You’ll often encounter the term ‘the sociological imagination’,
and in this lecture I’ll go through some thoughts about what’s distinctive about ‘thinking like a sociologist’.
Studying sociology is about seeing things and yourself in particular ways, in ways that you don’t normally see them.
Sociologists like to think that everyone who’s not a sociologist has a ‘common sense’ understanding of the world,
and what sociologists can provide is a range of much more complex, nuanced and interesting ways of looking at yourself,
your family, your friends, and your environment. Most of us go through life, for example,
guided to a greater or lesser extent by the thought that we control our lives, that we’re free to choose the way we want to be in the world.
Sociologists will question this idea, and look for the ways in which our feelings, thoughts, ideas about the world are
borrowed from the people and the world around us, the way in which all our thoughts and feelings are dependent on
a context or background of which we’re mostly unaware.
This issue becomes more apparent during times of significant social change –
for example, what it means to be masculine, feminine or something else, is actually constantly changing.
If you watch a TV series like, say, Mad Men, gender identity is a central theme,
and the script writers are engaged in a complex project of both drawing out attention to how different things were in the 1960s,
but also to make us question our memory of what things were like between men and women then,
and how many of the changes that took place since actually started much earlier than we thought.
A useful way to understand what the sociological imagination is to see it being about getting below the surface of the human social
world, to go beyond the way things appear at first glance,
and to try and find more interesting, complex ways of explaining what is going on around you.
In one way it makes you a really tedious kind of person, because you can see, for example, the same film as your friends and family,
but you’ll have all sorts of observations and complaints about what it really going on in that film,
when the people around simply say either that the liked it or they didn’t, without being able to say why.
That capacity to say ‘why’, to put words to things, is a large part of what sociology is all about, to get underneath the surface of things,
and to show what is ‘really’ happening in the everyday experiences that you have, or in the events that do on around you.
One good example of this is humour.
If you think about why you laugh at things, why a joke is ‘funny’,
I’ve always thought that one of the reasons we have that kind of emotional response to a joke, is that it brings to the surface something
that we kind of half-knew, but didn’t quite have the words for, or had never really thought about before.
What makes a joke work is that it brings that aspect of an experience to consciousness suddenly,
and we recognize it as true in an unexpected ‘burst’, so speak.
What joke does is show us something that we kind of know is true, or captures something important about the world,
but have never actually had words for, and brings it out in a way that’s hard to explain.
There’s nothing more futile than trying to explain a joke, it’s just not funny anymore.
Much of this line of thinking can be traced to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis,
which revolves around the distinction between the unconscious mind and consciousness,
and outlines the significance of bringing the unconscious to consciousness.
Take a look at the clip from the TV show Portlandia (2:40):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTupYg5gw s4
That segment contains, in a very compressed form, a whole range of arguments and observations about childhood,
the way the education system work, parent-child relationships, the relationship between schools and families,
what it’s like to be a teacher, competition, and so on.
The reason it’s funny is that it compresses all of those thoughts into a situation where we can ‘read’ them into the situation,
but only in a semi-conscious way, it’s embedded in the situation that’s constructed, rather than being made explicit.
Often you can see a sociological imagination in the popular culture around you, without it being obvious that that’s what’s going on.
If you come to enjoy studying sociology, you’ll find more and more of that as you look at the world around both,
both in actual events and in popular culture.
Here’s another example from Seinfeld, the Snickers Bar segment:
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/Ghent/ clips/the%20pledge%20drive_snickers.mp4/view (3:17)
I’m particularly interested in this example because I’ve done some work with the writings of a German sociologist, Norbert Elias,
who talks about the history of the way in which personality structures have changed over centuries.
One of the bodies of evidence he looks at is books about etiquette and manners, and one of the issues is the use of the knife and fork.
He looks at those historical periods when adults had to be told to use a knife and fork,
when they’d be more inclined ‘naturally’ to use their fingers.
Elias analyses how it emerged that we thought that the knife and fork was a good idea and an obvious part of eating.
It’s a development that for most of us occurs in our own lifetime, moving from childhood to adulthood,
but that has long historical trajectory as well.
Trying to explain how and why that happened is an interesting sociological exercise,
especially in terms of explaining what it is about the nature of society that drives people towards behaving in a certain way.
If you ask why that’s funny, what it’s describing, what Elaine’s missing when she demands ‘have you all gone made?’,
it could be about how people imitate each other, a ‘bandwagon effect’, group membership, or about aspiration and status,
but there are more interesting things to say about this example.
The word ‘distinction’ comes to mind, and this is a key sociological concept, often used to capture how people relate each other,
and how much value they place on being difference from each other, but in a positive way.
That’s then the problem, how to be distinctive in ways that are socially valued.
Competition is also clearly a central aspect of this example: there’s a sense in which being ‘in tune’ with the fashion for
eating chocolate bars with a knife and fork gives you a sort of cultural advantage over everyone else,
as an indication of a higher social status, and that’s why it’s a form of behaviour that people imitate.
This example is humorous because it’s a seemingly trivial thing – how to eat chocolate bars –
but the observation of the logic of how human behaviour changes is perfectly accurate.
There are endless other example of changes in cultural behaviour that follow this pattern –
how people speak, the music they listen to, the clothes they wear, the films they watch, the books they read, the cafes they visit,
even the universities and the degrees they enrol in.
There are many other aspects of human behaviour and relationships that we’ll be looking at in developing a sociological imagination,
but the important idea to begin with is that sociology does change how you see yourself, as well as the people and the world around you.
Sociology gives you the ability you to understand who you actually are, your place in the social world, and the forces acting upon you.
Given how quickly the world is changing, I hope you’ll agree that this is an important skill to have.