what is meant by the intersection of biography and history

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The Intersection of Biography and History

Over at Everyday Sociology , Karen Sternheimer discussed one of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in his book , Outliers .  She explains:

While the American ethos of success suggests that it is the result of talent and hard work, Gladwell examines factors that sociologists refer to as social structure —things beyond our individual control—to understand what else successful people have helping them on their journey. Let’s be clear: skills and hard work are important, but so is timing.

One of the examples Gladwell uses is the strange concentration of wildly improbable success in birth cohorts (people born around the same time).  Sternheimer summarizes Gladwell’s argument as to how timing and geography shaped the ascendence of Gates and Jobs:

Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested [and talented] in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers , the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post.

Sternheimer goes on to argue that members of Generation X may have a special advantage over earlier and later cohorts.  This figure shows that the number and rate of births peaked between the 1950s and then dropped precipitously during the period in which Generation X was born:

Those of us born in Generation X, then, would have had the advantage of schools designed and staffed for many more kids, leading to small class sizes and more resources for each kid.  Sternheimer writes:

As Gladwell describes, children born after booms… have the benefit of smaller class sizes. An unprecedented number of schools were built for Baby Boomers in the years before I was born. When my cohort was ready to go to school, there were newly-built buildings waiting for us, especially for people like me who lived in well-funded suburbs… When I was in elementary school in the mid 1970s, there were so few students that many classes were combined: first and second graders had the same teacher, as did third and fourth graders. Looking back, this provided me with some unusual opportunities.

Being able to think through this intersection of biography and history is how C. Wright Mills describes as “ the sociological imagination .”

Lisa Wade is a  professor of sociology at Occidental College . You can follow her on  Twitter  and  Facebook .

Craig — October 6, 2009

I wouldn't mind digging into this more, because it's intriguing. Buuuuut...I was born in 1973, and my experiences were exactly the opposite. A Rustbelt Refugee, I was crammed into a series of Sunbelt schools visibly bulging under the strain. In the 2nd and 3rd Grades, I was educated in "portable classrooms"--a sort of trailer park encroaching on the athletic fields. In the 4th grade, I went to a previously mothballed rural school building that was pressed back into creaking service to accomodate the demand. My class sizes were generally over 30, and only rarely would there be a student teacher or anything like that to assist.

So that's my anecdote, and a prime example of how the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

It leads me to what bothers me about this chart. The variables of live births and fertility rates are subtly transformed into proxies for "per capita funding of public education" (staffing levels are, presumably, the important thing here--not so much how many square feet of school building each student gets) without so much as a by-your-leave. I would really think that a better proxy for per-capita funding would be...per-capita funding.

Posts about Steve Jobs as of October 6, 2009 » The Daily Parr — October 6, 2009

[...] from Apple such a device even exists , it has already generated acres of column inches. The Intersection of Biography and History – thesocietypages.org 10/06/2009 Over at Everyday Sociology , Karen Sternheimer discussed one of [...]

larry c wilson — October 6, 2009

Data is just the sum of anecdotes.

mllesatine — October 7, 2009

"As Gladwell describes, children born after booms… have the benefit of smaller class sizes."

I can only laugh at that. When you can't fill the classes any more, you close down the school/kindergarten and move the children to the nearest school.

And Bill Gates was born into an upper middle class family and benefited from the privilege that came from his class standing. I think it far outweighs his birth cohort.

Aspik — January 4, 2023

Of course, this only applies to lines with a continuous production process, which are used as independent units. All major tobacco companies have such equipment. The productivity of fully automated lines is, on average, 2-5 thousand cigarettes per minute, individual lines produce up to 10 thousand cigarettes per minute. You can see it with Harvest original cigarettes https://www.cigstore.co/product-page/harvest-original/

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Lawrence Goldman, History and biography, Historical Research , Volume 89, Issue 245, August 2016, Pages 399–411, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12144

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This article explores the relationship between historical and biographical writing. It looks at the way structural and individualized approaches to past events complement each other and also conflict on occasion by focusing on examples drawn from modern British and American history. Given as an inaugural lecture by the new Director of the Institute of Historical Research, it looks in turn at the contribution of the I.H.R. to the development of Tudor historiography; at the history and aims of the original Dictionary of National Biography and its successor, the Oxford D.N.B. , published in 2004; and at the advantages and disadvantages of a history of the modern welfare state written through the biographies of its founders, among them William Beveridge, William Temple and R. H. Tawney. On the American side, contrasting depictions of Abraham Lincoln by biographers and historians are compared and the limits of both structural and biographical approaches to the history of American slavery and of individual slave lives are considered. The article argues that the best historical research and the most readable history require both types of analysis, biographical as well as historical.

