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Sociology is just as much an art form as it is a science. And while sociologists and those in cognate disciplines have long experimented with their writing, the search for new academic forms and practices has acquired new urgency and potentiality. How we write up our research is of paramount importance: our language can be used in experimental and innovative ways to offer nuanced, critical commentary without foreclosing alternative viewpoints, and without excluding others from dialogue. Sociography offers spaces for new sensibilities and sensitivities; unresolved or incomplete argument; multiple, multi-dimensional and multiplying possibilities: for writing differently. As an intervention in writing the social, our collection works to resist the ideological promotion of dry, dispassionate, and seemingly 'objective' discourse, one which has traditionally upheld a set of dominant, privileged voices. And in so doing, our collection explores the potential of new ways of writing the social for both a trans- and post-disciplinary academy and a wider reading public; and seeks forms of writing that do justice to the critical curiosity that animates sociology. In sum, the challenge embraced by this collection is to argue for and showcase a praxis that activates sociological knowledge and enlarges the sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan 'We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead' in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a re-thinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the renewal of council housing estates in London has involved widespread 'decanting' of resident populations to allow for demolition and redevelopment, primarily by private developers who sell the majority of new housing at market rate. This process of decanting has displaced long-term council tenants and shorter-term 'temporary' tenants, with many not able to return to the estate. In contrast, those leaseholders who bought under the 'right-to-buy' legislation introduced in the 1980s have a 'right to remain' by virtue of the property rights they have. Nonetheless, given the threat that their property will ultimately be subject to compulsory purchase because the redevelopment of the estate is in the 'public interest', these leaseholders experience similar displacement pressures to other residents. Describing these pressures, this article argues that the right-to-buy legislation offered these residents the illusion of entering a property-owning middle-class, but that they were never able to escape the labelling of council estates as stigmatised spaces which have ultimately been seized by the state and capital in a moment of 'accumulation by dispossession'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural interpretations of the sex trade are pervasive in Southeast Asia, in particular, the argument that daughters enrol in sex work to repay a debt of life and support their parents. While useful to illuminate the role of culture in shaping economic action, this narrative carries the risk of viewing people as robots guided by stable and supra-individual forces. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Southern Vietnam and Cambodia on precarious and indebted Vietnamese families that encourage their daughters to sell sex, this article disturbs deterministic cultural accounts of sex work by describing how families interpret, negotiate and (re)produce cultural scripts through relational work. More specifically, it shows how these families draw from familistic scripts about hierarchy, duty and sacrifice conveyed in popular culture to assemble relational packages. Deeply imbued in affective undercurrents and power asymmetry, these packages allow families to negotiate taboo trades like the repayment of debt through the sale of their daughter's virginity. Overall, a relational work framework provides a better understanding of female participation in the sex trade in Vietnam than explanations based on normative accounts of culture or problematic trafficking binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative, visual and multimodal research methods are commonly employed by sociologists in the 'outward-facing' activities of data collection, presentation and dissemination of research findings; however, they are rarely applied to the 'inward-facing' research practices of conceptualisation and research design. Responding to Pierre Bourdieu's calls for methodological pluralism in sociology and for the construction of the object to be rigorously undertaken in every moment of research, I explore how such methods can be used by the researcher as effective thinking tools to enhance the creativity and quality of conceptual work as a precursor to empirical investigation. I investigate the affordances of this approach using a creative research method – storyboarding – to examine trust. Although empirical research commonly cites trust as an explanatory factor, its meaning is ambiguous and contested. Based on three imagined trust dilemmas developed with the involvement of a visual artist, I demonstrate how a visual creative process can encourage consistent attention to the construction of the research object. It also speculatively reveals new facets of phenomena and supports reflexive attention to the researcher's relation to the object of research. I argue for sociological thinking to engage an eclectic range of visual and creative forms as legitimate tools capable of extending rigour and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between future-oriented temporality and precarity in creative work. Existing sociological studies implicitly assume an unproblematic causal link between creative workers' future-orientation and their precarity, subjugation and exploitation. This article problematizes this link and offers a more nuanced reassessment of creative work's futurity by arguing for the analytical potential of the notion of hope in gaining a better understanding of creative workers' hopeful – affective, practical and moral – responses to conditions of protracted precarity. Building on theories of hope, the article conceptualizes hope both as an existential affective stance and an active moral practice oriented towards the present – an orientation that enables workers to keep going in spite of economic hardship and job uncertainty. From 'an atypical case' study of creative work in South-East Europe, hope emerges empirically as the central quotidian practice of coping with precarity. Three practices of hope are discussed: (1) hope as therapeutic practice; (2) hope as informal labour practice; and (3) hope as socially engaged arts practice. In so doing, the article explores the possibilities of practising 'a hopeful sociology' of creative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper about what happens when a form of knowledge moves to another part of the university. The author, identifying himself as an 'ex-sociologist', investigates the relationship between the sociology of work, employment and organization and various 'critical' traditions within the business school. I argue that the contemporary divide between sociologies of work and employment, and Critical Management Studies ( CMS) within the business school rests in part on developments in UK sociology in the 1960s and 70s. This means that divergent understandings of the role of sociology and its relevant theoretical resources