There are two additional points which I must add to this general model in
order to make it formally complete. Full conceptions of upper strata require
attention to duration and mobility. The task here is to determine positions
between which there is typical movement of individuals and groups -- within the
present generation, and between the last two or three generations.
This introduces the temporal dimension of biography or career-lines, and of
history into the scheme. These are not merely further empirical questions, they
are also definitionally relevant. For(a) we want to leave open whether or not
in classifying people in terms of any of our key variables, we should define our
categories in terms of how long they, or their families, have occupied the
position in question. For example, I might want to decide that the upper two
per cent of status -- or at least one important type of status rank -- consists
of those up there for at least two generations. Also (b) I want to leave open
the question of whether or not I should construct a "stratum" not only in terms
of an intersection of several variables, but also, in line with Weber's
neglected definition of "social class", as composed of those positions between
which there is "typical and easy mobility." Thus, the lower white callar
occupations and middle and upper wage-worker jobs in certain industries seem to
be forming, in this sense, a stratum."
In the course of the reading and analysis of others' theories, the design
of ideal research, and the perusal of the files, I began to draw up a list of
special studies. Some of them are too big to handle, and will in time
regretfully be given up; some will end as materials for a paragraph, a section,
a sentence, a chapter, some will become pervading themes to be woven intos the
entire book or into parts of it. Here, again, are initial notes for several
such special projects, taken from an application I have made for a small
research grant:
"(1) A time-budget analysis of a typical working day of 10 top executives
of large corporations, and the same for 10 federal administrators. These
observations will be combined with detailed "life history" interviews. The aim
here is to describe the major routines and decisions, partly at least in terms
of time devoted to them, and to gain an insight into the factors relevant to the
decisions made. The procedure will naturally vary with the degree of
cooperation secured, but ideally will involve first, an interview in which the
life history and present situation of the man is made clear; second observations
of the lday, actually sitting in a corner of the man's office, and following him
around; third, a longish interview that evening or the next day in which we go
over the whole day and probe the subjective processes involved in the external
behavior we've observed.
(2) A time-budget analysis of upper class weekends, in which the routines
are closely observed and followed by probing interviews with the man and other
members of the family on the Monday following.
For both these tasks I've fairly good contacts, and good contacts, if
handled properly, lead to better ones. I've done this with labor leaders, and,
in general, I believe business and government people are more cooperative.
(3) A study of the expense account and other privileges which, along with
salaries and other incomes, form the standard and the style of living of the top
levels. The idea here is to get something concrete on "the bureaucratization of
consumption", the transfer of private expenses to business accounts.
(4) Bring up to date the type of information contained in such books as
Lundberg's America's Sixty Families, which is dated as of the tax returns for
1923.
(5) Gather and systematize, from treasury records and sother government
sources, the distribution of various types of private property by amounts held.
(6) A career-line study of the presidents, all cabinet members, and all
members of the Supreme Court. This I already have on IBM cards from the
constitutional period through Truman's second term, but I want to expand the
items used and analyze it afresh.
There are other -- some 35 so far -- small scale "projects" of this
sort,(for example, comparison of the amounts of money spent in the presidential
elections of 1896 and 1952, detailed comparison of Morgan of 1910 and Kaiser of
1950, and something concrete on the careers of "Admirals and Generals""). But,
as I go along, I must adjust my aim to what is accessible. I hope that the
above list will make clear the kind of thing I want to do."
Designs
My sense of form -- unskilled though it still is -- begins to tempt me into
concealment. I feel the tendency to leave my fragmentary notes and round all
this out so as to make my ways of working seem more effective than they are; in
short, to draw the reader's attention away from my limited discoveries and
inwards my modes of presentation and persuasion. I want to guard against that.
So I must tell you that during the last several months I have been doing a great
deal of writing; to be sure, it has been writing along the general lines of the
big model and in terms of the theories examined, but still it has at times
seemed quite free of all that. I cannot say for sure whether my imagination has
been prompted by having these larger designs before me, although I am aware
that I can easily make it look that way. Maybe these designs are a sort of
professional ritual I go through; maybe they are more than that, more than
psychologically necessary. At any rate, some of this writing leads me to feel
uneasy about the assumption that all the skills required to put a book together
are explicit and teachable, as are the deadbeat methods of much orthodox social
science today.