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• Published: 09 February 2016

Biology, social science and history: interdisciplinarity in three directions

• Chris Renwick 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  2 , Article number:  16001 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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The relationship between biological and social science is a long-standing area of interest for researchers on both sides of the divide, as well as in the humanities, where historians, among others, have been fascinated by its wider social, political and cultural implications. Yet interdisciplinary work in this area has always been problematic, not least because researchers are understandably concerned about interdisciplinarity being a cover for importing ideas and methods wholesale from other fields. This article explores the lessons, both positive and negative, that can be drawn from an ongoing project focused on building links between biology, social science and history. The article argues that dialogue between different disciplines is a difficult process to get going but ultimately rewarding. However, the article also argues that interdisciplinary practice is a much more elusive goal. The key to developing such practices lies in identifying new spaces for cooperative work rather than areas that are already occupied by researchers. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on the concept of interdisciplinarity.

“I don’t want you to answer this letter”, wrote the biologist Lancelot Hogben to the economist William Beveridge on 1 November 1937. Hogben was happy to admit he had consumed “enough whisky to attain a level of honesty, exhibitionism or candour which I rarely attain before 8 p.m.” and he knew that what he had to say probably would not look good in the cold light of day. He had recently left the London School of Economics following the collapse of “The Natural Bases of Social Science”—an interdisciplinary programme Beveridge, the LSE’s director, had created for natural and social scientists and hired Hogben to lead ( Renwick, 2014 ). There were recriminations and accusations flying from both sides of the disciplinary spectrum. Hogben, however, was glad to be out of it and, as he told Beveridge, busy rescuing his career after “besmirch[ing] his reputation with six years of association with economists and such”. Footnote 1

Many academics will identify with Hogben’s sense of frustration, which was born of a failure to convince his colleagues in sociology and economics that their work would improve if they embraced the methods he used as an experimental biologist. People in different disciplines do things differently: they are interested in different questions, investigate them differently, and when they publish their findings they write them up in different forms and publish them in different journals. Yet as Lyne (2015) has argued in this journal, these are neither minor concerns nor abstract difficulties. On the contrary, they are problems that matter because research beyond the small-scale projects university departments can fund on their own now often require interdisciplinary working. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences, where government support has shrunk dramatically, especially over the past decade, because policymakers believe STEM research delivers results that contribute to economic growth ( Holmwood, 2014 ). Interdisplinary working is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Some will continue to extol its virtues; others will bemoan its elevated status. But, like it or not, sitting round tables with colleagues from other departments and disciplines will be the price many people have to pay for research funding and career advancement.

My own research over the course of the past decade has involved increasing levels of interdisciplinary activity. A key component has been the study of projects such as the “Natural Bases of Social Science”, mainly so that we can understand more about how the current state of relations between biological and social science has come to be as it is. Equally important, however, has been the effort to connect that history with discussions that have implications for the future of that relationship. As I will explain, these activities present important and potentially ground breaking opportunities as well as risks and significant challenges, not all of which have straightforward solutions. In my ongoing experience, interdisciplinary projects of this kind generate important and interesting discussions. But they produce more questions than answers when it comes the issue of genuinely interdisciplinary practices that can be carried out by individual researchers. As frustrating as that outcome may be, it may very well be the point of cross-discipline collaboration.

Biology, social science and history

My current project—“Biology, Social Science, and History: Past, Present, and Future Interactions”, which commenced in October 2014 and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council—is a development from my doctoral research and first book, British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past ( Renwick, 2012 ), a study of the events that led to the appointment of L. T. Hobhouse, an avowedly antibiological thinker, as the UK’s first professor of sociology. For the most part, that study was a conventional piece of historical research, built on painstaking archival work, which revealed what major figures in early British sociology, including Patrick Geddes the Scottish polymath and failed candidate for the chair awarded to Hobhouse ( Studholme, 2007 ; Scott and Bromley, 2013 ), understood to be at stake in those formative discussions. As a project that was carried out in a department for history and philosophy of science—a field that was founded on the idea humanities scholarship had an important role to play in scientific endeavour ( Porter, 1996 )— British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots was primed from the start to embrace wider goals. Notably, as I explained in the introduction and conclusion to the book, there was a sense that the forgotten visions for British sociology I had recovered could become something like historical resources: things that social scientists might experiment with as alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between biological and social science in the present.

I conducted my research at what turned out to be an opportune moment. Partly inspired by the centenary of Hobhouse’s appointment at the LSE and as the first editor of The Sociological Review , a number of social scientists offered reflections on what they thought had happened 100 years earlier and suggested what might be learned from that history ( Studholme, 2007 ; Scott and Husbands, 2007 ; Studholme et al., 2007 ; Fuller, 2007 ). This encouraged me to think there was an audience for my work in sociology and led to one of the participants in those debates writing a foreword to my book, which has undoubtedly helped shape its reception beyond my specific field of historical expertise ( Fuller, 2012 ). It also suggested there was an audience ready to participate in a wider conversation about not only the role of historical knowledge in social science but also the intersection of biological and social science.

