Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are two current apologies for abstracted empiricism which, if accepted, would mean that the thinness of its result is due less to any feature inherent in The Method than to causes of an ‘accidental nature,' namely, money and time.
It might, first, be said that as such studies are usually quite expensive, they have had to be shaped by some concern for the problems of the interests that have paid for them; and moreover, that the aggregate of these interests has had rather scattered problems. Accordingly, the researchers have not been able to select problems in such a way as to allow a true accumulation of results-that is, one that would add up in a more significant way. They have done the best they could; they could not be concerned with a fruitful series of substantive problems, so they have had to specialize in developing methods that could be put to work regardless of the substantive issues.