To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination" (1959). In order for one to fully understand the current recession and his/her position within society he or she needs to do two things. The first is be self-conscious of the intimate and personal decisions one has made that has led him/her down his/her current path, the second thing is to understand the structural factors that ultimately precipitate the economic downturn. The aforementioned paragraphs give one, at least, a cursory understanding of why he/she is unemployed or underemployed. The economy, despite several infusions of cash by the Federal Government - TARP (trouble assets relief program) or as it's also known, "the bank-bailout" and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- has still not fully recovered. Ironically, the banks are now thriving once again, the stock market has recovered, but many people in the middle class are still struggling, still languishing. In 1959 when Mills wrote this piece, CEO salaries where roughly 30 times greater than the average employee. Now, CEO salaries are roughly 300 times greater than the average employee (Mishel, 2006). The system has changed. Some may even argue that the system is broken. In 1954 the marginal tax rate on individuals making more than $100,000/year was 89%. In 2010, the marginal tax rate on individuals making more than $100,000/year was 28%. What is more outrageous is that passive income is taxed at 15%. That's income that's made from the stock market. So, when a Wall Street tycoon cuts himself his billion-dollar paycheck for the year from his stock portfolio, that money only gets taxed at 15%, the same marginal rate a working stiff making $8,000/yr pays (Mishel, 2006). The implication here is that this corporate greed and avarice has a negative impact on the middle class. One can argue that unemployment and underemployment is as high for many reasons, globalization, global overcapacity, U.S. monetary policy (fiat currency), the rising national...
But one would be very hard pressed to leave corporate greed and the exploitation of the working man off that list.
Sociology The sociological imagination refers to the ability to see the world as a sociologist would: that is, by viewing individuals and relationships in terms of social structures, institutions, values, and norms. Usually, the sociological imagination addresses squarely the concepts of race, class, gender, and social power. One of the premier American philosophers of the early twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois had an active sociological imagination. DeBois recognized the relationship between race
In other words, contemporary men and women have lost sight of the philosophical for the commercial, and have replaced the sociological enlightenments of socialism and democracy. That contemporary men and women consume without thought as to their how their abundance or consumption of abundance came to them. Mills says: "No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a
Societies that have obtained and thrived on sociological imagination are usually within countries that experience freedom and have improved cultures. In most cases, social environments or communities without sociological imagination have always experienced ruling regimes as the standard (Maher par, 4). These communities have also have people's lives confined in a modest standard that has continued to plague the particular society for many centuries. Generally, sociological imagination has several important
Sociological Imagination Human life is, by definition, fraught with difficulty and challenge. Often, whatever difficulty an individual experiences feels so dire and unique that it is impossible to imagine that others could experience the same, or indeed, that it could be part of a wider sociological issue. Nevertheless, it is possible, with the "sociological imagination" (Mills, 1959) to create a more contextualized or collective vision of suffering and other social phenomena. Using
Sociological Imagination & Disease Treatment To a person from a Westernized country, illness or disease is a medical problem. For example, a person who is ill sees a doctor, undergoes medical tests, and then follows the doctor's instructions. It is not unusual to find patients battling the disease on their own. For a friend from West Africa, however, the individual approach to battling disease is incomprehensible. He believes that illness is best
Sociological Theory Sociology as a field of study entails examining and understanding the behavior of human groups and associated social behavior. In understanding these aspects, the sociologists have, their focus primarily concentrated on the human interactions. These human interactions revolve around how the different social relations influence the behavior and attitudes of the people and how the societies originate, form and change. Human interactions are vast, and so is the field
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