My project is built around a number of different activities that aim to open up space for those conversations. There is a substantial piece of historical research on the origins of social mobility studies in the United Kingdom, the results of which are beginning to appear ( Renwick, forthcoming ), a contribution to a social science journal ( Renwick, 2016 ), panels organised for social science events, public lectures to disseminate research findings beyond academic audiences, and a conference to be held at the University of York in April 2016. These activities have involved adapting my original plans to the realities of collaboration and a field of research that is rapidly changing, thanks in large part to the constant entrance of new participants, many of whom I have got to know in the process. What follows are what I see as the most important and valuable lessons I have learned from that process.

Opportunities and challenges

The starting point is what many people would see as a reassuring one. The foundation of my project has involved honing and deploying my skills as a historian in a traditional research context. I have been visiting archives in the United Kingdom and the United States, reading widely in the vast and often untapped primary literature, and preparing my findings for publication. Yet I have been pursuing that work knowing that, eventually, aspects will need to be put to a variety of uses, involving audiences in different disciplines, and that published work is only one of a number of aims. This has forced an agenda on my work that has felt unwelcome at times—a distraction perhaps from the narrowly focused pursuit of historical knowledge. Equally, though, having to think about those different contexts, especially the questions researchers in different fields might ask, has encouraged me to think about a broader set of issues. This may sound like wishful thinking—seeing the positive in an ultimately unwelcome imposition—but I think such conclusions would be wrong. Sometimes we do need a spur to consider questions beyond the ones we focus on as lone scholars—the preferred research model in the humanities. But that spur is only valuable on two conditions. The first is that it leaves space for researchers to pursue enough of their own discipline-specific work; otherwise the obvious question for many will be whether the enterprise is worthwhile. The second is that, while preserving that space, there needs to be a meaningful understanding of interdisciplinary work; one rooted in the idea that participants should be able to achieve different goals together.

I have been lucky in finding audiences in sociology who are eager to engage with historical research, as was the case when I convened a panel on biosocial science, featuring contributions from Des Fitzgerald, Maurizio Meloni, Steve Fuller and David Inglis, for the meeting of the British Sociological Association in Glasgow in April 2015. Discussion was lively and overlapped with a wider set of debates about the role of historical knowledge and understanding in the social sciences. Convening the panel also gave me the opportunity to forge links with scholars like Meloni who, unbeknown to me when I first scoped out my project 3 years earlier, was working on similar issues from the perspective of philosophy of biology and the sociology of science. This connection opened up new opportunities, such as an invitation to contribute an article to The Sociological Review ’s 2016 monograph, Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century , which Meloni is co-editing with Simon J. Williams and Paul Martin ( Meloni et al., 2016 ; Renwick, 2016 ). Perhaps the most valuable part of this process has been the chance to have my work peer reviewed by social scientists. This has proven invaluable in revealing which parts of my work are most useful in a different disciplinary context, providing guidance on the kinds of questions I need to consider to relate my work to social science concerns, and understanding which of my ideas translate into a different disciplinary context. Some of those issues were apparent from a distance but most only became clear through direct engagement.

The ongoing process of organising an interdisciplinary conference, in collaboration with a number of other researchers, including Felicity Callard, who has written widely on interdisciplinarity, has been a valuable opportunity in similar respects ( Callard et al., 2015 , Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015 ). The aims of the conference—featuring sessions focused on four problem areas: humans, “the social”, practice, and archives—are to bring together researchers from as many disciplines as possible to discuss how an exchange of ideas and methods can rejuvenate existing research programmes and help create new ones. This has enabled me to build contacts with people working on a range of issues, including digital methods, neuroscience and genetic history, which I have little hope of acquiring expertise in any time soon. This process can be immensely rewarding and an interesting process of discovery. But assembling the right mix participants—ensuring balance between genders and scholars at different stages of their careers, for instance—can be difficult. The actual conference is still to take place, of course, but the discussions promise to be enlightening.

In this respect, one of the most important lessons I have learned is that there are significant barriers when it comes to forging a practice rather than spirit or culture of interdisciplinarity. Initiating conversations with people in different disciplines is relatively straightforward in the sense that there are plenty of researchers out there who are interested in disciplines beyond their own. Setting out a form of interdisciplinary research that can be carried out by an individual is a different matter entirely, though. The burgeoning and controversial field of neurohistory, in which scholars deploy concepts from neuroscience to explain past human experiences and historical change, is a case in point. Neurohistorians argue that concepts including culture and society cannot be understood separately from the brain and genes, as the vast majority of historians argue it can, often implicitly in their day-to-day practices. Taking a much longer view than is typical in conventional historical scholarship, neurohistorians point to developments such as changes in agriculture and diet during the paleolithic era, which increased significantly the number of calories available for consumption and expanded the brain’s capacity. Moving closer to our own era, they argue that the intellectual ferment of the European Enlightenment was embedded in a “psychotropic” culture filled with products including coffee and tobacco, which were not only evidence of global trading networks but also had the power to stimulate and alter brain states, making the new intellectual culture possible (for example see Smail, 2009 ; Brooke and Larsen, 2014 ).