provided the deep structure for the current tension between CMS on the one hand and research on work and employment on the other. The movement of sociologists and industrial relations academics to the business school provided the preconditions for two very different critical traditions. The paper concludes with thoughts on what it means to be an outsider inside an institution, and on the future prospects for Burawoy's 'critical' or 'public' sociologies in UK business schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Savage and Burrows (2007) have argued that one way to invigorate sociology's 'empirical crisis' is to take advantage of live, web-based digital transactional data. This paper argues that whilst sociologists do indeed need to engage with this growing digital data deluge, there are longer-term risks involved that need to be considered. More precisely, C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' is used as the basis for the kind of sociological research that one might aim for, even within the digital era. In so doing, it is suggested that current forms of engaging with transactional social data are problematic to the sociological imagination because they tend to be ahistorical and focus mainly on 'now casting'. The ahistorical nature of this genre of digital research, it is argued, necessarily restricts the possibility of developing a serious sociological imagination. In turn, it is concluded, there is a need to think beyond the digitized surfaces of the plastic present and to consider the impact that time and temporality, particularly within the digital arena, have on shaping our sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the specificity of sociological materials and methods in relation to other disciplines and practices (art, literature, science and journalism) and questions the opportunities for sociological attentiveness, experimentation and failure in the context of contemporary UK professional, institutional and academic/ intellectual constraints. It asks whether materials and methods are 'sociological' to the extent that they tell about the problems of society, or whether it is the unique relation of sociology to its materials and methods that defines sociological practice. Exploring these questions in relation to a project that was researched and written during an extended period of unpaid leave (ie outside the profession and the institution), the article also examines some of the consequences of a changed relation between sociology and experience. What would be the implications if the aim of sociology was not only to theorize and explain experience but also, sometimes, to be an 'informed provocation' of experience? The second part of the article considers what the concept of 'make-believe' might offer sociology - not in terms of what sociology is, but rather in terms of what it does with its materials and methods. Finally, the article returns to the most common material that sociologists work with - words - and asks how it is possible to stay receptive to the vitality of words as forces in the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this manifesto for live methods the key arguments of the volume are summarized in eleven propositions. We offer eleven provocations to highlight potential new capacities for how we do sociology. The argument for a more artful and crafty approach to sociological research embraces new technological opportunities while expanding the attentiveness of researchers. We identify a set of practices available to us as sociologists from the heterodox histories of the tradition as well as from current collaborations and cross-disciplinary exchanges. The question of value is not set apart from the eleven points we raise in the manifesto. Additionally, we are concerned with how the culture of audit and assessment within universities is impacting on sociological research. Despite the institutional threats to sociology we emphasize the discipline is well placed in our current moment to develop creative, public and novel modes of doing imaginative and critical sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inability, or unwillingness, of 20th-century sociologists to move beyond the agenda bequeathed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim is remarkable in view not only of the now outdated presuppositions shared by all three but of the increasing likelihood that the more important influence on the human behavioural sciences in the 21st century will turn out to be Darwin's. Not only has the coming together of evolutionary theory, population genetics, and molecular biology shown that significantly more of human behaviour can be explained by the theory of natural selection than was previously recognized, but non-reductionist explanations of cultural and social evolution from within a neo-Darwinian paradigm can be framed in terms no longer vulnerable to the criticisms previously levelled against the application to sociology of Darwin's original insight about ‘descent with modification’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of community undertaken over a period of some forty-five years by the author and his colleagues are re-considered to show how the significance of ‘communities-in-the-mind’ has been inadequately appreciated. The distinction made by Clifford Geertz between ‘experience-near’ and ‘experience-distant’ is used to sharpen up certain assumptions and approaches of community sociologists, including Frankenberg. Some possible explanations for the decline in the perceived importance of comminity studies from the late 1960s are discussed in the context of the growing centrality of social class in sociological analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. Reference is made to recent research on personal communities by Liz Spencer and the author to illustrate how an ellision between ‘experience-near’ and ‘experience-distant’ approaches may be achieved. It is concluded that the imputed community-on-the-ground, often based on materialistic assumptions, should not be conceptually privileged over the real community-in-the-mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply by the author to the article "Why Bother With Durkheim?," by David Parker, in the volume 45, number one issue of the journal "The Sociological Review." The author says, I quite sympathize with David Parker's contention that very often the Marx-Durkheim-Weber trio is fetishized or divinized--their writings being used for promoting various dogmas, for legitimizing in post-hoc fashion conclusions that have been arrived at without serious engagement with the classical texts, as well as for giving a scholarly or theoretical veneer to studies with a predominantly empiricist orientation. I would add to all of this my objection to the recent, geometrically expanding, scholastically oriented Marx-Weber-Durkheim industry, at least in so far as a large input of this literature purports to find out what the trio really said or meant on one issue or another. With this last objection I do not want to endorse the opposite extreme: i.e., the ultra-relativistic argument that the readings of the classics depend so much on conceptual spectacles that there is no way of being certain that any particular interpretation is nearer the truth than another. In this regard I do believe that certain readings can indeed be more accurate or closer to what the three classical sociologists have said or tried to say.