After these designs were written down, I began, with a clearer conscience,
and I must say greater zest, to read historical works on top groups, taking
random(and unfiled) notes and interpreting the reading. You do not really have
to study a topic you are working on; once you are into it, it is everywhere.
You are sensitive to its themes; you see and hear them everywhere in your
experience, especialy, it always seems to me, in aparently unrelated areas.
Even the mass media, especially bad movies and cheap novels and picture
magazines and night radio, are disclosed in fresh importance to you.
From existing sources as well as those that you have fashioned, trying to
remain open, as it were, on all sides, you slowly go forward, continualy
outlining and re-outlining the whole, specifying and elaborating the list of
anchor projects, refining and trying to index parts of the master design,
writing this and editing that, bringing intellectual netness for a day or a week
or a month to this section or to that part.
The Sociological Imagination
But, the reader may ask, how do ideas come? How is the imagination
spurred to put all the images and facts together and lend meaning to them? I do
not think I can really answer that; all I can do is talk about the general
conditions and a few simple techniques which have seemed to increase my chances
to come out with something.
I do not believe that workmanlike imagination is an absolute gift. I, at
least, have got to work in order to call it forth, and when I am really in the
middle of some set of problems, I am working for it all the time, even when I do
not know it. I have to develop and nurse it, and I must live as well as work in
such a way as to allow it to occur. I believe that there are techniques of
imagination and definite ways of stimulating it, although I do not want to
acquire any technique of work that would limit the play of fancy. Naturally, I
hope that beginning students might gather a few hints for their own ways of
work, and some encouragement to pursue them, but I am not suggesting any rigid
technique. Yet, there are several ways I have found useful to invite the
sociological imagination:
(1) The rearranging of the file, as I have already said, is one way. One
simply dumps out heretofore disconnected folders, mixing yup their contents, and
then re-sorts them many times. how often and how extensively one does this will
of course vary with different problems and the development of their solutions.
But in general the mechanics of it are as simple as that.
(2) A second technique which should be part of the intellectual workman's way
of life consists of a kind of relaxed browsing in libraries, letting the mind
play over books and new periodicals and encyclopedias. Of course, I have in
mind the several problems on which I am actively working, and try to be
passively receptive to unforeseen and unplanned linkages.
(3) Closely related to playing with the file and relaxing in the library is
the idea of actively using a variety of perspectives. I will, for instance, ask
myself how would a political scientist whom I recently read approach this, or
that experimental psychologist, or this historian. One thinks in multiple
perspectives which are here represented by men of different specialties. I try
in this way to let my mind become a moving prism that catches light from as many
angles as possible. In this connection, the writing of dialogues is often very
useful
(4) One of the things meant by "being soaked in the literature" is being able
to locate the opponents and the friends of every available viewpoint. I very
often try to think against something, and in trying to understand and advance an
intellectual field, one of the first things I do is lay out the arguments. On
this point, for instance, the book on John Dewey's technique of thought by
Bogoslovsky, The Logic of Controversy , and C.E. Ayer's essay on the gospel of
technology in Philosophy, Today and Tomorrow, edited by Honok and Kallen.
(5) An attitude of playfulness toward the phrases and words with which
various issues are defined often loosens the imagination. I took up synanyms for
each of my key terms in dictionaries as well as in various scholarly books, in
order to know the full range of their connotations. This simple procedure seems
to prod me to a conceptual elaboration of the problem and hence to a more
precise definition of terms. Only if I know the several meanings which might be
given to terms or phrases canI select the precise ones with which want to work.
As a student, I kept a notebook containing the vocabularies for handling given
problem areas.
(6) On all work, but especially on existing theory, I try to keep close
watch on the level of generality of every key term, and I often find it useful
to take a high-level statement and break it down to more concrete levels. When
that is done, the statement often falls into two or three components, each lying
along different dimensions. I also try to move up the level of generality;
remove the specific qualifiers and examine the re-formed statement more
abstractly, to see if I can stretch it or elaborate it. From above and from
below, I try to proble, its clarified meaning into every aspect and
implications.
