Int J Polit Cult Soc (2008) 20:4149 DOI 10.

1007/s10767-008-9031-y

The Sociological Imagination as Clich: Perils of Sociology and Practices of Journalism

Michael Schudson

Published online: 9 August 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract The sociological imagination that connects personal troubles to public issues is an idea that was in the air when C. Wright Mills gave it a name and advanced it in a way to make it part of the intellectual armament of the New Left. Later, journalistic practice would turn it into a clich while sociology would assume prematurely that it was a weapon for the left rather than a tool that could be used from and for different political positions. This essay is a set of second thoughts about the meaning of the sociological imagination since Mills. Keywords Sociological imagination . Journalism . Anecdotal lead . Anti-commercial bias . Rosa Parks . Martin Luther King, Jr. . Individuals The capacity to connect biography to history, milieu to structure, or personal trouble to public issue was for C. Wright Mills the heart of the sociological imagination. Each time one can demonstrate the roots of a personal trouble in a public issue, it is an achievement that justifies the sociological enterprise. This definition of the sociological mission has been an inspiration to many, including me. It was clearly an inspiration to the New Left. It entered into the famous Port Huron statement, not quite word for word, but close enough. That 1962 manifesto advocated participatory democracy, a political life in which the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problemsfrom bad recreation facilities to personal alienationare formulated as general issues.(Miller 1987, p. 333)

M. Schudson Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, N.Y., USA M. Schudson (*) Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA e-mail: mschudson@ucsd.edu

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The reference to bad recreation facilities sticks out like a sore thumb in the midst of this high-flown rhetoric. But this language seems an obvious tribute to Mills. It recognizes the link between the personal and the political, the prosaic close-to-home and the broad ideals and ideologies of History. What Mills offered in 1959 as a call to arms for sociology became by 1968 the most powerful and enduring slogan of the womens movement apparently coined by activist Carol Hanisch: the personal is political (Rosen 2000, p. 196). At some point in the 1970s or a bit later but certainly not in the 1960s, the personal is political became one of journalisms most familiar clichs. The emphasis on the personal trouble as entre to a public issue was commonplace by the 1980s. The idea that a human vignette can open up larger public issues would seem to be as old as the hills, but it became a journalistic routine, almost a reflex, only in the past two generations. The idea of presenting the general significance of a particular public issue by introducing an individual case, a person whose troubles are an instance of a public problem, is a post-Millsian development. (The specific evidence of this I intend to provide in the future, but I can report some preliminary data. Examining the lead in every front page news story in one week of the New York Times every 5 years from 1967 to 2007, I found large changes in the prevalence of different styles of opening a news story. In 1967 one lead of 78 was an anecdotal lead rather than a conventional who-what-when-where or summary lead. In 1972 there were two anecdotal leads out of 77 stories. The use of the anecdotal lead grew slowly but by the 1990s a reader could count on at least one such story every day rather than one or two a weekand this was a substantial proportion of all news story leads (since the mid-seventies the total number of front-page stories was cut back from about seventy front page stories a week to about 40.) The Millsian habit in journalism became a public controversy itself in a celebrated flareup between President Ronald Reagan and the news media. In 1982, CBS presented a Bill Moyers-narrated documentary that examined the impact of Reagans budget reductions on the lives of everyday citizens. The program focused on four individuals, a man who lost his disability benefits and three others also adversely affected by Reagans reductions in government spending. David Gergen, then Reagans communications director, attacked the documentary for blaming poverty on the president. The president was already exercised about journalism-by-anecdote. He said, You cant turn on the evening news without seeing that theyre going to interview someone else who has lost his job. Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off and that he should be interviewed nationwide? (Iyengar and Kinder 1987, p. 34). All of this holds a place in social science because political scientist Shanto Iyengar and social psychologist Donald Kinder used it to test the vividness hypothesisthat lessons vividly presented are more memorable than lessons boringly told. In a set of laboratory experiments in which different subjects were shown different versions of television news stories, they found that stories that direct viewers attention to the flesh and blood victims of national problems prove no more persuasive than news stories that cover national problems impersonallyindeed, they tend to be less persuasive (Iyengar and Kinder 1987, p. 42). Stories that used statistics to describe unemployment left a stronger impression on subjects than stories that focused on the plight of an unemployed individual. Iyengar and Kinder found this result puzzling. They speculate. Perhaps viewers blame the victims and see them as causes of their own misfortune? Perhaps viewers get so caught up in the melodrama of the specific instance that they fail to make the sociological leap that, for more sophisticated viewers, is so obvious what the journalists are up to? Or perhaps viewers simply do not accept the journalists implicit or explicit subordinate thesisthese people are just like you or, more spiritually, there but for the grace of God are you. It may be that the viewer

