The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

The everyday empiricism of common sense is filled with assumptions and stereotypes of one or another particular society; for common sense determines what is seen and how it is to be explained. If you attempt to escape from this condition by abstracted empiricism, you will end up on the microscopic or sub-historical level and you will try slowly to pile up the abstracted details with which you are dealing. If you attempt to escape from common sense empiricism by grand theory, you will empty the concepts with which you are dealing of clear and present empirical reference and, if you are not careful, in the trans-historical world you are building, you will be quite alone.

A conception is an idea with empirical content. If the idea is too large for the content, you are tending toward the trap of grand theory; if the content swallows the idea, you are tending toward the pitfall of abstracted empiricism. The general problem involved here is often stated as ‘the need for indices,' and it is among the leading technical challenges of actual work in social science today. Members of all schools are aware of it. Abstracted empiricists often solve the problem of indices by eliminating the scope and the meanings of that which is supposedly being indexed. Grand theory does not confront the problem usefully; it just goes on elaborating the Concept in terms of others equally abstract.