attempt to save money if they can most of my students live in reasonable housing have reasonable Transportation Etc most of my students don't spend a lot of money on food and so the question for me then becomes what's going on on in the structure that is contributing to this problem so the sociological imagination allows me to get out of my own personal ideas and Notions about a problem and instead look at it from a social standpoint and once I can do that I can stop identifying things in terms of individual shortcomings and I can start looking at things in terms of being social problems this doesn't excuse the individual you still need to do whatever you can to try and be successful but when so many people are struggling I want to know what's going on in the structure so now my next question becomes what can the structure of society do differently if that individual is doing everything right they're working hard they're getting an education they're trying to keep to a reasonable budget they're not spending too much on food or entertainment or cars things of that nature what can the structure do to help that person out this is what SE right Mills contributed to Sociology letting us view things from the perspective of social problems rather than individual shortcomings and I bet if I pose that question to all of you what can the structure do differently you can come up with a whole host of answers that could be helpful to a lot of people we need to make education more affordable for people we need to have a better understanding of how the housing market impacts the individual and potentially have more social welfare programs in place to help people who are trying to do every single thing right lift themselves up out of that situation you know I don't know how many students I've had over the years who've said to me Dr Marshall I was doing every single thing right and then I got sick and I had to go to the emergency room and that set me back months having to pay that bill off or Dr Marshall I was on my way to work and I blew a tire on my car and I didn't have a spare and I lost my job because I didn't get to work on time so I couldn't fix my car and one thing snowballs right into another SE Mills allows us to see that sometimes times the problems we have are structural sometimes we aren't the primary contributors to the problems that we have to experience every single day I want to encourage you to use the sociological imagination every single day try to see things from someone else's perspective it might just help you to understand their situation all right I hope this helps take care we'll talk again soon