The article examines the concept of emotion from a sociological perspective, focusing on how some of the core questions facing the sociology of emotions can be interrogated productively. It outlines some of the core concepts of the sociology of emotions by putting emphasis on work done on the sociology of emotion by Emile Durkheim and other notable sociologists. Durkheim's analysis of the relationship between social gatherings and emotional effervescence exposes the limitations of language as an exclusive means of apprehending human sensuality, and demonstrates how the emotionally saturated bases of action can either solidify or render ineffective those internal controls which have been seen as a prerequisite of civilized life. What is perhaps most useful about Durkheim's approach is his placing of the somatic sensation of society at the very heart of social theory. From this perspective, the study of emotions needs to be saved from becoming yet another enclave within the discipline and connected instead to a series of issues central to the sustenance of social groups. These include the education of children's emotional dispositions, as well as the fate of those sacred phenomena that have supposedly been on the decline within the modern world yet are important to the affective attachment of individuals to society.

The concept 'social control' has been criticised from a variety of quarters in recent years, particularly by historians and historical sociologists. However, it remains in common usage in sociological studies of welfare, deviance and social control. This paper shows, first, how this reliance on the concept of social control is rooted in a wider-ranging argument in social and political theory concerning the liberal-democratic fusion between the state and civil society, and that the lack of resolution of this argument is the foundation of the persistence of the concept social control in other areas of social inquiry, despite its repeated 'falsification'. Second, the paper highlights the main arguments against the use of 'social control' in explaining social order, in particular the misunderstanding of class, culture and power which its use encourages, and the paper will conclude with a discussion of alternative ways of conceptualising the operation of power in contemporary societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relevance of the sociology of science for the study of power. Though there is by no means complete agreement between sociologists of science, recent work in this area has suggested that (a) scientists negotiate not only about scientific but also social reality, and (b) the distinction between macro- and micro-sociology is an impediment rather than an aid to analysis. Thus, though there are indeed differences in scale, it is argued that these should be seen as the outcome of differentially effective attempts by scientists to impose versions of scientific and social reality.
The present paper extends this argument by considering the way in which a set of pharmacological experiments was undertaken in order to generate results and control aspects of the scientific and social environment. It is suggested that the experimentalist acted like an entrepreneur, combining a variety of potentially unruly resources with the aim of simplifying these and reducing them to docile figures on a sheet of paper. The strategies and materials used in this process of control are considered and three classes of potential resources are identified: natural objects or devices, people and inscriptions. It is argued that these have certain properties that render them relatively durable and transportable and hence convenient for the purpose of long distance social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses survey techniques and quantitative analysis in the prosecution of art as against observation and verbal types of analysis. The foundation of statistical inference from samples representative of a wider population has now become commonplace knowledge and most first year students in the social sciences are made familiar with such notions as 'a representative sample', 'sampling error', 'biased and unbiased estimates' and similar ideas developed to express the logic of making inferences about a larger population from a considerably smaller sample. The method of case studies is, of course, general and has been extensively used, for example, in political science and in sociology. The argument that has been advanced here, then, is that case studies of whatever form are a reliable and respectable procedure of social analysis and that much criticism of their reliability and validity has been based on a misconception of the basis upon which the analyst may justifiably extrapolate from an individual case study to the social process in general.