(7) Almost any general idea I come upon will, as I think about it, be cast
into some sort of types. A new classification is often the beginning of
fruitful developments. The skill required to make up types and then to search
for the conditions and consequences of each type has become an automatic
procedure with me. Rather than resting content with Democratic vs. Republican
voters, I have to make up a classification of voters along the motivational
line, and another along the intensity line, and so forth. I am searching for
common denominators within Democratic types and Republican types and for
differentiating factors within and between all of the types built.
(8) The technique of cross-tabulating is not limited to quantitative
materials, but as a matter of fact, is a good way to get hold of new types.
Charts, tables and diagrams of a qualitative sort are not only display models
for work already done; they are often genuinely productive in their effects.
(9) On almost any problem with which I am concerned, I try to get a
comparative grip on the materials. The search for comparative cases in one
civilization or historical period or several, or in two samples, gives me leads.
I would never think of describing an institution in twentieth-century America
without trying to bear in mind similar institutions in other types of milieu and
structure.
(10) In the search for comparative cases, I seem to get the best insights
from extreme types--from thinking of the opposite of that with which I am
directly concerned. If I think about despair, then I also think about elation;
if I study the miser, then also the spendthrift. That is also a general
characteristic of anchor projects, which, if it is possible, I design in terms
of "polar types". The hardest thing in the world for me is to study one object;
but when I try to contrast objects, I get a sort of grip on the materials and I
can then sort out the dimensions in terms of which the comparisons are made.
find the shuttling between these dimensions and the concrete types very
illuminating. This technique is also logically sound, for without a sample, you
can only guess about statistical frequencies; what you can do is give the range
and major types of some phenomenon, and for that it is more economical to begin
by constructing "polar types", opposities along various dimensions. This does
not mean that I do not strive to gain and to maintain a sense of proportion,
some lead n the frequences of given types. One continually tries, in fact, to
combine this quest with the search for indices for which one might find
statistics.
(11) I seem automatically to try to put historical depth into my reflection,
and I think this is the reason for it; Often what you are examining is limited
in number, so to get a comparative grip on it, you have got to place it inside a
frame with historical depth. To put it another way, the contrasting-type
approach often requires the examination of historical cases. This sometimes
results in points useful for a trend analysis, or it leads to a typology of
stages. I use historical materials, then, because of the desire for a fuller
range, or for a more convenient range of some phenomena--by which I mean one
that includes the variations along some known set of dimensions. Some
knowledge of world history is indispensable to thesociologist: without such
knowledge, he is simply a provincial, no matter what else he knows.
From these considerations, I hope the reader will understand that in a way
I never "start" writing on a project: I am writing continuously, either in a
more personal vein, in the files, in taking notes after browsing, or in more
guided endeavors. I always have, in following this way of living and working,
many topics which I want to work out further. After I decide on some "release"
out of this work, I try to use the entire file, the browsing in libraries and
periodicals, my conversations and my selection of people --all on this topic, I
am trying, you see, to build a framework containing all the key elements which
enter into the work; then to put each section in separate folders and
continually readjust the whole framework around changes in them. Merely to lay
out such a skeleton is to suggest what flesh is needed: facts, tables, more
ideas.
So one discovers and describes, constructing typologies for the ordering of
what one has found out, focusing and organizing experience by distinguishing
items by name. This search for order pushes one to seek out underlying patterns
and trends, to find relations that may be typical and causal. One searches, in
short, for the meanings of what one has come upon, for what seems capale of
being interpreted as a visible token of something else that is invisible. One
makes an inventory of everything that seems involved in some phenomena, pares it
down to essentials, then carefully and systematically relates these items to one
another, thus forming a sort of working model. And then one relates this model
to the systematically-defined phenomenon one wants to explain. Sometimes it is
that easy; sometimes it just will not come.
But always, among all these details, one searches for indicators that might
point to the main drift, to the underlying forms and tendencies of the society
of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. For that is what,
in the end, one is always writing about.
Thinking is a simultaneous struggle for conceptual order and empirical
comprehensiveness. You must not close it up too soon -- or you will fail to see
all that you should ; you cannot leave it open forever -- or you yourself will
burst. It is this dilemma that makes reflection, on those rare occasions whenit
is more or less successful, the most passionate endeavor of which a man is
capable.
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