It's terrific! Why didn't I read it earlier! These few pages seemed to be aimed at the apprentice researcher, which is what a post-grad is. Wright Mills starts by commented that:
"Only by conversations in which experienced thinkers exchange information about their actual ways of working can a useful sense of method and theory be imparted to the beginning student."Yes - I need those conversations. He reports on how he does what he does. Guess what? Despite being written as long ago as 1959, he recommends keeping a daily journal about
"personal experiences and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned."Advantages of such a journal include:
- relating experience to work in progress
- serving as a check on repetitious work
- capturing 'fringe-thoughts'
- "keeping your inner world away" to draw out implications from events or ideas
- building the habit of writing
- developing powers of expression
This appendix comes in six sections.
Part 2 explains how to use the file of writing for intellectual production through maintaining and rearranging it. He gives examples from his own work.
Part 3 is about empirical projects.
Part 4 suggests seven techniques for getting ideas, for "stimulating the sociological imagination".
- re-arrange the files
- play with the phrases and words
- classify your notions
- consider extremes - think of the opposite
- invert your sense of proportion
- "get a comparative grip on the materials" - that's what my supervisor recommended last month - compare public sector case studies with case studies in other sectors.
- arrange materials for presentation, identifying and sorting the main themes. Cross-classify them.
"(1) how difficult and complex after all is my subject?Part 6 advises that you order what you've found out, that "thinking is a struggle for order"
(2) when I write, what status am I claiming for myself?
(3) for whom am I trying to write?"
Part 7 advises trying to understand "men and women as historical and social actors".
Part 8 is on keeping "your moral and political autonomy". Thus:
"the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time"This is an inspiring appendix to read and reread.
Mills, C. W. 1959. SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION.
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