Neurohistorians reject this accusation that theirs is an ultimately reductionist project. It is a brute fact that brains and genes play an important role in historical processes, they argue, yet they are just two of many components in what is ultimately a dynamic process. Indeed, they suggest that focusing on the brain can have a liberating effect by forcing people to see change as resulting from incredibly long-run developments and thereby counteracting the “presentist” trend in history departments, especially in the USA, and culture more generally, which seldom sees history as having roots beyond 1900 ( Smail, 2009 ). Indeed, according to Hunt (2015) , looking at history as a process in which natural factors construct culture and society as much as vice versa is an essential part of getting to grips with some of the greatest challenges of our times, such as the environment, which policymakers are reluctant to see in anything other than the most immediate terms.

Nevertheless, and despite the noble sounding aims, there are seemingly mundane but quite pressing questions about what neurohistory might look like in practice. How much neuroscience does a historian actually need to know to analyse the past in such terms? Is it, for example, necessary for historians to be able to produce neuroscientific research to apply its findings to historical or sociological subject matter? Or is the expectation that researchers in the humanities and social sciences will simply apply resources that are given to them fully packaged? The answers to the questions are important because they have important consequences both intellectually and institutionally. While detractors such as Roger Cooter (2014) worry that making the brain central to our understanding of human history threatens to strip history, not to mention human beings themselves, of agency and the power of critique, there are obvious knock on effects when it comes to the long-term project of producing neurohistorians, skilled in both neuroscience and historical analysis. What kind of training might aspiring neurohistorians, especially postgraduates, require? The answer to that question has huge implications for research funding.

In this respect, I have found discussion and dialogue, rather than stumbling on any specific solutions, are the most important parts of interdisciplinary work. Building contacts with Meloni, for instance, has brought a number of important issues to my attention, such as the idea that epigenetics—the study of the relationship between genetic expression and environments—offers a new and potentially significant area for cooperation between social and biological scientists ( Meloni, 2014a ,  b , 2016 ). Moving on from the idea that the human genome contains “junk DNA”, material with actual purpose, epigenetics is reconfiguring the idea of heredity by making the environment as important as genes. On this account, things like susceptibility to particular diseases to the ageing process are not hardwired in the way some natural scientists have believed in the past but emerge thanks to processes of interaction biology and environment ( FASEB, 2014 ). This development is crucial for social scientists, Meloni (2016) argues, because it opens up an ambiguous space; one where social scientists should be playing an active and important part because they are uniquely placed to contribute to discussions about the content and construction of environments. Indeed, and just as importantly, this space offers the potential for a radically new politics of biosocial science. With gene-environment interaction at the fore, old ideas about hard heredity are irrelevant. Imagine, for instance, what biologically informed social policy might look like if it was not about tracing the inheritance of allegedly good and bad genes, as critics fear, but instead focused on how the the design of urban environments or even social structure itself triggered particular conditions? Conversely, and to relate this point back to neurohistory, what might history look like if biology was not taken to be a fixed entity but something shaped by culture? To be sure, Meloni’s suggestions are open to some of the same criticisms as neurohistory when it comes to issues of research funding and institutional identity. Yet, as a forwards looking project focused on shaping the identity of an ambiguous new intellectual space, rather than remaking an individual discipline, it holds more promise.

In the preceding sections I have tried to outline some of the lessons I have learned from a project dedicated to exploring different ways a scholar-based in the humanities might inhabit the space at the intersection of biological and social science. The experience has been positive but not without its significant challenges. There are two issues worth highlighting as part of my concluding thoughts. The first concerns the the relationship between my expectations on starting the project and the outcomes now it is reaching its end. As I have explained, there have been a number of what funding councils refer to as outputs: publications, conference presentations and talks to audiences outside academia. All of these things provide important, though far from definitive, measures of research activity. Yet they represent closure on only a small number of questions. What I have not found certain answers to are questions about forging interdisciplinary practices. To be sure, I have learned about how to open up discussion across a number of disciplinary boundaries, which should not be underestimated as a productive process in its own right. But I find myself only marginally more clear about what day-to-day interdisciplinary practice would look like at the intersection of biology, social science and history.

