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Toward a Sociological Imagination: Bridging Specialized Fields, edited by Bernard Phillips, Harold Kincaid, and Thomas J. Scheff. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. 305 pp. $44.00 paper. ISBN: 0-7618-2342-5.
It is hard to believe that it is almost half a century since C. Wright Mills published The Sociological Imagination, noted by the editors of this new book as one of the most influential books in sociology (second only to Max Weber's Economy and Society). The editors recall Mill's trenchant criticism of structural/functionalist theory, misbegotten attempts at achieving "grand theory," and the degree to which sociologists have departed from a tradition of making private problems public issues.
What has been lost, according to Toward a Sociological Imagination, edited by Bernard Phillips, Harold Kincaid, and Thomas Scheff, is sociology's ability to grapple with the big theoretical questions and the ability to link our studies to concerns central to the profession as a whole. Pulling also from Alvin Gouldner's The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, this book calls for a more reflexive sociology. Toward this end, the contributors to this volume reflect on their past work, as well as other seminal works in sociology, to identify ways of redirecting the discipline to fulfill the promise of sociology.
The...