Sociology Definition

According to C. Wright Mills, he defines sociology as the work of social imagination. By social imagination, Mills meant the ability to see the impact of social forces and patterns on a person’s life. Best explained, it is “the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society”. This plays a role in the sociological perspective. Mills also discusses that “our own troubles are in fact public issues”. Mills main point is that if we desire to understand people’s behavior, we have to look beyond the larger social contexts in which they live and that individual choices are influenced by social, historical, cultural, and even economic factors we may not be first aware of. People can examine their own personal issues as social issues and connect their experiences with society.

Lemert focuses on social competence. His analogy demonstrating how a child learns best explains this theory: “Social competence is much like our native ability to use the language we hear as infants. All of a sudden, one day, a child begins to speak, soon in sentences, eventually without pointing, eventually in reasonably correct forms of the past and future tenses.” Essentially, social competence is our ability to obtain and maintain social relations with others, making life without it impossible. It is the knowledge we take with us from previous situations. Instead of having to learn new behaviors for each situation, we are able to use previous knowledge like the example of students quieting in a classroom.

I think the two are quiet similar. Though there are some differences, both point out that we take our previous life experiences into present situations to analyze social patterns. Lemert seems to focus on the person or the single event while Mills focuses on the problem at hand or the group of individuals. If you look closely at each definition, in my opinion, they are very similar.