The second issue concerns the current asymmetric nature of interdisciplinary collaboration. Building lines of communication between the humanities and the social sciences—success in which can be measured in a variety of ways, such as response rates to conference invitations—has been hard work but involved steady progress. Direct links with the life sciences have proven much harder to forge. The reasons for the discrepancy are far from clear. It is not for wont of trying, nor resistance on the part of many biologists. Those working at the intersection of the social sciences and the life sciences, including the medical sciences, especially on digital methods, have been open to active participation in discussions. But academic life is busy and shaped by a whole host of different concerns, including funding, that seem to make collaboration more pressing for those on the social side of the fence. Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn is that the way into interdisciplinary discussions involves people working at the margins rather than the centre. It most likely there that new practices will emerge following sustained discussions among a wide group of interested parties about an agenda for a new kind of biosocial research.

Additional information

How to cite this article : Renwick C (2016) Biology, social science, and history: interdisciplinarity in three directions. Palgrave Communications . 2:16001 doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.1.

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Acknowledgements

The ongoing project described in this article was conducted thanks to the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L007312/1).

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What Is Sociological Imagination: Definition & Examples

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• The term sociological imagination describes the type of insight offered by sociology; connecting the problems of individuals to that of broader society.
• C. Wright Mills, the originator of the term, contended that both sociologists and non-academics can develop a deep understanding of how the events of their own lives (their biography) relate to the history of their society. He outlined a list of methods through which both groups could do so.
• Mills believed that American society suffered from the fundamental problems of alienation, moral insensibility, threats to democracy, threats to human freedom, and conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason, and that the development of the sociological imagination could counter these.

What is Sociological Imagination?

Sociological imagination, an idea that first emerged in C. Wright Mills’ book of the same name, is the ability to connect one’s personal challenges to larger social issues.

The sociological imagination is the ability to link the experience of individuals to the social processes and structures of the wider world.

It is this ability to examine the ways that individuals construct the social world and how the social world and how the social world impinges on the lives of individuals, which is the heart of the sociological enterprise.

This ability can be thought of as a framework for understanding social reality, and describes how sociology is relevant not just to sociologists, but to those seeking to understand and build empathy for the conditions of daily life.

When the sociological imagination is underdeveloped or absent in large groups of individuals for any number of reasons, Mills believed that fundamental social issues resulted.

Sociological Imagination Theory

C. Wright Mills established the concept of sociological imagination in the 20th century.

Mills believed that: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” the daily lives of society’s members and the history of a society and its issues.

He referred to the problems that occur in everyday life, or biography, as troubles and the problems that occur in society, or history, as issues.

Mills ultimately created a framework intended to help individuals realize the relationship between personal experiences and greater society (Elwell, 2002).

Before Mill, sociologists tended to focus on understanding how sociological systems worked, rather than exploring individual issues. Mills, however, pointed out that these sociologists, functionalists chief among them, ignored the role of the individual within these systems.

In essence, Mills claimed in his book, The Sociological Imagination , that research had come to be guided more by the requirements of administrative concerns than by intellectual ones.

He critiqued sociology for focusing on accumulating facts that only served to facilitate the administrative decisions of, for example, governments.

Mills believed that, to truly fulfill the promise of social science, sociologists and laypeople alike had to focus on substantial, society-wide problems, and relate those problems to the structural and historical features of the society and culture that they navigated (Elwell, 2002).

Mills’ Guidelines for Social Scientists

In the appendix of The Sociological Imagination, Mills set forth several guidelines that would lead to “intellectual craftsmanship.” These are, paraphrased (Mills, 2000; Ellwell, 2002):

Scholars should not split work from life, because both work and life are in unity.

Scholars should keep a file, or a collection, of their own personal, professional, and intellectual experiences.

Scholars should engage in a continual review of their thoughts and experiences.

Scholars may find a truly bad sociological book to be as intellectually stimulating and conducive to thinking as a good one.

Scholars must have an attitude of playfulness toward phrases, words, and ideas, as well as a fierce drive to make sense of the world.

The sociological imagination is stimulated when someone assumes a willingness to view the world from the perspective of others.

Sociological investigators should not be afraid, in the preliminary and speculative stages of their research, to think in terms of imaginative extremes, and,

Scholars should not hesitate to express ideas in language that is as simple and direct as possible. Ideas are affected by how they are expressed. When sociological perspectives are expressed in deadening language, they create a deadened sociological imagination.

Mills’ Original Social Problems

Mills identified five main social problems in American society: alienation , moral insensibility, threats to democracy, threats to human freedom, and the conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason (Elwell, 2015).

1. Threats to Democracy and Freedom

The end result of these problems of alienation, political indifference, and the economic and political concentration of power, according to Mills, is a serious threat to democracy and freedom.

