1 A Sociological Lens
Sean Ashley
2020 was the year of the sociological imagination. This concept, coined by the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), invites us to see how our personal lives are shaped by changes in the larger social structure (Mills, 1967). It is a way of perceiving the world that helps distinguish when a personal problem is in fact a public issue, one that may require concerted rather than individual action in order to bring about change.
Across the globe, everyone’s lives were upended by the pandemic, but not all lives were upended equally. People who worked in lower paying, part-time jobs in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants were required to continue going to work, while those whose jobs required college and university degrees were more often encouraged to stay home and isolate in the face of a deadly virus. In North America and Europe, non-white men and women disproportionately faced the danger as frontline workers, and as a result died at higher rates than white workers. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, migrant workers were the ones who bore the brunt of the pandemic (Kalush, 2020). Women across the world faced increased stress and wage loss as schools closed and the unequal division of childcare responsibilities became starkly visible.
Sociology can help us understand what happens when large scale social changes occur like those brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, sociologists refer to the feeling of disorientation that accompanies rapid changes in social norms as anomie, a feeling of normlessness that produces a sense of despair and anxiety. By recognizing that the root of this feeling lay not within our individual minds but within the larger shifting structures of society, sociology provides us with the tools necessary to reshape ourselves and the world around us, perhaps enabling us to create a more inclusive and just global community in the process.
Sociology is the systematic study of society. Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society, from the micro-level dynamics of small group interactions to the macro-level analysis of large-scale social structures like patriarchy and caste.
Seeing the world sociologically involves seeing the general in the particular, and the strange in the familiar (Berger, 1969). A key component of the sociological perspective is the idea that the individual and society are inseparable. It is nearly impossible to study one without the other. German sociologist Norbert Elias called the process of simultaneously analyzing the behavior of individuals and the society that shapes that behavior figuration (Elias, 1978). It is like dancing; you can’t have a dance without dancers, and you can’t be a dancer without the dance.
The analogy with dance is also useful for understanding the role of individual agency when studying society. Agency refers to the individual’s ability to change and act freely within social structures. It is similar in many ways to what philosophe