Charles Wright Mills
Twoje prywatne problemy – utrata pracy, rozpadające się małżeństwo – są często sprawami publicznymi, a dostrzeżenie tego związku jest sercem socjologii.
Umiejscowienie
Buntownik amerykańskiej socjologii: wyobraźnia socjologiczna łączy osobiste kłopoty ze sprawami publicznymi, a niepodlegająca rozliczeniu „elita władzy” rządzi powojenną Ameryką.
Kluczowe idee
- Wyobraźnia socjologiczna
- Osobiste kłopoty a sprawy publiczne
- Elita władzy
- Krytyka wielkiej teorii
Wpływ
Pod wpływem 5
Karol Marks
pod wpływem
Mills used Marx’s class analysis but replaced ‘ruling class’ with ‘power elite’ to stress institutional power (The Power Elite, 1956), and presented Marx critically in The Marxists (1962). C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (1956); The Marxists (1962)
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Karol Marks › 1818–1883
Gaetano Mosca
pod wpływem
Mills discussed Mosca’s organised ruling minority in The Power Elite (1956) but derived the elite from command posts in corporations, the military and the state. C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (1956); G. Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica (1896); G. Parry, Political Elites (1969)
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Gaetano Mosca › 1858–1941
John Dewey
pod wpływem
Mills wrote his dissertation on pragmatism (1942, printed 1964 as Sociology and Pragmatism), reading Dewey’s theory of inquiry sociologically as tied to the institutions of American higher learning. C. W. Mills, A Sociological Account of Pragmatism (diss., Wisconsin, 1942), printed as Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (1964)
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John Dewey › 1859–1952
George Herbert Mead
pod wpływem
Mills drew on Mead’s social behaviourism to treat motives as socially learned vocabularies that actors use in situations (‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive’, 1940). C. W. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive”, American Sociological Review 5 (1940); H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, Character and Social Structure (1953)
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George Herbert Mead › 1863–1931
Max Weber
pod wpływem
With Hans Gerth, Mills edited and translated From Max Weber (1946) and took up Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy and status in White Collar (1951). H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds. and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946); C. W. Mills, White Collar (1951)
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Max Weber › 1864–1920
Wpływ na 1
Arlie Russell Hochschild
wpływ na ✓
Hochschild started from Mills’s ‘personality market’ in White Collar (1951), where salespeople sell their personality, and studied how such emotional labour is managed (The Managed Heart, 1983). A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983); C. W. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)
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Arlie Russell Hochschild › ur. 1940
Krytyka
Krytykuje 1
Talcott Parsons
krytykuje
In The Sociological Imagination (1959) Mills attacked Parsons’s ‘grand theory’, translating passages of The Social System into a few plain sentences and faulting its neglect of power. C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), ch. 2
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Talcott Parsons › 1902–1979
Dzieła
Socjologia powinna łączyć „osobiste kłopoty” ze „sprawami publicznymi” – wbrew abstrakcyjnej „wielkiej teorii” Parsonsa i wbrew gromadzeniu danych bez idei.
Stanowisko
Mills wanted sociology to serve democratic self-understanding. In The Sociological Imagination (1959) he defined its promise as the ability to connect “the personal troubles of milieu” with “the public issues of social structure”: one person’s unemployment is a personal trouble, but when millions are out of work, the cause lies in the economy, not in individual character. The same book attacked two dominant styles of American sociology – the “grand theory” of Talcott Parsons, several pages of which Mills translated into a few plain sentences, and the “abstracted empiricism” of survey research, which piled up data without asking important questions. His earlier studies sketched the new social structure of the United States. White Collar (1951) portrayed the salaried middle class of offices and sales floors, who must sell their personalities along with their labour. The Power Elite (1956) argued that the interlocking leaders of big business, the military and the federal executive made the decisions that shaped the nation, largely beyond democratic control. Drawing on Weber, Marx and the pragmatists, Mills became a model for critical, public sociology and an inspiration for the New Left.
Życie i kontekst
Charles Wright Mills was born in 1916 in Waco, Texas, into a Catholic middle-class family. He studied at Texas A&M and the University of Texas and took his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1942 with a dissertation on the sociology of pragmatism. With his teacher Hans Gerth he edited the influential collection From Max Weber (1946). From 1946 he taught at Columbia University in New York. A motorcycle-riding outsider, he attacked both the academic establishment and the complacency of Cold War America, and travelled to Cuba to write Listen, Yankee (1960) in defence of the revolution. His “Letter to the New Left” (1960) helped popularise the movement’s name. He died of a heart attack in 1962, aged 45.
Dalsze główne dzieła
- From Max Weber (ed. with Hans Gerth, 1946)
- White Collar (1951)
- The Power Elite (1956)
- The Sociological Imagination (1959)
- Listen, Yankee (1960)
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