Stretching Exercises

Abstract

C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination has achieved legendary status in the 50 or so years since its publication. In this chapter, the author wants to build on that and discuss some of the ways in which the sociological imagination can be stimulated and cultivated. Mills claimed that “in many ways cross-classification is the very grammar of the sociological imagination. The deployment of juxtapositions and contrasts is of course closely connected with the practice of cross-classification. There are quite other ways of looking at juxtapositions and contrasts as ways of illuminating social reality. Sociology without metaphor is dead or, we might say, impossible. We might well be shocked to realize that the concept of society itself is a metaphor. It was Robert Merton, for so long the doyen of American sociology, who was fascinated, even obsessed, with the role of serendipity in scientific research.