Developing Sociological Imagination - Essay Example

Developing Sociological Imagination The ostrich, when confronted with a new and strange situation that smells like a threat, buries its head in the sand. Being the world's largest bird and swift-footed at that, it can make a good account of itself by meeting an approaching danger head-on or by just making a run for it. Instead, the ostrich would not recognize an impending problem and tries to shun danger by refusing to see it. It is axiomatic in behavior, bird or otherwise, that anything unknown inspires fear and confusion. Thus, people behave much like the ostriches in the face of life situations that seem hard to explain and cope with. They hide at the first sign of trouble, withdrawing into indifference and fear. "Faced with issues they do not understand, with structural forces that they cannot comprehend and over which they appear to have no power, ordinary people withdraw into apathy or anxiety," observed C. Wright Mills, the social scientist who in 1959 blazed the trail on developing a quality of mind that could help ordinary people dissociate themselves from the ostriches in dealing with danger and problems. A false sense of security is all the ostrich example can give us. By developing what came to be known as "sociological imagination," we would know what we are up against. This knowledge will then help us understand any problem that gets in our way to effectively cut it down to size and hopefully cease to elicit fear in us since it is no longer an unknown entity. When we don't feel any threat to the set of values we cherish, it is believed we experience well-being. In the presence of these threats, we experience a crisis. And when we are unaware of any cherished values and feel no threat, this becomes an experience of indifference, apathy if it concerns all our cherished values. However, when unaware of any cherished value but aware of a threat, this results in an experience of uneasiness and anxiety which, if total enough, becomes a deadly unspecified malaise. Sociological imagination, Mills explains, is the quality of mind urgently needed in our cultural period to cope with the anxiety, uneasiness and indifference that prevail in today's world. Uneasiness and indifference are considered the signal features of our age as a result of the dizzying changes happening in our midst. Governments that used to function as democracies, for example, suddenly fell into the control of despots. In states that were once political colonies, new and subtler forms of imperialism were installed. Societies once relatively peaceful became the object of random and senseless terrorist attacks. Such changes send people out of kilter, giving them the sense of being trapped. We get this sense of being trapped, sociologists believe, when we are not aware of the intricate connection between the pattern of our own lives and the course of history, and what this connection means for the kinds of people we are turning into and the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. To let ourselves out of this trap, we must employ sociology ethically, through sociological imagination, to allow us some sense of control over events by showing how public issues are interconnected with our lives, our history, biographical experiences and social structure milieus. By understanding the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals, we will be equipped with information necessary for developing reason that would "achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within ourselves." Sociological imagination will enable us to shift from one perspective to another - from the political to the psychological, from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the world's national budgets, from the theological school to the military establishment, even from studies on the oil industry to that of contemporary poetry. With such knowledge our feeling of uneasiness will be focused on the explicit troubles and our attitude of indifference will be transformed into involvement with public issues. This quality of mind is essential in grasping the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of "self" and "world." Trouble and Issue In sociological terms, self and world are sometimes called "trouble" and "issue." Trouble has to do with one's self and those limited areas of social life that directly involve us and we are personally aware of. It occurs within an individual's personal milieu and within the range of his/her immediate relations with others. We experience trouble when we feel that the values we hold dear are being threatened, and that the way it is going to be played out and resolved depends upon the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of one's immediate milieu. Let's say in a city of 100,000 all are gainfully employed except one. This problem is personal and calls for an analysis of the individual involved, his skills and the immediate opportunities available to him. In times of war, it is trouble when our concern is confined to survival and dying with honor. It is almost the same way in marriage when, say, 10 out of every 1,000 couples break up during the first four years. As for issue, it is a public matter and takes place when the threat is directed at publicly upheld values. Although an issue also affects people personally, it nonetheless transcends an individual's local environment and the range of his inner existence. Again using the example on the employment picture, it is an issue when only 15 million people are unemployed in a nation of 50 million, and we can resolve it only by looking at a broader perspective involving that nation's economic and political institutions. On the consequences of war, personal trouble turns into a public issue when we dig into its causes and effects on family, the economic, political and religious institutions. On marriage, trouble becomes an issue when the divorce rate runs up to 25 per cent, or about 250 marriages out of 1,000 fail in the first four years, since this indicates that something is terribly wrong with this institution as a whole. In most cases, however, a personal trouble is tied to a public issue and it is necessary for one undergoing trouble to treat the problem as such. Consequently, we can improve our chances for resolving this personal