Consider a photographer with state-of-the-art equipment. The photographer can view their subject through either a zoom lens or a wide-angle lens. Through the zoom lens, the photographer sees intricate details about the subject’s appearance; through the wide-angle lens, they get the “big picture” and a sense of the broader context in which the subject is located. Both views are valuable in understanding the subject, and both result in photographs of the same thing.
Sociological perspectives are like the photographer’s lenses, giving us different ways of looking at a common subject (Newman 2000). Sociologists can take a microsociological (zoom lens) perspective, a macrosociological (wide-angle lens) perspective, or any number of perspectives located on the continuum between the two (Figure 1.2).
FIGURE 1.2The Macro-Micro Continuum Sociology covers a wide range of topics at different levels of analysis.
Microsociology concentrates on the interactions between individuals and the ways in which those interactions construct the larger patterns, processes, and institutions of society. As the word indicates (“micro” means small), microsociology looks at the smallest building blocks of society in order to understand its large-scale structure. A classic example of research that takes a micro approach is Victoria Leto DeFrancisco’s article “The Sounds of Silence: How Men Silence Women in Marital Relations” (1991). Like many scholars who had observed the feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s, DeFrancisco was concerned with issues of power and domination in male–female relationships: Are men more powerful than women in our society? If so, how is this power created and maintained in everyday interactions? In her research, DeFrancisco recorded and analyzed heterosexual couples’ everyday conversations in their homes. She found some real differences in the conversational strategies of men and women and some surprising results about gender, power, and silence in everyday talk.
One conversation took place in the living room, where a woman was having a difficult time engaging her husband in a discussion about an encounter she had had while shopping. He failed to respond for long stretches of time, sometimes staying quiet for four and even eight seconds at a time and only rarely uttering an “mm-hmm” or an “aahh” to fill the gap. The husband even walked outside twice while the wife was speaking! But she persisted, trying to keep control of the conversation and maintain her right to continue.
DeFrancisco recorded many more conversations between couples and saw this pattern over and over: men using silence to suppress women’s talk. DeFrancisco noted that when men withhold what are called “supportive responses” (“mm-hmm,” “oh,” “a-ha,” etc.), they are violating a firmly held rule of conversational structure. Supportive responses help storytellers continue speaking by acknowledging that they are being heard and understood. Without supportive responses from men, women must work harder to keep a conversation going, which also makes it more likely that they will be silenced by their partner’s lack of response. Thus, in her micro-level analysis of conversation, DeFrancisco was able to see how macro-level (“macro” means large) phenomena such as gender and power are manifested in everyday interactions.
IN THE FUTURE
SHOWHIDE
C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination
The “sociological imagination” is a term that seemingly every sociology student encounters. It was first introduced by C. Wright Mills in his 1959 book of the same name, and over time it has become an enduring cornerstone of the discipline. It captures the spirit of inquiry, the quality of mind, and the guiding principles that all sociologists should embrace. Mills was sometimes critical of sociology as a discipline, so he offered himself as a “public intellectual,” one who could speak beyond the confines of academia and address some of the most pressing social issues of the time. Mills was convinced that sociology had something to offer everyone, not just academics.
Mills highlighted the distinction between “personal troubles” and “public issues” as “an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science” (Mills 1959, p. 8). He explained that almost any feature of an individual’s daily life can be better understood if this distinction is applied to it. Unemployment, war, marriage, and housing are all experienced as personal troubles, but to be fully understood, they must also be seen as manifestations of long-standing institutions and larger social structures. As Mills pointed out, “In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution” (Mills 1959, p. 10). This lesson was driven home again during the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2020, as infections and deaths were rising around the world, a series of society-wide shutdowns were put in place to keep people safe and slow the spread of the virus. Suddenly, millions of Americans were out of work, particularly low-wage workers in industries like leisure and hospitality, travel and transportation, and construction (Terrell 2021). The unemployment rate skyrocketed to nearly 15 percent—the highest level since the Great Depression. For the many millions of people thrown out of work, unemployment was experienced as a personal trouble; people could no longer pay rent, buy food, or access health care. However, these personal troubles can be understood only when they are viewed as a public issue—a global crisis beyond the control of any individual.
In even more fundamental ways, Mills believed that people are shaped by the connections between “the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history” (Mills 1959, p. 4). These connections could influence the most personal features of someone’s life, shaping the very kind of people “they are becoming” (p. 4). In her book Unbearable Weight (1995), Susan Bordo describes how anorexia came to be recognized as a national mental health problem. In 1973, psychiatrists still considered anorexia quite rare, so why is there so much awareness about eating disorders now? Anorexia and bulimia are experienced in intensely personal ways, and eating disorders are usually explained in purely psychological terms. But Bordo, thinking about them sociologically, argues that cultural factors help create eating disorders. Contemporary culture’s obsession with bodies that are “slim, tight, and young” (p. 140) shapes individual psychologies. Eating disorders, then, are symptoms of a troubled culture as well as a troubled individual. This is not to deny that personal and psychological factors are important, but it is a reminder that social and cultural factors create the environment that makes it possible to experience problems like eating disorders in the first place.
Today you may be a student in an introductory sociology class; every year, more than 25,000 students will receive bachelor’s degrees in sociology (U.S. Department of Education 2019). Whether or not you end up majoring in sociology, C. Wright Mills wanted everyone to develop and sharpen a sociological imagination. In fact, that is the goal we share in writing this textbook. How might the sociological imagination be useful to you in the future?
Personal Troubles and Public Issues High unemployment rates during the Covid-19 pandemic were both a personal trouble and a public issue.
Macrosociology approaches the study of society from the opposite direction, by looking at large-scale social structures to determine how they affect the lives of groups and individuals. If we want to stick to the topic of gender inequality, we can find plenty of examples of research projects that take a macro approach; many deal with the workplace. Despite the gains made in recent years, the U.S. labor market is still predominantly sex segregated—that is, men and women are concentrated in different occupations. Sociologist Christine Williams found that while women in male-dominated fields experience limits on their advancement, dubbed the “glass ceiling” effect, men in female-dominated occupations experience unusually rapid rates of upward mobility—what she called the “glass escalator” (Williams 1992, 1995, 2013). Here, then, we see a macro approach to the topic of gender and power: Large-scale features of social structure (patterns of occupational sex segregation) create the constraints within which individuals and groups (women and men in the workplace) experience successes or failures in their everyday lives.
As you can see, these two perspectives make different assumptions about how society works: The micro perspective assumes that society’s larger structures are shaped through individual interactions, while the macro perspective assumes that society’s larger structures shape those individual interactions. It is useful to think of these perspectives as being on a continuum with each other; while some sociologists adhere to radically micro or exclusively macro perspectives, most are somewhere in between. The next part of this chapter explores some specific theoretical traditions within sociology and shows you where each falls along this continuum.
Levels of Analysis These two views of the New York Public Library represent different levels of analysis in sociology. Microsociology zooms in to focus on individuals, their interactions, and groups in order to understand their contribution to larger social structures. In contrast, macrosociology pulls back to examine large-scale social processes and their effects on individuals and groups.
the level of analysis that studies face-to-face and small-group interactions in order to understand how they affect the larger patterns and structures of society