A research project undertaken for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in 1980-1 is seen as representative of a trend towards contract research and of the problems this creates for sociologists. The project entailed an examination of the 'housing needs' of the Authority's tenants in fled houses m the North of Scotland. It is suggested that the UKAEA was less interested in forecasts of housing needs than in 'expert' identification of trends with which the Authority was already familiar. The 'experts'' final report would then be used by the UKAEA to ease the progress of Authority policy in a sensitive area. The research contract did not inevitably produce a study which could be used by the UKAEA as a cosmetic but the Authority directed the research to this end. Nevertheless, the project did produce contacts and opportunities for independent research which would have been inaccessible. An example is given m the form of an account of the UKAEA's housing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between town planning, urban planners and sociology in Great Britain from the 19th century through the early 1980s, with a particular focus on the post World War II period. An overview of the impact that post World War II British politics played in the increasing role of sociologists in urban planning, including in regard to sociologists' role in urban research, is provided.

The article presents information on sociology. The opposition between qualitative and quantitative is used to mark many different contrasts. Some of these that occurred in discussion at the SSRC Workshop are presented below. But immediately a problem arises. Sociology is a pluralistic discipline, characterized by numerous alternative conceptions of theory, explanation and data, that is, by different sociological approaches. Each different approach has its own conception of what is qualitative about social data and what are the problems and possibilities for the analysis of qualitative data. Listing approaches to sociology is hazardous, since approaches can be endlessly differentiated and any particular definition or categorization of approaches is inevitably challenged for omitting or mis-identifying crucial boundaries and for associating authors with others considered to be their opponents. Furthermore, any definitional activity is fraught with philosophical difficulties concerning the ontological status of the definiendum and methodological difficulties concerning the means through which the categories are derived. No attempt is made to engage with these difficulties here for it is not the intention to provide an account of approaches that does anything other than locate the discussion of qualitative data analysis.

This article presents information on Wilfred Owen, the First World War poet and Arthur John Brock, doctor, Scotsman, stoic, classical scholar and sociologist. Brock opined that contemporary society is suffering from a dissociation between organism and environment. Specialisms and bureaucracy had so sapped individual responsibility that people had been shellshocked long before 1914. The common condition was "ergophobia," a fear of effort; people had been allowing themselves to become weak and had been substituting drugs for action. The fashionable "rest-cure" only made matter worse; people needed more work, not less. Brock had defined a limited version of "ergotherapy" in print in 1910 and 1911, but as he then described its practice it seems to have been largely a matter of getting his patients to pursue disparate activities such as pottery and gardening without an integrated programme. It is further informed that Wilfred Owen was one of the founder-members of the Field Club on 13 July 1917. As a boy, he had formed with some cousins an "Astronomic, Geological and Botanical Society," to observe the world; these subjects had always fascinated him, and he welcomed with delight the Field Club's plans to explore the Pentlands for rocks and plants and to visit the Royal Observatory.

