“I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

Such was the rather awkward beginning of a recent conversation I had with a friend in the social sciences—let’s call him “Norbert”—here at the University of Minnesota. Even more disconcerting, it turned out that Norbert (who is not a sociologist by training) was talking about my Editor’s Desk post from a week or so ago, the one trying to specify the distinctive elements of the sociological imagination. It’s not that I minded being challenged—I actually thrive on the thrust and parry of intellectual discussion and debate. It was more that I didn’t see it coming. Aside from a little kerfuffle about wholism and holism, the post had circulated fairly widely and had generated a number of complementary comments and supportive emails.

Turns out that Norbert’s bone of contention was that, as much as he appreciated and indeed agreed with the big vision and bullet points I’d laid out, he wasn’t convinced sociologists actually practice this form of inquiry within their own discipline. He said he’d been reading some sociology journals over winter break, and found most articles were given over to dense methodological discussions based on datasets where the individual was the fundamental unit of analysis. Big ideas about social construction, the importance of context, and the need for synthesis and a broad cultural perspective: all of this seemed almost non-existent. (The one exception he granted involved critiques of inequality and social injustice, but that was a different tangent.)

“Do you really think your description is accurate to the field?” he asked. “Or were the ideas about sociological imagination you were describing more aspirational than actual?”

I was stuck–and had to agree. Powerful and important as I believe the sociological imagination (properly understood) is, I’m afraid that this perspective is more vibrant and vital in Intro textbooks and among bright undergraduates than in the discipline as a whole. Among far too many of us, the sociological imagination is either taken-for-granted or simply forgotten. We almost can’t be bothered to talk about it.

This isn’t how it should be. This vision is a legacy and tradition—a sociological birthright—that needs to be defended, reclaimed, revitalized.

As I told Norbert, this is precisely what Chris and I have been beginning to realize and work on over the past few months. Under the top-secret code name “The Outside-In Project,” we’ve been trying to develop ideas about the larger implications of public engagement of the sort we are doing on TSP (not to mention of all manner of public sociology) for the discipline and practice of professional, academic sociology itself. How can an outward orientation to a general public help re-focus the topics, questions, and methods sociologists choose, and how can it change the kinds of knowledge and understanding we produce and contribute to society? That’s what we’ve begun thinking through. “Well, maybe if you are serious about this,” Norbert observed, “You should be more explicit about how you think the field is failing short and what you think should be done about that.” Maybe, in other words, our project shouldn’t be so secret.

Norbert, as it turns out, was only getting started. “This isn’t just about academic sociology,” he continued. “It is actually about the public engagement a project like The Society Pages is all about.”

The reason we need to fight harder to articulate and defend a properly sociological vision is that otherwise the various discoveries and facts and insights about the empirical world that come of our field end with a whimper, not a bang. They get lost in that vast sea of information and data that characterizes modern life, or they get put in the little boxes of public discourse and political debate, unintentionally reproducing conventional ways of thinking and reinforcing the usual ideological and political divides that plague our public discourse and landscape.

Facts about attitudes toward gay marriage, for example, are not just about gay marriage. They’re also about how we think about families and public policies that support (or fail to support) families of all types. Data about racial achievement gaps in our schools should not be cited only to make the old, tired point about the ongoing persistence of racism and prejudice in our society: it should be situated in the broader social context of all of the social factors (from incomes and wealth to neighborhood and housing patterns, systems of funding schools through property taxes, etc.) that contribute to the problem and make policy solutions so elusive. Sociologists don’t only have facts and figures and critiques to offer; they’ve got a broad vision that can help everyone better understand how to approach social problems and cultural trends in the first place.Sociologists don’t only have facts and figures and critiques; they’ve got a broad vision that can help everyone better understand how to approach social problems and cultural trends.

That’s what’s at stake in all this, Norbert insisted. And here we found common ground.

Truth be told, I have had a few more emails of this sort trickle in over the last few days—friendly sociological readers and critics, some of the field’s more venerable scholars among them, echoing Norbert’s suggestions and concerns. They are quietly and collectively (whether they realize it) making a point I think we all need to take to heart: what is at stake in reclaiming the sociological imagination is not only re-inspiring sociologists to think and research on a larger scale, but taking control of the interpretation and use of our research in actual social life. A reorientation, a more classical approach and commitment to the sociological imagination can make our rigorous research more relevant and engaged. It can help truly enrich and enlarge publics’ discourse and understanding of themselves (and yes, that includes us sociologist types).