problem if we know the chances of all individuals in the same set of circumstances. Both "trouble" and "issue" are caused by structural changes in social institutions that are also involved in constructing gender and enforcing gender norms - family, education, the state and religion. To understand these changes then, we have to look over and beyond them since their quantity and variety increase as the institutions within which we live become more all-embracing and more intricately intertwined. This is where sociological imagination comes in, which in itself is no easy task considering that the values we cherish in this day and age are neither clear-cut nor widely acknowledged as such. In the years before World War II, the values threatened were plain to see and cherished by all and the structural contradictions that threatened them also seemed plain. In many cases, troubles are difficult to resolve personally without looking at the bigger picture. This is especially true with the problem of unemployment since the economic system that influences it goes into a slump occasionally. During an economic crunch, few jobs are available and no amount of skills and self-analysis could help people land a job. The same thing is true with people going through a rocky marriage. Since the family as a social institution often turns women into "darling little slaves" dependent on men as their chief providers, the problem of unsatisfactory marriages remains incapable of a purely private solution. The family as a social institution has in fact long been associated with conflict, which becomes readily evident in the distribution of household production and of domestic labor. Based on studies, this family row develops when wives want their husbands to do more household work even as the latter say that that would be expecting too much of them. The women desire changes in this setup, even as men prefer the status quo. Another possible source of conflict is the situation where wives earn more than their husbands. In most of these cases, studies show that both spouses try to avoid conflict by putting up the man as the primary provider for the family. Many working wives realize that this pricks their husbands' pride, authority and manhood in the traditional sense so they do what they can to preserve the image of their husbands as bread-winners. One of the ways employed by such wives is by using their husband's income for the more essential needs, their own pay for extras. Gender Roles This only goes to show that in conflicts or troubles involving the family, sociological differences play as important a role as biological disparities, or those having to do with gender. In attempts to control family disputes arising from the factors earlier mentioned, gender differences come into the fore. An example is the way mothers and daughters turn up as the most active family members in closing off conflicts inside the house, which enforces gendered norms about such matters being within the purview of women since men are responsible only for the outside roles. Women have been assigned roles inside the home because of their generally smaller physique, the birth process and their stronger link to young children. The accepted notion is that men provide fresh meat, handle financial dealings and do yard work while women play supportive, nurturing home roles. In the handling of finances within the households, Rosein and Granbois (1983) found that the primary determinants for this are sex-role attitudes and education. But households or families today are in the midst of myriad changes as to their composition, functions and form such that radical makeovers are expected in gender processes in the households of future generations. Although gender is a dominant structural force in families, sociologists agree that it is being constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis in private relationships. As wives enter the "outside domain" in greater numbers, for example, norms have shifted with decision-making on household necessities becoming a shared responsibility. Still, traditional roles persist with men deciding on cars, television and housing and women having their say on the acquisition of appliances, furniture and cereal. While men and women may thus take on new structural roles, their allegiance to the precept of masculinity and femininity remains largely unchanged. In attempting to know the contribution of gender in the development of sociological imagination, it is well to remember the three frameworks for studying the subject. First, there is biological determinism which is used to support generalized notions about men and women (i.e., men are naturally handy with math and technology while women are by nature suited to domestic duties). Second, sex-role socialization which maintains that gender behavior is socially conditioned, such that boys and girls learn to be masculine or feminine through the social expectations imposed on them by family and peers. And the third is gender construction which acknowledges that men and women construct their own gendered identities, adopting masculine or feminine practices as their own situations and beliefs dictate. Sociologists agree that the idea of masculinity or femininity is constructed and reinforced in people's minds by the interacting influences of such institutions as school, church, media and family. In short, male-female differences are sometimes sexual or biological in nature, sometimes gendered or social constructions put together to serve various purposes at various periods in time. The influence exerted by families and social class backgrounds on gender construction has been demonstrated by the Joldoshalieva-Dean-Hussainy study on Pakistani students at the Aga Khan University in Karachi. It concluded that students construct their gendered identities through the different schooling processes. These include division of labor, gendered bodily and disciplinary regulations, control of space and practices, and teachers' beliefs about different characteristics which influence the way students learn. Other than classification based on sex, gender is also determined on the basis of "historically constructed interpretations of the nature, disposition and role of members of that sex." Because gender is malleable, an assertive woman executive, for