Despite the seminal place that sociologist Robert Merton occupies in the development of sociological theory, the application of his theories to specific patterns of behavior does not seem to have attracted the attention of many of those engaged in empirical research. This is not to say that Mertonian theory has not been subject to searching criticism. The strain towards anomie created by the and means leads, he argues, to five types of which take the form of acceptance and/or goals and institutionalized means of attaining mismatch between goals adaptation to this strain, rejection of the cultural these goals. By examining career patterns of addicts and addiction as a career, it should be possible broadly to establish if and when failure occurs, particularly in relation to educational achievement. The sick role therefore provides a legitimate reason for not pursuing the goals of society without the subject having to abandon either the goals or the means of achieving these goals, and might therefore be described as a temporary retreatist adaptation. It is also possible that an attempt would be made by some to turn the sick role into an invalid or at least a chronic sick role, thereby permanently evading having to resolve any problems.

The article focuses on the social theory. Far from depriving the sociologist of creativity, therefore, the precept of representativeness demands it of him. Indeed, it has already been suggested that if he succeeds in articulating a representative experience, the sociologist plays a part in shaping and extending the particular experiences upon which it is based. But the creativity involved in this is of a particular kind. It is emphatically not the kind which provides a warrant for any and every variety of nebulous, romantic, utopian subjectivism. This article has culminated in the proposition that sociology has been shaped and, in terms of its concepts and methodological principles, permeated by representative traditions of value which have articulated the representative experiences of its times and places. A second major purpose of the article, however, has been to attempt to provide a defence against the manifest dangers which follow from the inadequate ways in which propositions about these elements are all too frequently formulated.

Controversy over the nature of man and society, and in particular over the ability of the perspective of the natural sciences adequately to study these phenomena, has continued unabated in the social sciences. Whatever the case, many sociologists seem to find it difficult to theorize adequately and to conduct research incorporating such subjective factors as consciousness, social meanings, interpretations and so on, especially if they are concerned with macro-social phenomena and problems. The most basic assertion of this approach is that society is collectively constructed and maintained by those individuals and groups that it creates and sustains. Social structure, as conceived of here, is simply the sum total of these typifications and the recurrent patterns of interaction established by means of them. The problem of social order is essentially the problem of producing some sharedness of meanings and some co-ordination of the activities of the members of any society sufficient to allow them to achieve what they consider to be adequate gratification of their needs and desires through theft everyday lives.

The article focuses on secularization in the English context. The sociologists who concentrated on industrial society in their studies of religion of the question of how religion is to be defined. Social anthropologists, concerned with the definition of analytical concepts appropriate to a cross-cultural perspective, have in recent years considered carefully the question of religion, and, while differing in detail, their definitions of religion are remarkably similar when considering the key referent of the term. It is here argued that it is inappropriate to stretch, the definition of religion to incorporate orientations of this kind, Sociology already possesses terms such as 'ideology', 'value-orientation', 'belief-system', or, for, those of the functionalist persuasion, functional alternative, which are quite adequate to cover the commitments concerned. Dominant values are associated with dominant institutions, and the place of Christianity in the dominant value system is assured by state recognition.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim's theory of politics and the state is undoubtedly the most neglected of his contributions to social theory. There are perhaps two main reasons why Durkheim's political sociology has not received the attention which it merits. One is that several of the standard expositions of his work were written before the publication of the series of lectures in which he most directly confronted the problems of political analysis. A second, although related, factor in this neglect derives from the "phases" through which the secondary interpretation of Durkheim's work has passed. The fundamental continuity between Durkheim's early and later works does not become fully apparent, however, unless considerable attention is given to his political theory. Far from being of peripheral significance to his sociology, Durkheim's political thought has an important role in his ideas. Durkheim's political liberalism and his sociological defence of republicanism played a major role in the promotion of his own academic career, and in facilitating the rise of sociology as a recognised discipline in the French academic system.

