Although I’m not a sociologist, I was lucky enough get a Ph.D. from one of the few public policy programs (University of Colorado – Boulder) in the U.S. that wasn’t simply economics by another name and actually took sociology seriously. One of the key “lightbulb” moments in my life was being assigned C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination.

As an intrepid young graduate student, I had no idea that I was reading a sociologist or that Mills’ was out of favor when I came across his text. He shook me by forcing me to realize that the times in which I lived were mediated through a structure, that structures have changed throughout human history, and that people life chances are heavily influenced by that structure. More importantly, he challenged me as a would be social scientist to make this truth explicit to others.

I think of Mills’ as I teach my courses at California Lutheran University in the midst of what might be a broad, expansive paradigm shift in how we organize ourselves politically and economically. I am struck by how difficult it is for people to recognize that the structure they find themselves is not how it has always been. I’m curious as to how others are talking about the global financial crisis. Are they addressing it as a temporary blip in an otherwise sound structural system? Or are they addressing the possibility of a shift and speculating as to what that shift might look like?