Answer:
The father of sociological imagination, C Wright Mills, founded this field of thinking in the mid-20th century. At the time he wrote, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” Just the same, it’s also important to put Mills’ theories into context.
Mills’ contemporaries in sociology tended to focus on understanding systems rather than exploring individual issues. (For example, structural functionalism.) But Mills argued that thinking of society as just a series of systems was not quite accurate. And equally important, it ignored the role of the individual within those systems.
He believed that looking at a balance between systems and the individuals within them was essential to understanding their collective relationship, as well as the social structures that arise out of conflict between various groups. This perspective also helps enable sociologists to do more than observe, but to expose social injustice, and act and change the world.
And that’s important because without sociological imagination, all of our common sense ideas are drawn from our limited social experiences. Sociological imagination is a framework for viewing the social world that exceeds those limitations; an ability to develop understanding how biography is the consequence of historical processes, and unfolds within a bigger context in society. As such, sociological imagination requires us to separate ourselves from the familiar reality of our personal circumstances, and view social issues from a broader context.