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thinks, I am not black. I am not old. My family has not abandoned me. I have never relied on government assistance. I do not live in New Jersey. What you are showing me does not translate into my own everyday life. They blame the victims rather than identifying with them. (Iyengar and Kinder 1987, p. 42) Even if the journalist is exercising a sociological imagination, the audience may refuse it. The Iyengar and Kinder finding notwithstanding, journalism went on its merry way in the strong belief that the sociological imagination was an excellent guide to doing good journalism. Should we regard this as a triumph for Mills, the entrance of the sociological imagination into a general public discourse? Or was it his ultimate defeat, the transformation of a brilliant insight into a hopelessly hackneyed habit? I suspect that not much more than a blink separates a valuable framework for understanding from a clich. The former threatens always to dissolve into the latter. The latter, if pushed and prodded enough, may reveal the former. When the framework collapses into clich, it requires rescue or revision. What do you do to rescue the sociological imagination? My answer is simply this: do not get trapped by sociology. It doesnt explain everything. Take sociologys virtues seriously, particularly a respect for empirical evidence, but dont substitute anecdote for investigation. In his famous chapter on the sociological imagination, Mills not only advocated a sociological imagination but offered the concept as a description of a changed cultural and intellectual mood. The sociological imagination he wrote is becoming, I believe, the major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature. This quality of mind is found in the social and psychological sciences, but it goes far beyond these studies as we now know them. Literary criticism has become at least as much sociological as aesthetic. Novelists frequently possess this imagination and do much to meet the demands for it (Mills 1959, p. 14). Journalists in leading daily newspapers, if my evidence from the New York Times is representative, brought up the rear in adopting a sociological imagination as a literary device, highlighting an individual as an instance of a pattern or trend. And they may sometimes adopt the anecdotal form without accepting the full thrust of the causal relationship that Mills regarded as central. That is, the anecdote the journalists choose may be an instance to illustrate a general phenomenon, but that phenomenon may suggest only an aggregation and not a structural cause or condition. Journalism may begin with a raindrop to help the audience appreciate the weight of a downpour but may do so without saying anything at all about the rain cloud. Showing that an individual is a grain of sand through which one might view the world is part of what journalism has taken up in its sociological imagination. I find this commendable. At the same time, it is often less than what C. Wright Mills had in mind. He saw the sociological imagination as a form of liberation. Showing that ones own troubles are related to some large public issue is a way to see that the trouble may not be a personal fault or failing. The leap of imagination releases the individual from a debilitating sense of personal moral fault. Recognizing the public issue in a personal trouble also gives people a basis for solidarity with others. Where a sense of personal fault separates one person from the next, a sense of suffering from a public trouble helps people recognize their common humanity. A recognition of common humanity gives people a motive to engage in collective and political action to remedy the structural failings that gave rise to the public issue in the first place. Mills concept of the sociological imagination is warrant for seeing sociology as a moral vocation but it is not warrant for a particular liberal or radical politics, certainly not in the

