Sociological Imagination and life chance by social class

Notably, in his life, he worked as a sociology professor at the University of Columbia till his death. He is cherished and widely remembered for his several works namely, White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Social Imagination. To be specific, he is one of the towering figures who have contributed a lot to the field of sociology. His works and particularly books have been relevant up to date especially to the social science community. One of his best-known books that have been of great help to students learning psychology is “The Social Imagination. This can be summarized in Mill’s quote in his book, The Sociological Imagination where he says, “What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves” (Mills, 2000).

In this statement, he meant that people often feel inferior to the social forces that affected their routine lives and they tend to lack control over them. As a result, these social forces end up influencing their outcomes. Fortunately, with the aid of social imagination, people can easily determine and understand how personal experiences are shaped by social forces. Therefore, with this knowledge, people can change their social structures which bring about these social forces. Therefore, social imagination should be used in our daily lives and works continuously in order to understand the social structural issues and how these forces affect human value and behavior. To understand these transformations in our society one, therefore, has to analyze the various social-cultural forces and structures and how they relate to one another (Fuller, 2006).

Besides, it involves the examination of mechanics of social change and trends, and then later compares the society itself through the different historical years. To understand this social life and changes, we ought to ask ourselves the manner in which the various social-cultural structures have modeled and how they have shaped the members of the society. Quality of mind assists us to understand how a particular variety of human beings can withstand the social forces in the society as well as that variety that will withstand similar or related forces in future (Fuller, 2006). ” However, today this method has changed and social classes can be measured on basis of each individual factor as well as other factors such as education. Today, education has been seen as the main measure of social stratification and directly leads to others such as occupations and economic status (Weber, 2009).

However, it should be noted that education tends to depend on economic status for it to be successful and quality. For instance, in order to gain access to higher levels of education then one has to be stable economic wise since good money can buy quality education and the reverse is true. A good education opens the door to other desirable factors in the society and therefore we can say that it is depended on a person’s life chances (Willis, 2016). In conclusion, it can be said that social classes usually affect one’s power, status, and economic well-being and this, in turn, affects the life chances they make. Therefore, these three life chances tend to rely on one another and hence easily influence one’s economic situation.