The first two sections of this paper deal with the teaching of sociology as an academic discipline in the United Arab Republic and with its place outside the universities; the third presents an impressionistic evaluation and offers some data about sociology in Egypt which are relatively unknown in the non-Arab world. While some Egyptian sociologists in their nationalistic zeal would maintain that Egypt is the first country in the world where sociology was ever taught, it is certain that it was taught and cultivated from the foundation of Cairo University at the beginning of this century. In addition there are sociology courses in the curricula of the Faculties of Agriculture, in the colleges of education, the intermediate and higher institutes for social work, and in a number of faculties in Al-Azhar University as well as in the girls' college. At Alexandria University sociology is taught in the Department of Philosophical and Sociological Studies, which offers a combined B.A. degree in philosophy and sociology. After the B.A. the students can choose to work for an MA. degree in one of these disciplines; and for students of sociology two roads are open.

Sociologists who have turned their minds to the subject of crime have been in the business of invention. They have aimed to invent plausible explanations of the known facts. The greater proportion of the current sociological knowledge about criminal deviance was invented to explain certain known facts about the epidemiology of crime. The best known of these facts the one which has probably been uppermost in the minds of theorists, and hence the one which has been most influential in the development of their theories is that law-violating behavior is negatively related to social class. Since the theories invented by these sociologists have provided the most tenacious paradigms for interpreting criminal behavior, it is surely justifiable to take yet another look at the facts which they were designed to explain. One does this when there are growing doubts about the validity of claims based on inferences drawn from official statistics or from samples of apprehended offenders, and when several recent studies, designed to explore the relationship between social class and delinquency, but measuring the latter by the technique of self-reported infractions and not official apprehension, have produced findings at variance with official statistics.

This article proposes to raise for discussion several fundamental issues in sociological study and to suggest a point of view. The aim is to suggest that at least some radicals in sociology have gone astray on certain anti-sociological and methodological matters. There has been in the past decade an intellectually defensive effort on the part of radicals to justify one or several radical sociologies by adopting the counter-positions to those verbally espoused by orthodox or establishment sociologists in matters relative to the philosophy of social science or methodology. Several themes can be identified: objectivity, value-commitments, criticism, relevance, paradigms, and purposes. A popular argument of non-objectivists is that of various relativist positions: linguistic, cultural and in terms of the sociology of knowledge. The common element in all these positions is that they show correlations between reports of facts and the prior linguistic, cultural or social characteristics of those reporting. A further consideration comes from recent humanist writers often associating their positions with phenomenology. They begin from the subjective experience of freedom and choice, and argue that these experiences remain unaccounted for in an objectivist, causal analysis.

The writings of Talcott Parsons have excited great admiration among many of his fellow academics, and aroused the intense hostility of many others; but even his adversaries admit his remarkable pre-eminence in contemporary sociological theory. On the other hand, his admirers do not deny that his thought is extremely complex and its expression often highly obscure. Parsons, then, has produced a body of work which is important, difficult, and controversial; a body of work which therefore calls for sustained and rigorous analysis. The present essay is an attempt to come to grips with the crucial theoretical problems of the Parsonian system. It focuses on one of the key elements of Parsons' conceptual scheme, the four so-called system-problems, or functional prerequisites of social systems, and the four functional sub-systems associated with these prerequisites.

The article profiles sociologist T.H. Marshall. He is eighty this year. He is the doyen of British sociology today. His sociological scholarship developed against a background of a sheltered upper middle class upbringing, historical scholarship in Cambridge, and a generous variety of practical affairs of life. Parliamentary candidacy, work in the Foreign Office Research Department Educational Adviser with the British High Commissioner in Germany, and Director of the Social Sciences Department of UNESCO, have been some of the assignments which fell to his share. In his recently published autobiographical sketch he characteristically gives the impression that his passage into sociology was almost accidental and that his preconceptions of the sociological discipline were hazy. He now deplores the sociological innocence from which he allegedly suffered at the time of his four years in a German prisoner of war camp: he wishes he had been a sociologist then, and had studied camps life with the method of participant observation and other survey methods.

The article focuses on the book entitled "The Sociological Imagination," by C. Wright Mills. It is a great advantage to have this stimulating and provocative book in paperback at last. Wright Mills hits out with splendid impartiality at both grand theorists and abstract empiricists. And those who see the main aim of sociology to lie in finding solutions to practical problems might ponder his comment that this means accepting the framework of his society that the sociologist cannot help but be committed in one way or another.