The scale of sociological imagination

Kate Nash

C.W Mills’s sociological imagination is concerned with a particular dimension of scale: with the relationship between the individual, their formation, their personal biography, and their “private troubles”, and the social structuring of societies as historically and geographically specific.  It is only relatively recently, however, that sociologists have begun to think directly about how scale itself is produced socially, and with what effects – in large part as a result of concepts and practices of globalization.   Mills’s classic work is a call to sociologists to think of sociology as necessarily engaged in questions of political and moral value, and as providing a service for ordinary people in drawing out the relationship between private troubles and public issues.  But it is at the same time an attempt to create a public, receptive and able to make use of the work sociologists do.  Implicit in Mills’s idea of the sociological imagination is the idea that sociological work can be influential, and even effective, by informing democratic publics which may then act to change their conditions.  One important task for sociologists today, then, is to understand the scale at which effective democratic publics may legitimately be produced.