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way it is sometimes used in journalism. Consider the right-wing groups that seek tort reform who have annexed the anecdote-centered news story to their cause. The tort reform right vigorously promoted the story of Stella Liebeck who in 1994 suffered severe burns when she spilled a cup of coffee on herself that she had just bought at the drive-through. She sued McDonalds and won three million dollars. This tort tale, as William Haltom and Michael McCann call it, is one of those folk items that cycles over and over through the news media as the laughing stock case of how personal injury lawsuits have gotten out of hand and must be curtailed. It is obvious that people have to take responsibility for not spilling hot coffee on themselves. Why is this McDonalds fault? But then wouldnt it be odd if it turned out that 79-year-old Stella Liebeck, who sat in the passenger seat of a fully stopped car to remove the lid of the coffee to add cream and sugar, spilled the whole cup of coffee on herself, suffered third degree burns over 6% of her body, was hospitalized for a week, permanently disfigured, and partially disabled for 2 years? And that this woman, who had never filed a lawsuit, politely asked McDonalds only to reevaluate the temperature to which they heated coffee and to pay her medical expenses of up to $20,000? That, after 6 months of lawyer-less (on her side!) communication with McDonalds, McDonalds offered her $800 in settlement? That McDonalds had in the prior decade dealt with some 700 similar complaints of burns and had paid out nearly $750,000? That the jurys award to Liebeckof $160,000 in damages and 2.7 million in punitive damageswas reduced to $480,000 by the judge who nonetheless concluded that on the basic points the jury got it right? (Haltom and McCann 2004, pp 183226). No doubt the journalists who responded to the tort reform lobbys anecdote-mongering thought they were exercising the sociological imagination, but it turned out to be more imagination than sociology. And it was closer to the Reaganological than the sociological imagination. The difference lies in the choice of anecdote. The sociological imagination links a personal trouble to a public issue to demonstrate a largely invisible or even hidden structural cause of a personal problem; the conservative imagination sees a personal cause of a structural problem, typically, that greed or self-indulgence or a multitude of individual moral failings tend to a dangerous or self-defeating governmental overreaction. My own work is not an expression of the kind of imaginative leap Mills promoted and that I intend to honor in these remarks, whether that leap is made by a sociologist or a journalist. Mills was concerned that people blame themselves or blame others as victims for matters whose root causes lie in the social conditions that shape them. Most of my own work has operated in a different fashion: I have practiced a kind of sociology of intellectual sloppiness. I have been drawn to the willingness of academics and op-ed writers and contemporary affairs observers, journalists and professors and writers, to accept as reality things that sound good or things that are emotionally satisfying or things that flatter one into imagining oneself a French intellectual at a caf, remembering the great days of the resistance that one may or may not have had anything to do with. Intellectuals often live in a world of words, words and fantasies, and words may obscure as well as reveal. So while Mills offers an intellectual call to only connect, my own watchword has more often been a Weberian call to distrust ones own inclinations to make connections that are not justified by the facts. Mills asks us to see the link between individual biography and social and historical order, or the webs that connect what is sometimes called the micro and the macro. The advice I most often repeat is to draw what you see. I call for a kind of intellectual integrity, an integrity that may require a kind of intellectual and moral courage or at least an intellectual and moral self-abnegation. I learned this in part from my teachers in graduate school, but the language in which I think about it came from Phil Geraci, an artist, who taught a life drawing class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

