Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Specialists in method tend also to be specialists in one or another species of social philosophy. The important point about them, in sociology today, is not that they are specialists, but that one of the results of their specialty is to further the process of specialization within the social sciences as a whole. Moreover, they further it in accordance with the methodological inhibition and in terms of the research institute in which it may be embodied. Theirs is not a proposal for any scheme of topical specialization according to ‘intelligible fields of study or a conception of problems of social structure. It is a proposed specialization based solely on use of The Method, regardless of content, problem, or area. These are not stray impressions; they are readily documented.
The most explicit and straightforward statement of abstracted empiricism as a style of work, and of the role within social science which the abstracted empiricist should perform, has been made by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who is among the more sophisticated spokesmen of this school.5