He believed that, as bureaucratic organizations became large and more centralized, more and more power would be placed into the hands of a small elite (Elwell, 2006).

2. Alienation

Mills believed that alienation is deeply rooted in how work itself works in society; however, unlike Marx, C. Wright Mills does not attribute alienation solely to the means of production, but to the modern division of labor .

Mills observed that, on the whole, jobs are broken up into simple, functional tasks with strict standards. Machines or unskilled workers take over the most tedious tasks (Elwell, 2002).

As the office was automated, Mills argued, authority and job autonomy became the attributes of only those highest in the work hierarchy. Most workers are discouraged from using their own judgment, and their decision-making forces them to comply with the strict rules handed down by others.

In this loss of autonomy, the average worker becomes alienated from their intellectual capacities and work becomes an enforced chore (Elwell, 2015).

3. Moral Insensibility

The second major problem that C. Wright Mills identified in modern American society was that of moral insensibility. He pointed out that, as people had lost faith in their leaders in government, religion, and the workplace, they became apathetic.

He considered this apathy a “spiritual condition” that underlined many problems — namely, moral insensibility. As a result of moral insensibility, people within society accept atrocities, such as genocide, committed by their leaders.

Mills considered the source of cruelty to be moral insensibility and, ultimately, the underdevelopment of the sociological imagination (Elwell, 2002).

4. Personal Troubles

Personal troubles are the issues that people experience within their own character, and in their immediate relationships with others. Mills believed that people function in their personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within their control.

As a result, people have some issue on the outcomes of events on a personal level. For example, an individual employee who spends most of his work time browsing social media or online shopping may lose their job. This is a personal problem.

However, hundreds of thousands of employees being laid-off en masse constitutes a larger social issue (Mills, 2000).

5. Social and Public Issues

Social and public issues, meanwhile, are beyond one”s personal control. These issues pertain to the organization and processes of society, rather than individuals. For example, universities may, as a whole, overcharge students for their education.

This may be the result of decades of competition and investment into each school”s administration and facilities, as well as the narrowing opportunities for those without a college degree.

In this situation, it becomes impossible for large segments of the population to get a tertiary education without accruing large and often debilitating amounts of debt (Mills, 2000).

The sociological imagination allows sociologists to distinguish between the personal and sociological aspects of problems in the lives of everyone.

Most personal problems are not exclusively personal issues; instead, they are influenced and affected by a variety of social norms, habits, and expectations. Indeed, there is often confusion as to what differentiates personal problems and social issues (Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009).

For example, a heroin addiction may be blamed on the reckless and impulsive choices of an addict. However, this approach fails to account for the societal factors and history that led to high rates of heroin addiction, such as the over-prescribing of opiate painkillers by doctors and the dysregulation of pharmaceutical companies in the United States.

Sociological imagination is useful for both sociologists and those encountering problems in their everyday lives. When people lack in sociological imagination, they become vulnerable to apathy: considering the beliefs, actions, and traditions around them to be natural and unavoidable.

This can cause moral insensitivity and ultimately the commitment of cruel and unjust acts by those guided not by their own consciousness, but the commands of an external body (Hironimus-Wendt & Wallace, 2009).

Fast Fashion

Say that someone is buying themselves a new shirt. Usually, the person buying the shirt would be concerned about their need for new clothing and factors such as the price, fabric, color, and cut of the shirt.

At a deeper level, the personal problem of buying a shirt may provoke someone to ask themselves what they are buying the shirt for, where they would wear it, and why they would participate in an activity where they would wear the shirt over instead of some other activity.

People answer these questions on a personal level through considering a number of different factors. For example, someone may think about how much they make, and how much they can budget for clothing, the stores available in the community, and the styles popular in one”s area (Joy et al., 2012).

On a larger level, however, the questions and answers to the question of what shirt to buy — or even if to buy a shirt at all — would differ if someone were provided a different context and circumstances.

For example, if someone had come into a sudden sum of wealth, they may choose to buy an expensive designer shirt or quit the job that required them to buy the shirt altogether. If someone had lived in a community with many consignment shops, they may be less likely to buy a new shirt and more likely to buy one that was pre-owned.

If there were a cultural dictate that required people to, say, cover their shoulders or breasts — or the opposite, someone may buy a more or less revealing shirt.

On an even higher level, buying a shirt also represents an opportunity to connect the consumption habits of individuals and groups to larger issues.

The lack of proximity of communities to used-clothing stores on a massive scale may encourage excessive consumption, leading to environmental waste in pollution. The competition between retailers to provide the cheapest and most fashionable shirts possible results in, as many have explored, the exploitation of garment workers in exporting countries and large amounts of co2 output due to shipping.

Although an individual can be blamed or not blamed for buying a shirt made more or less sustainably or ethically, a discussion of why an individual bought a certain shirt cannot be complete without a consideration of the larger factors that influence their buying patterns (Joy et al., 2012).