example, may enact her gender differently at home, where we see the most basic form of gender at work. But gender is dynamic in nature, changing for the individual on an almost continuous basis. That possibilities exist for shifts in power relations between men and women, between the young and old, and for the displacement of the norms on gender and ageing is demonstrated by the McPherson study in 2001 which juxtaposed the feminity exuded by a TV commercial on tea for an alternative calendar of a women's institute and the machismo flowing from another TV ad on Guinness beer. The images of middle-aged women in the tea commercial reflect the traditional passive role of the home-centered housewife whose sexuality is not usually acknowledged, sometimes even assumed to be non-existent. This potential power shift has been detected in another study of women submitting themselves to cosmetic surgery. For the most part, women choose cosmetic surgery to cater to the standards set by men and thus serve men's interests. Here, the "male gaze theory" comes into play which presumes that men have control over women in the sense that the social construction of self is actually an effort to meet men's desires and standards. But this happens rarely since only white and well-to-do men have such social power; the colored as well as working-class men poor do not. In general, women take to plastic surgery to enhance their interaction with others and increase their social opportunities. Through cosmetic surgery they hoped to command greater respect and compete better in a job market that favors youth. More than the male gaze, the factors that exerted greater influence on these women are the media, fashion, other women and the generalized gaze. Men and women act out their gender differences from childhood, research shows. In a study of boys and girls as two separate social groups, McGuffey and Rich found that mid-childhood boys and girls in summer camp organize themselves differently based on distinct value systems. The group of boys consists of a larger membership while the girls band together with only two or four individuals. Ranking is also determined in a dissimilar manner, with the boys looking up mostly to athletic ability, even in non-sport activities. As for the girls, alpha status is given to those considered most sociable and most admired by others. Among the boys, race and social class do not matter while the girls make a big deal of racial and class divisions. Demographic studies reveal that females dominate the males in many societies for a variety of reasons. One, because it is mostly the men who are sent to wars; two, the women are more conscious of their health and figure; and three, the mostly stay-at-home women have stronger resistance to disease than men and are safer from street accidents. Thus, it might be worth looking into if the prejudice on skin color and social status exhibited by the girls in the McGuffey-Rich research has crept into popular consciousness and practice because of this demographic factor. If anything, this served to marginalize the working class and lower-income groups, a situation exacerbated by what Basil Bernstein calls "theory of social learning" which maintains that educational opportunity in today's world is distributed unevenly to the disadvantage of the poor. "Social class remained the dominant cultural category that has penetrated schools so as to position pupils differently and insidiously legitimizing the few, and invalidating the many." On the receiving end of this indictment against the school system as a sociological institution is private schooling with its use of "elaborate, esoteric and privileged language code," which ignores the old theory that individual ability lies in genetic or even gender differences. Apart from education, jobs and within the family, various socio-cultural groups also experience conflict over religious observance and legal definition of what is right and wrong. The church is noted for feeling uncomfortable with sociological thought and theory because of the fact that sociology tends to criticize the established order - and the church has become very established. But certain elements of the conflict theory and symbolic interaction are consistent with the New Testament. For one, the holy book like sociology frowns on communalism. Like sociologists, the apostles also adopted a critical toward social structures and Paul himself attached no importance to ethnicity, nationality or gender in preaching for individual well-being. Many elements of sociological theory actually coincide with the Christian worldview as it relates to determinism and choice, humanism and belief in God, cultural relativity and moral absolutes, and a critical egalitarian perspective. For this reason one of the major churches, the Seventh-Day Adventists, has made sociology an important part of its general education curriculum. My own life experience serves as a case study for the validity of the above observations. The influence of family, for example, seems evident in me and my three sisters' interest in the same fields of study and recreational activities. Most of us are into sociological study, all four of us girls intend to take up teaching as a profession and all of us compete in synchronized swimming at the national level. Both of our parents are also college educated we have the trappings of a middle-class family. Probably because of these factors, employment is no problem for us. I myself, even while into my third year of sociology studies, already earn for myself by coaching national-level swimmers and doing lifeguard duties in summer. No social study has completed its intellectual journey without coming back to the problems of biography, history and their interrelations within a society. To fully understand the elements of uneasiness and indifference that prevail in our times is the foremost political and intellectual task of the social scientist, which I intend to engage in after my studies. We need sociological imagination to give us the ability to study our lives and individual biography and connect them with the larger social structure around us. Only then can we come to terms with the problems facing us, without feeling intimidated or confused by them. REFERENCES Brewer, J. 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