ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces and elaborates on the latter two sensibilities associated with the sociological perspective introduced in Chapter 4: the structural and the critical. A structural sensibility focuses on the influence of the social structure on how groups and individuals negotiate the social world and their place in it. Structure is a vitally important component of understanding the relationship between the individual and society. A critical sensibility asks how we know what we do about our society and whether social life could be different. A critical sensibility as a part of the sociological imagination, we suggest, also interrogates who benefits and who loses out in an existing social structure.