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I took the class at a moment when I felt becalmed in graduate school. I did not know where I was going vocationally or why, let alone if I could get there. Nor was I doing any better in my personal life. I was not dating, I was not meeting women, everyone else around me appeared to be happily coupled and I seemed to be invisible to any of the women I found attractive. I needed to get out of my narrow world and it occurred to me that, since I once had achieved some local renown as a child artist, maybe I should return to art. At the very least, in a life drawing class, I could view some women unclothed. I went to the life drawing class. To my dismay, I learned immediately that life drawing is the sort of class people take over and over again. So as I glanced at the sketchpads of the other students in the class, I felt smaller and smallerthese people could really draw! Their sketches actually looked like the model before us. Phil walked around the class, stopping occasionally to make a few remarks to one or another student as they kept on working. He walked by me, stopped for a moment, did not say a word, and kept on. After doing that several times, he stopped and simply said to me, Draw what you see. Well, hello! What did he think I was trying to do? But I kept that thought to myself and tried to ponder Draw what you see as if it were a zen koan, full of wisdom, only, I had not the faintest idea what he meant by it. He came by again, some time later and again said, Draw what you see, try to draw what you see, convincing me that I had the zen part right. But I was not going to take this sitting down. Thats what Im trying to do! And he said, No, not really. You are drawing what you think a human figure should look like on a page. You are not drawing what you see. Notice that the model is sitting there on the stool with her legs crossed, leaning forward, her hands on her left knee. What part of her body is closest to you? Her left knee. Right. So it takes up more of your visual space than other parts of her body that have receded relative to it. Yes, but if I draw the knee as big as it looks to me, it will look like she has some humongously distorted body when shes actually quite beautifully proportioned. Try it. Draw what you see, not what you think you should see. And so I did. And, astonishingly, some of my sketches did not look half bad. Draw what you see has been the best methodological advice I know to offer to my students, ever since. Let me offer just one instance from my own work. This concerns the question of the role of commercial motive in the character of the American press. I think most sociologists have an anti-commercial, anti-capitalist bias. We pride ourselves on having chosen a profession where money is not god, and we are inclined to think ourselves thereby purer than the rest of the world. In the history and sociology of journalism, there is an inclination to think of commercial forces as forever threatening independence of mind, and the history of journalism begins to look like the tension in a newspaper between the editorial department and the business department, writ large. In such a battle, no journalism historian has any doubt which is the force of good and which is the force of evil. But is the profit motive always corrupting? Have the successes of American journalism and its distinctive position in the larger world of journalism emerged in spite of and in no way because of the preposterous amounts of money individual entrepreneurs have been able to accumulate in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television? Consider the work by Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of the Press in the Nineteenth Century. This is a useful and well researched study. Nonetheless, Baldasty begins with an anti-commercial bias and, not surprisingly, interprets his data to confirm it. His comparison of newspapers from the l830s to newspapers from the l890s shows that there was a decline over time in the percentage of news space devoted to political news. He concludes that the commercialization of news in the mid-nineteenth century led to a

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decline in the importance of political coverage and that this was obviously a bad thing for American democracy. The ante-bellum press, he writes, produced political debate of potential value for the broad public while the late nineteenth-century presss subservience to advertising interests did not (Baldasty 1992, p. 143). In a set of dramatic tables in the text, Baldasty shows that the percentage of news devoted to politics dropped sharply in newspapers during the nineteenth century. For instance, it declined from 50.5% in his sample of five ante-bellum papers to l9.4% in his sample of eight late nineteenth century metropolitan papers (Baldasty 1992, p. 123). In the appendix, however, but nowhere else in the book, Baldasty provides not only the percentage figures for his newspaper sample but the total amount of newspaper space. Only there can the reader recognize that the so-called decline in the percentage of political news in the press was actually a huge increase in the total amount of political news. Seven of the eight newspapers in Baldastys l897 sample provided more political reporting in a week than any of the five papers in his l83l sample. The New York Evening Post, New York Journal, and Chicago Tribune in l897 each printed more than five times as much political news as the most political paper of l83l! (Baldasty 1992, pp. 153, 155). How could this vast expansion of political reporting have produced the sharp decline in the percentage of all news represented by political reporting? The increasingly lucrative newspapers of the Gilded Age and after had many more pages, many more reporters, and much more political news than the Jacksonian press, even if they also had much more news of non-political matters. They also had from ten times to 100 times more readers than even the largest papers of 1831. Baldastys scrupulousness in reporting his findings allows a skeptical reader to recover this, but only by reading the appendix. Baldastys own anticommercial bias prevented him from making these observations himself. Baldasty could still be right that the relative displacement of political news by other news topics in the late nineteenth century press reduced the prestige or salience of the political in American culture. But that would have to be argued. It would have to be argued that the percentage of news space matters more than the total column-inches. It would have to be argued that newspapers with essentially no local political news in the l830s did more for political discourse than newspapers with lots of local news in the l890s. All this and more could have been argued were it not so easy to assume that commercialization necessarily has negative consequences. Prof. Baldasty did not draw what he saw. He saw what his preconceptions prompted him to see. In the same year C. Wright Mills published The Sociological Imagination, journalist Richard Rovere published a book on Senator Joe McCarthy where he observed, Those of us who have been educated in the twentieth century habitually think in sociological terms, whether or not we have had any training in sociology. Observing a phenomenon like McCarthyism, we almost automatically dismiss from our minds the notion that a single human being could have much to do with it, even though it bears his name. Obviously, it was a product of forcesnot of a single living creature. He then cites a variety of explanations of McCarthyism including, as it happens, one from Talcott Parsons, who wrote that McCarthyism was both a movement supported by certain vested-interest elements and a popular revolt against the upper classes. But this and other explanations, Rovere observes, leave Joseph R. McCarthy out of the picture altogether. In each, he is only an instrument, a voice, a symbolor an ailment within us. Perhaps he was, but in that case one is at a loss to know why McCarthyism waited so long to come alive and why it seemed to die or at least to become greatly enfeebledwhen McCarthy succumbed to despair. Life and history go on, and nothing ever dies completely. But assuredly the fevers of McCarthyism subsided in 1954, and most of us knew it and felt it (Rovere 1959, p. 266).