The “Global Economic Crisis”

Dinerstein, Schwartz, and Taylor (2014)  used the 2008 economic crisis as a case study of the concept of sociological imagination, and how sociology and other social sciences had failed to adequately understand the crisis.

The 2008 global economic crisis led to millions of people around the world losing their jobs. On the smallest level, individuals were unable to sustain their lifestyles.

Someone who was laid off due to the economic downturn may have become unable to make their mortgage or car payments, leading to a bank foreclosing their house or repossessing their car.

This person may also be unable to afford groceries, need to turn to a food bank, or have credit card debt to feed themselves and their families. As a result, this person may damage their credit score, restricting them from, say, taking out a home ownership loan in the future.

The sociological imagination also examines issues like the great recession at a level beyond these personal problems. For example, a sociologist may look at how the crisis resulted from the accessibility of and increasing pressure to buy large and normally unaffordable homes in the United States.

Some sociologists, Dinerstein, Schwartz, and Taylor among them, even looked at the economic crisis as unveiling the social issue of how academics do sociology. For example, Dinerstein, Schwatz, and Taylor point out that the lived experience of the global economic crisis operated under gendered and racialized dynamics.

Many female immigrant domestic laborers, for example, lost their jobs in Europe and North America as a result of the crisis.

While the things that sociologists had been studying about these populations up until that point — migration and return — are significant, the crisis brought a renewed focus in sociology into investigating how the negative effects of neoliberal globalization and the multiple crises already impacting residents of the global South compound during recessions (Spitzer & Piper, 2014).

Bhambra, G. (2007).  Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination . Springer.

Dinerstein, A. C., Schwartz, G., & Taylor, G. (2014). Sociological imagination as social critique: Interrogating the ‘global economic crisis’. Sociology, 48 (5), 859-868.

Elwell, F. W. (2002). The Sociology of C. Wright Mills .

Elwell, F. W. (2015). Macrosociology: four modern theorists . Routledge.

Hironimus-Wendt, R. J., & Wallace, L. E. (2009). The sociological imagination and social responsibility. Teaching Sociology, 37 (1), 76-88.

Joy, A., Sherry Jr, J. F., Venkatesh, A., Wang, J., & Chan, R. (2012). Fast fashion, sustainability, and the ethical appeal of luxury brands. Fashion theory, 16 (3), 273-295.

Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination . Oxford University Press.

Spitzer, D. L., & Piper, N. (2014). Retrenched and returned: Filipino migrant workers during times of crisis. Sociology, 48 (5), 1007-1023.

Module 1: Foundations of Sociology

The sociological imagination, learning outcomes.

• Define the sociological imagination
• Apply the sociological imagination

Figure 1.  The sociological imagination enables you to look at your life and your own personal issues and relate them to other people, history, or societal structures.

Many people believe they understand the world and the events taking place within it, even though they have not actually engaged in a systematic attempt to understanding the social world, as sociologists do. In this section, you’ll learn to think like a sociologist.

The sociological imagination , a concept established by C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) provides a framework for understanding our social world that far surpasses any common sense notion we might derive from our limited social experiences. Mills was a contemporary sociologist who brought tremendous insight into the daily lives of society’s members. Mills stated: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” [1] .  The sociological imagination is making the connection between personal challenges and larger social issues. Mills identified “troubles” (personal challenges) and “issues” (larger social challenges), also known as biography, and history, respectively. Mills’ sociological imagination allows individuals to see the relationships between events in their personal lives (biography), and events in their society (history). In other words, this mindset provides the ability for individuals to realize the relationship between their personal experiences and the larger society in which they live their lives.

Personal troubles are private problems experienced within the character of the individual and the range of their immediate relation to others. Mills identified that we function in our personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about our friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within our control. We have a degree of influence on the outcome of matters within this personal level. A college student who parties 4 nights out of 7, who rarely attends class, and who never does his homework has a personal trouble that interferes with his odds of success in college. However, when 50% of all college students in the United States never graduate, we label it as a larger social issue.

Larger social or public issues are those that lie beyond one’s personal control and the range of one’s inner life. These pertain to broader matters of organization and process, which are rooted in society rather than in the individual. Nationwide, students come to college as freshmen who are often ill-prepared to understand the rigors of college life. They haven’t often been challenged enough in high school to make the necessary adjustments required to succeed in college. Nationwide, the average teenager text messages, surfs the Net, plays video games, watches TV, spends hours each day with friends, and works at least part-time. Where and when would he or she get experience focusing attention on college studies and the rigorous self-discipline required to transition into college?

