ABSTRACT
This chapter brings C. Wright Mills' vision of the sociological imagination to bear upon the labour of criminology in contemporary society. In particular, it asks what it means for criminologists to work within the historical confines of what Mills theorized as 'overdeveloped' or 'postmodern' society. Mills was one of the first sociologists to theorize a transition in Northwestern society from the modern to the postmodern era. While other theorists pointed to the increasing importance of information to the rational organization of 'post-industrial' society, Mills pictured the 'extra-rational' allures of omnipresent technological feedback in less sanguine terms. By the late 1950s Mills used the term 'postmodern' to depict the emergence of a powerful new form of military guided social control in the years following the Second World War. This signifies a 'Fourth Epoch' of Northwest history, a time in which lived human experience enters into interactive loops of feedback with powerful new Web-based technologies of communication.
