The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

During the last several decades, alongside the older practicality a new kind has arisen-in fact, several new kinds. Liberalism has become less a reform movement than the administration of social services in a welfare state; sociology has lost its reforming push; its tendencies toward fragmentary problems and scattered causation have been conservatively turned to the use of corporation, army, and state. As such bureaucracies have become more dominant in the economic, the political, the military orders, the meaning of ‘practical' has shifted: that which is thought to serve the purposes, of these great institutions is held to be ‘practical. '6

Perhaps ‘the human relations in industry' school will do as a brief example of the new illiberal practicality.7 When we examine all the terms in ‘the literature' of this style referring to managers and to workmen, we find that the managers are most frequently talked about along such lines as ‘intelligent-unintelligent,' ‘rational-irrational,' ‘knowledge-ignorance'; whereas the workmen are talked about most frequently along such lines as ‘happy-unhappy,' ‘efficient-inefficient,' ‘good morale-bad morale.'