1Soc Perspective 7: A Sociological Imagination and Imagine Where...

Our last lesson, we looked at the idea of the social construction of reality as another way to understand what having a sociological perspective is.  Today we will look at a second theory that will continue to help you to think with a sociological perspective.

As students arrive, please read this excerpt from Outliers.

Please open the Google Form for this lesson and fill out the questions as you go along.

1.  What if you were born in a different place or a different time?  How would you be different?  Choose a place or time and brainstorm how you might be different.  

Applying Sociology:  The Sociological Imagination and Outliers

After brainstorming about how you might be different if you lived in a different time or place, read the following excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.  This excerpt is the introduction to the book.  It is about a small town in Pennsylvania and how the people in that town were affected by living there.

2. Describe life in Roseto, PA.

3. What did Dr. Wolf set out to study at first?

4. What did he find/conclude at the end of his study?

5. Were the people of Roseto, PA aware of that they were being affected in the way that Dr. Wolf concluded? Explain.

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about extreme success stories (aka Outliers). In the introduction (the excerpt linked above),  we learn that the people who lived in Roseto at that time were affected by the social life there even though they did not realize it.  In other words, they were affected by where and when they live.  This is is the task of sociology;  to understand how people are affected by where and when they live.  

This understanding is what an important sociologist, C. Wright Mills, calls having a "sociological imagination".   Mills explains "sociological imagination" as seeing the connection between history and biography. That is, who we are (our biography) is determined by where and when we live (our history).   As an example of this idea, the people of Roseto were affected by where and when they lived. Because they lived in the town of Roseto at that time, they lived in a way that affected them (without even knowing it) so that they had a much lower chance of getting heart disease and living longer than the rest of the country.  This idea might seem simple, but C. Wright Mills, an important sociologist, wrote in 1959, that people often forget this in both their daily life and their research.  Mills also adds that using a sociological imagination it is possible to see the private troubles as public issues.  In other words, often times a person's struggle in daily life is really part of a larger structural issue that individuals can't always see.

The rest of Gladwell's book, Outliers, uses a sociological imagination to explain extreme success stories. For example, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs tremendous success and wealth stemming from where and when they lived: 

Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested 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. Back in the 1960s, when Gates and Jobs were coming of age, a supercomputer took up a whole room and was not something most youngsters would have had a chance to see, let alone work on. But because of their proximity to actual computers, both Gates and Jobs had a leg up on others their age and had the chance to spend hours and hours (10,000 of them in Gladwell’s estimation) learning about programming.

For more info/examples of the sociological imagination, see this post from the Everyday Sociology site that explains how a sociological imagination can be used to analyze how individuals are affected by when and where they live.

Please add Mills' sociological imagination to your sociological framework graphic organizer:

6.  Do you have any questions about Mills' sociological imagination?  Can you explain it?

Imagine Where...

Applying your sociological imagination to where a person lives

Recall that a sociological imagination is understanding that an individual's experience is shaped by where and when they live.  Now, let's use a sociological imagination to examine data to understand how being a student in SHS's district might shape students differently than being a student in North Chicago.  North Chicago is just 10 miles northeast of SHS, but a student's biography might be drastically different if you live there.

Use your sociological imagination to analyze the three data sources below.  Using your sociological imagination, create a hypothesis for each of the data sources.  Be sure to cite data to support your hypothesis.

• Compare high school data from Illinois High School Report Card Data here.  Use data from the link to hypothesize how you (and the opportunities presented to you) might be different if you were going to school in North Chicago as opposed to Stevenson.  If you have trouble accessing the website, here is 2018 data for SHS.  Here is 2018 data for North Chicago.
• Compare the community data from CMAP.  Here are community snapshots for North Chicago and Lincolnshire.  Hypothesize how the data might shape your experience, opportunities, and challenges if you lived in North Chicago as opposed to Lincolnshire.

Compare SHS and North Chicago using the links above.  Then answer this:

9. (A&B) How might this data reveal that some of the private troubles of different students are really public issues?  A) Using the data in those links cite differences between SHS and N. Chicago.   These differences might be considered public issues.  Then, B) theorize how might those differences create private troubles?  In other words, how might those differences create problems for individual students living there? 


Choosing a College and Sociological Imagination
Another exercise in sociological imagination and college is at this post.  It has some ways of both using data and exploring college and the sociological imagination.