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Are we reaching the end of sociology, an age in which individuals, not social groups, exercise greater power than ever before? And not just individual incumbents of political office but entrepreneurs, philanthropists, criminal megalomaniacs, bloggers, videographers, and others? This should be a heretical question in sociology but I do not think it is. The sociological premise that great results have great social rather than individual causes may itself be located in a sociologically and historically specific set of conditions. What conditions construct a world in which individuals have greater impact on world affairs? What are the conditions that diminish the role of individuals? What conditions give greater or lesser authority to individual leaders? What sociological conditions make sociology in its conventional assumptions more or less successful as an explanatory scheme? I am interested in the role of individuals at the moment because I have just finished teaching a course on the civil rights movement. My intent was simplestudents learn about the civil rights movement in grade school and in high school and therefore mislearn almost everything. For one thing, they learn that Rosa Parks was Every Woman. She was anything but. Almost all of my students think of her as a saintly little old lady who sat down on the bus and started the civil rights movement. When they learn thats not the whole story, they are stunnedand upset that they have believed something so wrong for so long. Whats wrong with the picture of Rosa Parks as just an ordinary woman who got tired and randomly walked into her moment in history? First, the moment waited for her. She was the third woman to be arrested in the span of a few months in Montgomery for violating the practices of segregation on the buses. But the other women did not have the moral stature that local NAACP leaders believed would sustain a strong fight against segregation. Second, the NAACP leadership recognized instantly that Rosa Parks had that moral stature because they all knew her very well. She was a long-time member of the Montgomery NAACP, had served as its secretary, was a leader of its youth groups. At the urging of Virginia Durr, a well connected white liberal who had been involved in antilynching activities on the national scene, Rosa had recently attended a workshop for training civil rights leaders at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. This was no naive seamstress but a seasoned political volunteer. Third, Rosa Parks had been resisting Jim Crow since she was a child. This included, by the way, that she was raised in large part by her grandfather, a man born a slave who slept in a chair with a shotgun across his lap when he feared Klan activity might endanger his family. Even as a child, Rosa Parks, though quiet, was never meek. Fourth, Rosa Parks was armed with memories herselfof slavery and oppression, vicarious traumas passed on from her grandfather; of racial injustice, going back not only to her childhood but to her husbands active involvement in efforts to save the Scottsboro boys in the 1930s; of a bus boycott in Baton Rouge in 1953 that she learned about from the black press and from her work as NAACP secretary, monitoring protest efforts elsewhere in the South; and not incidentally of Maxwell Air Force Base, where she worked during the war, riding a racially integrated trolley on the base before switching to a segregated Montgomery bus when she left the base. So Rosa Parks serves a conventional sociological lesson, and I did not hesitate to teach it: politics does not come from nowhere. Politics comes from past politics. Politics comes from organized efforts and social networks and preparation. After the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, there was a great deal of enthusiastic talk in left-wing circles about the powers of the Internet to bring thousands of protesters into the streets. A leading organizer of the protests, Lori Wallach, scoffed at this. Preparations for the protests began half a dozen years before the Seattle meeting. The leaders met face to face during those years

