What is the difference between sociological imagination and common sense?

This essay will aim to explain differences between the sociological imagination and common sense. What the sociological imagination and common sense are and how they are at work in our society today. Using the area of educational achievement I will bring into this essay examples through research and findings from sociologists such as; Pierre Bourdieu, Culture Capital (1977), Bernstein-(1961)speech patterns’ and Paul Willis (1977)learning to labour, and use these examples as evidence to show how these would explain educational achievement in relation to the sociological imagination and common sense assumptions. I shall begin this essay by discussing where the sociological imagination arose from and what this is in comparison to common sense.

American sociologist C.Wright Mills (1959) published a sociological text called ‘The sociological Imagination (1959), C.Wright Mills wrote in his book about ‘the troubles of milieu’ the word milieu means (environment) this was looked at as being where an individual will find themselves in a situation that is of a personal social setting to them and therefore could indeed affect them personally and in some extent the situation be this persons making.

Mills(1959), also wrote about public issues of social structure, referring to matters that go beyond the individual and look at society as a whole. How society is organised and how society works. This goes far beyond ‘the troubles of milieu, as it doesn’t look at the person and there individual experiences in society but looks at the wider social structure e.g social institutions… education, religion, family, law and how they have developed and interact with each other examples of the differenc...

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...ion, Sociology making sense of society, 4th ed, Harlow, Pearson Longman, pp. 604-605.

Mills C.Wright (1959) The Sociological imagination , Harmondsworth, England, Oxford University Press.

Office of National Statistics (2004), Education, Ethnicity and Identity, Available from: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=461 [accessed 28 September 2010], Cite as (office of National Statistics 28 September 2010)

Pierre B (1961) Culture Capital Cited, Taylor P ; Richardson Jr John; Yeo, A, (1995), The class structure and educational attainment, Sociology in Focus, pp.297, Ormskirk, Causeway Press.

Scanlan J Stephen; Guest-editor; Grauerjolz Liz (2009) 50 Years of C.Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination, Teaching Sociology 37, (1), pp1-7

However, other social sciences such as anthropology study practices within societies either from the past or very distant from our own society. Bauman (1990:4) states that unless we are actively trying to seek a deeper meaning to common sense it will remain an ‘obvious’ meaning. One similarity between common and sociological sense is that both exist in an attempt to give structure to the society in which we live in. However, sociological sense seeks to give a deeper and less obvious meaning. Another difference between common and sociological understanding is that sociological understanding relies on facts derived from research whereas common sense relies on ideas held by collective society. Unlike many other scholarly subjects – ‘sociological discourse is wide open’ (Bauman 1990:11). When talking about subjects like physics and biology, a certain type of discourse is required whereas, within sociology, the discourse is the same as …show more content…

The first one is responsible speech. By using this, sociologists are able to remain unbias and credible. Responsible speech involves sociologists not being biased towards the research they are doing and remaining balanced and open to criticism. By using responsible speech, sociologists are able to clearly describe and explain the information they’re talking about. This makes their point come across in a way that can be understood by many people rather than a few who know the jargon associated with the subject. Bauman (1990:12) detailed that when responsible speech is used that the ‘trustworthiness, reliability and … practical usefulness of the ensuing propositions will be greatly enhanced’. The next difference between common sense and sociological sense is that sociologists put more effort into increasing the size of the field. As Bauman (1990:12) states in his extract, for non-professionals, size of field is limited to our own lifeworld. There is rarely an effort made to increase the size of the field when thinking about our experiences. This may be due to lack of time and resources or plainly because a person doesn’t see the benefit in increasing the size of the field. However, sociologists like to do this as it gives an insight into other societies and how they interact. It gives research more information as there is more than one outcome to be looked at. Bauman (1990:13) argues in his extract

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