Question

Pietro always assumed that impoverished people were lazy and unwilling to work. After the first few weeks in his introduction to sociology class, his sociology professor introduced him to something called the sociological imagination, which helped him realize that there was research regarding the intersecting factors that result in poverty, and attributing poverty to laziness was overly simplistic. How did pietro's sociological imagination help him think critically?

Answer 1

C. Wright Mills defines “sociological imagination” as the intersection of history and biography. Sociological imagination refers to the awareness of how our personal experiences relate to the experiences of society at large. It is a process in which the person steps away from their own person and looks at his life not as a series of daily events that are happening to him, but as a product of a particular time period and cultural tradition. This "history" determines to a very large extent your life events.

In this case, Pietro is realizing that his "biography" tells him something about society at large. However, he is also noticing that people's lives are a consequence of their context. People do not always have full autonomy to do whatever they desire, but instead have to work within some constraints. That is why it is naive to believe that people's lives are only a consequence of their decisions.