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three or four times annually. The organizers had to book hotel rooms for hundreds of young people far in advance. They met face-to-face regularly to put the protest together. They were old-fashioned political organizers who, of course, like the rest of us, used new technologies when they proved useful. The Internet, Wallach said, is a tool like anything else (Foreign Policy 2000, p. 33). Its an old sociological lesson. In my course on civil rights, I became most interested in Martin Luther King, Jr., himself an undergraduate sociology major. But in his active political life, King was not a quick study in sociology. After the triumph of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, King was a celebrity and sought to leverage his fame into creating a national civil rights movement to do for the whole country what he so remarkably achieved in Montgomery. But to do that, one would have to have figured out what the formula for success was in Montgomery. And Martin Luther King, Jr. did not know. For the next year or two, he suffered from what biographer Taylor Branch calls the oratorical illusion. He thought his speeches had won the victory in Montgomery and that speeches and sermons could create a national movement. He toyed with the possibility of a national crusade for civil rights in which he pictured himself teaming up with Billy Graham in a national series of revival meetings. His speech-making was very important as a source of fund-raising for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It won him attention. It won his organization dollars. But it was not itself an effective organizing tool. Then there was what I would call the presidential illusion. King was taken with the possibility that national leadership would impose civil rights victories. He initially had high hopes for President Eisenhower, and this was not unreasonable. Eisenhower had appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court. Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock to protect the black students desegregating Central High School in 1957. Eisenhower was a man of personal generosity and kindness. But after awhile it became clear that Eisenhower had no heart for the hard politics that it would take to promote civil rights for black Americans. King turned to the Kennedys during the 1960 presidential campaign and in the first year of the Kennedy administration. But here, too, he failed to learn the lessons of Montgomery. King did not really understand the power of the thousands of citizens participating together and risking for the common cause. Even though I am making a case that sociology open itself to the possibility that individuals may be more effectual in social action than sociology ordinarily assumes, I think we still suffer regularly from a failure to learn the lessons of conventional sociology and a failure to exercise a Millsian imagination. The more I thought about the charge of this lecture seriesto honor the concept of the sociological imagination, the more I realized I had never taken it on very directly. There is, to be sure, an imaginative element in my work, and it is sociological. But my effort has been to imagine the concrete, to imagine away received wisdom, even received sociological wisdom, and particularly received wisdom that my left-liberal inclinations have found especially congenial. I learned this from Phil Geraci. I learned it or came to practice it also from an ornery streak and an angry streak, and my sense that too many sociologists and too many of my fellow sociology graduate students and later too many of my professional colleagues are simply too easy on themselves. I learned it out of some sort of native suspicion that theoryany and all theoriesalways falls shortand the aesthetic and moral pleasure I find when the empirical world of human actions trips up the best theories that we come up with. So an intolerance of easy answers plus, I am sure, an ambition to distinguish myself from my teachers and my peers, has driven my scholarship. Id like to say I have been driven by my deep and loving commitment to what is best in the sociological traditionand I do have enormous admiration for sociology well done. But I also know that I have been motivated dialectically by opposition to colleagues and seniors

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who seemed to me to take the intellectually easy way out too often, a way that in recent years has often been quite accurately disparaged as politically correct. My motives, like those of others in our field, are mixed, something I think C. Wright Mills understood, even if many who seek to follow in his footsteps do not always recognize it so well.

References
Baldasty, G. (1992). The commercialization of news in the nineteenth century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Foreign Policy (2000). Loris War. Foreign Policy, 118, 2855. Haltom, W., & McCann, M. (2004). Distort-ing the law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iyengar, S., & Kinder, D. (1987). News that matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, J. (1987). Democracy is in the streets. New York: Simon and Schuster. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosen, R. (2000). The world split open. New York: Penguin Books. Rovere, R. (1959). Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt, Brace.