The Sociological Imagination
2) Mills “The Sociological Imagination”
a) The definition of the sociological imagination as Mills described is “a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves”. What he meant by the sociological imagination is that a person think himself away from his surroundings gathering information about the familiar routines of his daily lives to understand what is happening in the his society and within himself.
b) The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. Also it enables him to see how the individuals in their daily lives often become falsely aware of their social positions.
c) Troubles have to do with 'an individual's character and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. To describe those troubles and to resolve them, he argues, we must attend the individual's biography and the scope of their immediate milieu - what Mills describes as 'the social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A trouble is, thus, 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 limited range of his life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of society as a whole. An issue is a public matter, values cherished by publics are felt to be threatened. It is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the everyday environments of ordinary men. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements
For an example: unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000 only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble. For its relief, e properly look to the character of the man, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. Another example is marriage. Inside a marriage a man and women may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institution of marriage and family and other institutions s that bear upon them.
d) Mills means that an individual in his limited milieu will have no power to solve his issues that this system puts on him. In order to solve this problem individuals must come together to address this issue and find a solution for it. He believes that a person by his ingenuity won’t solve anything because basically he is one individual, its’ his problem, but if it was a problem that matter to the whole society, they will form a structure that can find a permeant solution for the problem.
3) Zimbardo “Pathology of Imprisonment”
The prison experiment took place in Stanford University in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo. He put an ad in a Palo Alto city newspaper and ended up with 24 men. They were mature, emotionally stable, normal, intelligent college students from middle-class homes. None had any criminal record and all were relatively homogenous on many dimensions initially. Half were assigned as prisoners by a flip of a coin and the other as guards. The participants were offered $15 a day for the two-week experiment. The mock prison was constructed in the Stanford Psychology Department. Zimbardo himself was an active participant of the experiment. He was the prison superintendent and his research assistant was the warden. The experiment had chocking results and gave much new information about the influence of the environment on the individuals. It was aimed to find out how social environment influences individuals and how individuals act in frames of particular social roles. It was a study of human psychological reactions on imprisonment and authority. The experiment lasted only six days instead of two weeks planned
b) The guards were mad aware of the potential seriousness and danger of the situation and their own vulnerability. They made up their own formal rules for maintaining law, and respect, and were generally free to improvise new ones during their eight-hour, three-man shifts. At first the prisoners were picked up at their homes by a city policemen in a squad car, searched, hand cuffed, fingerprinted, booked at the Palo Alto station house, and taken blindfolded to the jail. They were stripped, deloused,