ABSTRACT
The discipline of sociology, according to Macionis and Plummer (1997: 4), is ‘the systematic, sceptical study of human society’. It is a subject that is both ordinary and extraordinary. It starts with something we implicitly know about, that is, the relationship between ourselves as individuals and society. It then sets out to examine this afresh, to encourage us to think about and ‘unpack’ our common-sense assumptions and attitudes about society and our place in it. It does so by, at times, taking a broad view, looking at structures and institutions within society now and across history. At other times, it takes a microscopic view, interrogating the minute processes and relationships that make up our daily lives. From this we can see that we are the first subjects in the sociological enterprise, but we are also members of a particular society, born at a given historical moment with a specific gender, class, ethnic, cultural and racial grouping. It is only by stepping outside our own lives and experiences that we can begin to see the patterns and the systems that govern our existence. C. Wright Mills (1959) calls this process of stepping-outside, ‘the sociological imagination’. He writes:
The task of sociology is that people should be enabled to grasp the relations between themselves and the way in which their society operates … The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society.
