17. Be that as it may. Something that unites the different camps or “schools” of sociology, something that the different “major perspectives” have in common, is their use of what has been termed, by C. Wright Mills, the “ sociological imagination ” — which is a mindset that seeks to understand the individual as the product of his and her social worlds, and seeks to understand the peculiarities and histories of such social worlds.
18. To apply the “ sociological imagination ” is to… … observe people’s behavior, beliefs, and attitudes under the aspect of how they are shaped by their social contexts . To do this, we need to be able to… — view our own society as an outsider would and — compare various social worlds, and various sets of behavior, beliefs, and attitudes, to one another.
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