The real power of the sociological imagination is found in how we learn to distinguish between the personal and social levels in our own lives. This includes economic challenges. For example, many students do not purchase required textbooks for college classes at both 2-year colleges and 4-year colleges and universities. Many students simply do not have the money to purchase textbooks, and while this can seem like a “choice,” some of the related social issues include rising tuition rates, decreasing financial aid, increasing costs of living and decreasing wages. The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has sought to address this  personal trouble  as a  public issue  by partnering with institutional consortia and encouraging large city and state institutions to adopt OER materials. A student who does not purchase the assigned textbook might see this as a private problem, but this student is part of a growing number of college students who are forced to make financial decisions based on structural circumstances.

A majority of personal problems are not experienced as exclusively personal issues, but are influenced and affected by social norms, habits, and expectations. Consider issues like homelessness, crime, divorce, and access to healthcare. Are these all caused by personal choices, or by societal problems? Using the sociological imagination, we can view these issues as interconnected personal and public concerns.

For example, homelessness may be blamed on the individuals who are living on the streets. Perhaps their personal choices influenced their position; some would say they are lazy, unmotivated, or uneducated. This approach of blaming the victim fails to account for the societal factors that also lead to homelessness—what types of social obstacles and social failings might push someone towards homelessness? Bad schools, high unemployment, high housing costs, and little family support are all social issues that could contribute to homelessness. C. Wright Mills, who originated the concept of the sociological imagination, explained it this way: “the very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.”

Watch the following video to see an example of how the sociological imagination is used to understand the issue of obesity.

• Mills, C. W.: 1959, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, London. ↵
• Modification, adaptation, and original content. Authored by : Sarah Hoiland for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• The Sociological Imagination. Provided by : College of the Canyons. Located at : https://www.canyons.edu/Offices/DistanceLearning/OER/Documents/Open%20Textbooks%20At%20COC/Sociology/SOCI%20101/The%20Sociological%20Imagination.pdf . Project : Sociology 101. License : CC BY: Attribution
• People graphic. Authored by : Peggy_Marco. Provided by : pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/en/network-society-social-community-1019778/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved

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When I was growing up many of the women whom I knew worked cleaning other people's houses. Domestic service was part of my taken-for-granted reality. Later, when I had my own place, I considered housework something you did before company came over. My first thought that domestic service and housework might be a serious research interest came as a result of a chance encounter with live-in domestics along the U. S.-Mexican border. Before beginning a teaching position at the University of Texas in EI Paso, I stayed with a colleague while apartment hunting. My colleague had a live-in domestic to assist with housecleaning and cooking. Asking around, I learned that live-in maids were common in EI Paso, even among apartment and condominium dwellers. The hiring of maids from Mexico was so common that locals referred to Monday as the border patrol's day off because the agents ignored the women crossing the border to return to their employers' homes after their weekend off. The practice of hiring undocumented Mexican women as domestics, many of whom were no older than fifteen, seemed strange to me. It was this strangeness that raised the topic of domestic service as a question and made problematic what had previously been taken for granted.

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Scavenger and Bricoleur: A Critical Analysis of Dick Hebdige’s Repurposing of Subculture Through the Intersection of Biography and History

• First Online: 23 April 2020

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• Shane Blackman 17  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music ((PSHSPM))

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This chapter explores Dick Hebdige’s approach towards subculture from his MA thesis, Aspects of Style in the Deviant Subcultures of the Sixties, at the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) to his more recent University of California, Santa Barbara, Desert Studies based on the development of ‘repurposing subculture’ through the intersection of biography and history. There will be an assessment of how Dick Hebdige’s book on Subculture was received within sociology and how there are degrees of similarity between the negative reception of C. W. Mills’ (The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, New York, 1959). The Sociological Imagination and Dick Hebdige’s (Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Methuen, London, 1979) and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. From a critical research position, I will look at his interpretation of the youth subculture: mod (because his personal roots and early research at the CCCS is on mod); through the lens of autobiography and his creative participation in the Shoop sound system as a practice-based intervention in music and culture and will conclude by comparing Desert Studies to his classic study of Subculture to advance a close reading of the Subcultural Imagination. The chapter will develop the argument that the conceptual approach of Dick Hebdige can be theoretically understood as a critical bricoleur and methodologically grounded as an ethnographic scavenger always seeking to understand and to explore social and cultural disruptions and transgressions in order to challenge the orders of normality.

I should like to thank Dick Hebdige for speaking at length with me on the phone, answering all the emails I sent and for sending me copies of his articles.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Debbie Cox, and also the editors of the book for the guidance.

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Shane Blackman

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Keith Gildart

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Blackman, S. (2020). Scavenger and Bricoleur: A Critical Analysis of Dick Hebdige’s Repurposing of Subculture Through the Intersection of Biography and History. In: Gildart, K., et al. Hebdige and Subculture in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28475-6_3

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Published : 23 April 2020

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